The students created their grappling hook gun for an Air Force competition. The device the team created uses a launcher to shoot a grappling hook as far as 90 feet in the air. Once deployed, the system uses pulleys, and other tech to automatically pull the user up the building or other surface with little effort.

The contest the team will be participating in gives them 20 minutes to demonstrate the tool and then train military representatives on its use. The goal of the competition is to get three people up a 90-foot vertical incline while carrying 300 pounds of gear each. The device designed by the BYU students is able to climb 30 feet per minute. Check out the video above to see the system in action.

Apparently, if you use PS3s, you can save up to 10× the cost of commercial supercomputer technology. Condor was created for the Air Force for its image processing tasks. It’s considered one of the top forty fastest computers in the world, despite its video game brains. The Condor is supposed to help process all of the Air Force’s recent aerial photos. Snapping up the photos via satellites isn’t a problem. It’s finding something useful in them.

Users will be able to use Condor to move cameras around, kind of like if you’re playing Starcraft. Apparently, users can rewind or predict forward based upon the information gathered. I don’t know exactly what they mean about predicting the future, but it probably has to do with some image interpolation based upon the available info.

[Hot Hardware via CrunchGear]

U.S. Air Force Combat Controller Ron Walker is a jump master, responsible for overseeing parachute jumps. As he looked out of the side of the plane to inspect the scenery before his team jumped on a recent flight, he stuck himself out of the side of the plane. Flying about 1,000 feet above the ground, and at a speed of about 150mph, the fierce draft caused a Velcro seal on his pocket to open up – and out flew his iPhone 4. As the phone flew through the air and tumbled to the ground, Walker assumed the phone was lost forever – or at least smashed to bits.

Later, he shared his story and a colleague decided to try and use the Find My iPhone app to track down the missing phone. To their surprise, the phone showed up on the map, and they tracked it to a location in the woods. Incredibly, when they found it, the phone was completely intact. Not only was the phone still functional – it didn’t have any cracks or scratches on it.

That all said, the phone was wrapped in a Griffin Motif case at the time of the fall, not just a naked iPhone. Still, it’s impressive that it could survive a 1,000 foot fall and live to make another call. Perhaps it was all the soft tree leaves and needles that cushioned the fall, or maybe it was just luck. If it was me, I’d drop my phone the 18 inches from the couch seat to the floor, and it would shatter into a million pieces. Then I’d pick it up and cut my hand.

So, depending on how you look at this story, it’s either a really good testimonial for Griffin cases, or a really bad testimonial for Velcro.

[via TUAW and iLounge]

Similar to their natural counterparts, MAVs will be able to crawl, fly and work in swarms to achieve their goals. These goals can be anything from surveillance to detecting biochemical or nuclear weapons, and even… eliminating human targets by exploding upon contact. That’s where the similarity ends.

You gotta love the background music.

[via BotJunkie]

What’s that Shaider? Yes. That is indeed a front-mounted minigun.

The Warthog’s profile adds, “The motor, much like the stereo, was designed to thump. Dyno’d at 188 RWHP, it’ll stomp just about any ‘show’ bike on the circuit today.”

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I don’t know what the hell “dyno’d” means. All I know is that this motorcycle has a minigun.

[Icon via dvice]