The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : Lab Works to Instill Loyalty in a Firearm

The stories are all too familiar: A child finds a gun and uses it; a policeman is killed with his own gun. Firearm injuries are the second-leading cause of death for Americans ages 10 to 34, and many firearm deaths involve stolen or borrowed guns. Now Sandia National Laboratories, with funding from the Justice Department, is investigating so-called smart-gun technologies that would prevent anyone but the gun’s owner from firing it.

A sensor that releases an internal lock only when it recognizes the gun owner could prevent a police officer from being shot by someone who grabs the officer’s gun, or the accidental shootings of children playing with their parents’ guns.

Researchers at the Albuquerque, N.M., laboratory are looking into a number of ways to help a gun recognize its owner. One would require the owner to wear a magnetic ring that would be recognized by a device in the gun’s handle. The hand of the person holding the gun would also have to conform to the shape of the gun’s individually designed handle.

Another approach involves a remote-controlled radio frequency sensor that would arm or disarm the gun. Fingerprint or palm print sensors and voice-activated sensors are also under consideration.

Out of the Fog: Anyone stuck on Interstate 5 in dense fog knows how dangerous that situation can be. Motorists on a heavily traveled stretch of Interstate 75 in south Georgia face the same problem. But soon these motorists will have some high-tech help: a fully automated fog detection and warning system developed jointly by the Georgia Department of Transportation and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Using a network of fog sensors, speed monitoring devices, weather instruments and an on-site central computer, the system will continuously monitor visibility in a chosen area. The fog sensors consist of a light source and receiver aimed slightly off the line of sight of each other. Under conditions of good visibility, the light beam will miss the receiver, but when fog is present, the particles will scatter the beam, causing light to enter the receiver.

The system will also control four electronic message signs along the road that will warn motorists of a fog hazard, call for reduced traffic speeds when appropriate and provide detour information if conditions warrant closing the highway. Installation of the sensors is expected to begin this fall.

Smart Batteries: You’re sitting in an airplane, finishing up a critical report, when suddenly your portable computer’s battery runs out. Wouldn’t it be nice, you think, if you’d gotten a clear warning so you could have saved your data before the system shutdown? Even better, what if your word-processing program was aware of the battery’s impending failure and automatically saved data for you?

A smart battery that can do all this is not far off. Such a device is essentially a rechargeable battery equipped with specialized hardware that provides present, calculated and predicted battery life information to a computer. Duracell and Intel have announced two specifications for smart batteries. Now SystemSoft Corp., based in Natick, Mass., is developing a smart battery software suite that will display information about batteries, including the chemistry, capacity, battery status and remaining percentage of battery life.