A lot of the time, I blog in this space about speculative inventions and applications of technology, such as bacteria-sized medical robots or transoceanic underwater maglev trains. This week, however, we’re going to look at a controversial technology that is already here: active millimeter-wave full-body imaging, which penetrates clothing to reveal anything concealed beneath the fabric, from hidden objects to the human body itself. The federal Transportation Security Administration already is using such scanners at 19 airports across the nation to thwart terrorists trying to sneak bombs or weapons through security checkpoints.

Keep reading! There's more...

TSA reportedly had been planning for years to deploy the scanners as a backup option for passengers chosen for secondary inspections. But as the New York Times recently reported TSA officials are so happy with the scanners’ performance at the 19 pilot sites that they now intend to use such imaging to replace walk-through metal detectors that for years have been the primary line of defense at airports. They’re planning to install more of them across the nation.

Proponents say that the scanners have a lot of pluses. The devices will spot nonmetallic objects and liquids that metal detectors might miss, they say, and they’ll also largely eliminate the need for pat-down searches for airline passengers with joint replacements, prosthetics and other medical devices that can set off metal detectors. TSA claims that such passengers can be scanned in just 15 seconds, as opposed to the two to four minutes it would take to search them by hand.

For the privacy conscious, critics point to one glaring downside: Security officials will get a chance to see what you look like naked, and though TSA has said that it will delete your au naturel image immediately after use, the agency’s screeners already have a track record of being somewhat less than trustworthy. Additionally, with the results of TSA’s evaluation of the technology shrouded in secrecy, there’s another nagging issue: How well does scanning really work? Are there potential countermeasures that a terrorist might employ to defeat the scanner and smuggle a bomb or weapon onto a plane? At least one scientist seems to think there are such risks.

When I first heard about the scanners, I pictured something like the creepy “ no unauthorized weapons beyond this point” full-body x-ray screen that Arnold Schwarzenegger walks through in the 1990 sci-fi movie Total Recall. But actually, the images look more like this. Basically, the two antennas rotate around the body, projecting beams of radio-frequency energy in the millimeter-wave spectrum over the body’s surface at high speed. The energy reflected back from the body — or objects on it — is used to construct a three-dimensional image, which is then displayed on a remote monitor. (TSA says the facial features are blurred as an additional privacy measure.)

As an official from L-3 Communications, the maker of TSA’s scanners, explained in 2007:

L-3's millimeter wave technology pinpoints objects made of any material, including liquids, rubber, wire, plastic, and metal, to quickly and easily locate weapons, contraband, and other threats concealed under an individual's clothing. The portals detect concealed and hidden objects such as metallic and non-metallic weapons and virtually all known explosives, and other contraband in seconds.

Here’s a cheery video from TSA explaining the scanning process:

TSA’s official blog is even more blithely reassuring:

Millimeter wave will allow our TSOs to view a noninvasive image of a passenger revealing any items that were not divested. These images are friendly enough to post in a preschool. Heck, it could even make the cover of Reader’s Digest and not offend anybody.

Not everybody is satisfied with that disclaimer. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a watchdog group, derides the technology as a “virtual strip search.” EPIC is gathering signatures on a petition letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, which demands that the program be suspended.

In addition, U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, has introduced legislation that would ban the scanners at airport. From his D.C. office, where the freshman legislator saves money by sleeping on a cot when Congress is in session, Chaffetz recorded a YouTube video in which he explains his privacy worries.

It strikes me that when even a conservative Republican like Chaffetz is worked up about the civil liberties implications of a new technology, it’s time to pay attention.

Additionally, I have another question about the scanning technology. How impervious is it to hacking or countermeasures? TSA (whose press office didn’t return my phone message) isn’t revealing the results of its evaluation, and the available scientific literature on millimeter-wave imaging that I found on the Internet doesn’t yield any answers, either. But I did find this lone caveat, buried in a June 2008 USA Today article on the scanners:

The scanners do a good job seeing under clothing but cannot see through plastic or rubber materials that resemble skin, said Peter Siegel, a senior scientist at the California Institute of Technology. "You probably could find very common materials that you could wrap around you that would effectively obscure things," Siegel said.

I emailed Siegel in an effort to get him to elaborate on this, but he answered back:

Probably best if I say no more on this, considering the application.

That may not help. Security expert, author and blogger Bruce Schneier, the chief technology security officer for global telecom-Internet giant BT, suspects that if such a vulnerability exists, terrorists already have figured it out. But in a phone interview, Schneier raised an even more provocative question. Even if we install the absolute primo, state-of-the-art scanning technology at airports and prevent weapons and bombs from being hidden in clothing, won’t terrorists simply adopt new tactics or shift to different targets?

“Defending against tactics and targets makes sense only if there are a few of each,” he contends. “The reality is that there are 10 million targets in this country, and just as many ways to attack them. We put scanners in airports because terrorists attacked airplanes last time. We’re screening for liquids because terrorists used liquid explosives in the past, not because they’re more effective than solids, which they aren’t. We take off our shoes and not our underwear because that’s where Richard Reid hid explosives, not because shoes are better. We take away guns and bombs, and they use box cutters. We take that away, and they’ll use something else. This is a stupid game, and we should stop playing it.”

Schneier argues that the only really effective way to prevent terror attacks is to be proactive. “Intelligence, investigation, preemption — they work, no matter what the target or tactics,” he says. Schneier points to the FBI’s and the New York City police department’s recent preemption of an alleged plot by four suspects to attack two Bronx synagogues and shoot down a military aircraft, which was cracked by conventional detective work plus the targeted use of video and audio surveillance.

So what do you think? Are full-body scans at airports a good tool for preventing terror attacks? Or does the whole thing sound too problematic — or embarrassing — to you? Express your opinion below.

Cue up the spooky theremin music. 

What if we actually had a disc-shaped vehicle that could take off and land vertically,
hover, and fly without burning a drop of jet fuel, just like the alien spacecraft in The Day The Earth Stood Still?   (I’m talking about the 1951 version, not the recent Keanu Reeves remake.)

Keep reading! There's more...

The flying saucer would be powered by a magnetohydrodynamic drive, which would use electrodes to ionize the surrounding air and turn it into plasma. The plasma, in turn, would push against the non-ionized air surrounding the saucer and provide lift.

In addition to looking incredibly cool, in theory such a vehicle would have tremendous advantages. Unlike jet aircraft or helicopters, it wouldn’t have any moving parts that could malfunction. Plus, it would be much more stable and maneuverable, because unlike conventional aircraft, it wouldn’t depend upon the flow of air molecules around wings or rotor blades. (By the way, if you’re already mystified by that how that phenomenon produces flight, here’s a HowStuffWorks article on aerodynamics.)

A saucer using a magnetohydrodynamic drive could change direction, stop and start again very, very quickly. And it would be able to accelerate to hypersonic speeds, making it as fast as today’s most advanced experimental aircraft.

What would be the disadvantages? Hmm. Well, if the flying saucer became a commonplace, explainable phenomenon, thousands of UFO enthusiasts would have to find some other mysterious fascination to talk about. 

Actual human scientists and engineers from this planet got the idea of building flying saucers long before Kenneth Arnold’s famous June 1947 sighting of nine UFOs flying in formation in Washington state, which, along with the infamous Roswell “flying disk” the following month, touched off the modern cult of UFOology.

Back in the 1930s, Romanian aeronautics engineer Henri Coanda discovered the Coanda effect --that is, that airflow will follow a curved surface, rather than just continue in a straight line. The bending of the flow accelerates it and increases aerodynamic lift. This principle wouldn’t necessarily matter that much to our magnetohydrodynamic vehicle, but it did inspire aircraft designers to contemplate the advantages of a completely curved — that is, saucer-shaped — vehicle.

After World War II, a German engineer named Georg Klein claimed in newspaper interviews that Nazi scientists had in fact developed and flown a flying-saucer prototype capable of reaching nearly twice the speed of sound, but then destroyed them the discs to keep the technology out of the hands of the advancing Soviet forces. (Here’s a fascinating article from the Daily Kos Web site about it, which includes a reproduction of a declassified CIA summary of Klein’s claims.)

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. Air Force funded Canadian researchers’ development of a flying saucer called the Avrocar. Here’s a declassified 1955 Air Force report on the Avrocar, which insists that

This project should in no way be associated with any science fiction or ‘flying saucer’ stories because of its external appearance. The configuration was the result of an engineering investigation into the solution of a particular problem.
An examination of the AVRO proposal shows that the potential for a very high performance weapon system exists in the not-too-distant future. Although the proposal offers the USAF a potentially advanced weapon system having both vertical takeoff and military performance capabilities, there are numerous technical problems which must be solved before a successful development can be realized.

Unfortunately, the technical problems apparently persisted, and the Air Force canceled funding for the program in 1961. In the 1990s, though, the U.S. military did develop an experimental, robotic saucer called the Multipurpose Security and Surveillance Mission Platform (MSSMP), which looked a bit like a dog’s water bowl with a video camera attached.

More recently, though, a University of Florida mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor named Subrata Roy has developed and patented a design for a “wingless electromagnetic air vehicle,” or WEAV, that ultimately could lead to the sort of  magnetohydrodynamic saucer that we talked about in the intro. 

    A July 2008 Scientific American article describes the concept:

The last we heard, Roy was working on a miniature version of the saucer, 6 inches in diameter, to demonstrate how a full-size saucer would work. As Scientific American notes, the biggest technical challenge to building a WEAV big enough to carry passengers would be making the vehicle light, yet powerful enough to lift both its cargo and energy source.

Possibly, the answer may be to use a lightweight ceramic material that also is a good conductor of electricity. (Maybe a ceramic reinforced with carbon nanotubes would do the trick.)

    So what do you think? Are flying saucers in our future, or not? Express your opinion below.

In ancient times, the Greeks sought guidance from the trancelike ravings of the ethylene-snorting priestess Pythia at Delphi. Today, we’ve become similarly enamored of the wisdom spewed forth by Google, the dominant search engine on the Web.

The human race now does about 235 million Google searches per day, in search of information on vital subjects ranging from Oprah Winfrey’s fried-chicken giveaway to the truth about bird-eating spiders. But just as the Greeks were dependent upon priest intercessors to translate Pythia’s streams of gibberish, so are we reliant upon our own ability to come up with search terms that suitably cajole Google’s all-powerful PageRank algorithm into summoning forth pages of links to Web sites where, hopefully, we’ll be able to find the information we are seeking.

But what if there were an easier, more direct way? What if we simply could ask the Web a question, and receive an answer?

Keep reading! There's more....

The ability to search in such a direct fashion would have far-reaching impacts. Instead of spending hours scanning all the pages coughed up by Google in search of the right tidbit, we’d be able to find out exactly what we want to know almost instantly. That would save enormous amounts of time, and dramatically boost the productivity of workers who depend upon information to do their jobs, in addition to freeing those of us obsessed with bird-eating spiders to actually accomplish something useful, like doing the dishes. 

But there might be a few drawbacks, too. If we could easily get an answer to any question from the Web, we probably would stop reading newspapers and books completely. We might even stop surfing the Web itself. That would deprive us of the intellectual serendipity that exposes us to new information and inspires meaningful insights, in addition to the latest “I can has cheezburger” jokes that we like to forward to our friends.

You’re probably picturing this new online oracle as something akin to HAL 9000, the intelligent, sentient — and malevolent —machine in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Or if that’s too dated of a reference, try Karen Plankton, the  W.I.F.E (Wired Integrated Female Electroencephalograph) from Spongebob Squarepants.)
   

But I’m actually thinking of Wolfram Alpha, an online “computational knowledge engine” developed by scientist-inventor-author Stephen Wolfram. Basically, instead of searching for  Web content, as Google does, Wolfram Alpha performs computations to come up with an answer to your question.  In a blog posting, Wolfram notes:

Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things. And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.
I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.

Web entrepreneur-guru Nova Spivack, who has previewed how Wolfram Alpha works, explains how it works:

An article from the Independent, a U.K. newspaper, further details Wolfram Alpha’s capabilities: 

CNet News reports that Wolfram Alpha has some imperfections — it’ll tell you the box office gross of the first Star Trek movie, for example, but not where you can see the latest one. Nevertheless, its reviewers conclude, “It does things with online information that Google does not.” 

So what do you think? Is a computational knowledge engine such as Wolfram Alpha the wave of the future? Or are we better off sticking to Google? Express your opinion below.

Beam me up, Scotty! What if life was actually like Star Trek, and we actually had a device like the Starship Enterprise’s Transporter  that could de-materialize our bodies, beam information about our exact atomic configuration to a distant location, and then instantly reassemble us there?

Keep reading...There's more!!

    Obviously, teleportation would have some awesome benefits as a form of transportation. You’d always have plenty of time for that second cup of coffee in the morning, since your commuting time to work would be reduced to, well, some imperceptibly small fraction of a second. For lunch, you could eat a salad made from vegetables harvested on another continent an hour before.

We could convert airports into solar farms, as we wouldn’t have any need for jetliners anymore. You might spend less time Web surfing, too, since in the time it would take to gaze enviously at someone else’s Hawaii vacation photos, you could actually just beam yourself to Waikiki Beach and dip your toes in the water.

But enough with the silly stuff.

Even with the assumption that the technology would have some distance limitations — that is, that we couldn’t beam ourselves from Earth to the surface of the moon or another planet — teleportation might dramatically advance space travel.

Transporting materials into space via teleportation would be even easier than it would be with a space elevator, so we could build gigantic interplanetary or even interstellar spacecraft in orbit. And to take a leaf from Star Trek, they wouldn’t have to land on distant planets, because it would be possible to beam astronauts and equipment down to the surface.

Teleportation could have some glaring disadvantages, too. What if it turns out to require an enormous amount of energy? And how safe would the teleportation process be? You wouldn’t want to end up like the scientist in the 1958 horror movie The Fly, who emerges from his experimental teleportation device with an insect’s head and limbs. Or like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, who in a TV episode was accidentally split into good and evil versions of himself. But the biggest problem with teleportation, of course, is that a practical means of teleporting isn’t even close to being invented yet, though some scientists assert that it is at least theoretically possible.

Teleportation has been around for a long time in the world of science fiction. Edward Page Mitchell’s 1877 short story “The Man Without a Body” describes how an inventor used a machine called the “teleprop” to transmit a cat through telegraph lines. (Unfortunately, when he tries it on himself, his power runs out, leaving him as a disembodied head.) Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1928 story “The Disintegration Machine” explores teleportation’s world-changing potential:

There is a Latvian gentleman named Theodore Nemor living at White Friars Mansions, Hampstead, who claims to have invented a machine of a most extraordinary character which is capable of disintegrating any object placed within its sphere of influence. Matter dissolves and returns to its molecular or atomic condition. By reversing the process it can be reassembled. The claim seems to be an extravagant one, and yet there is solid evidence that there is some basis for it and that the man has stumbled upon some remarkable discovery. I need not enlarge upon the revolutionary character of such an invention, nor of its extreme importance as a potential weapon of war. A force which could disintegrate a battleship, or turn a battalion, if it were only for a time, into a collection of atoms, would dominate the world.

Teleportation also figures in Alfred Bester’s classic 1956 sci-fi novel The Stars My Destination, in which people have an ability to “jaunte,” or transport themselves without special equipment, simply by tapping into an obscure structure in their nerve cells. (Stephen Gould’s 1993 novel Jumper, the basis for a 2008 movie, also envisions teleportation by mind power. 

For a long time, however, scientists believed that teleportation would never make the jump from fiction to reality, because it was thought to violate the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. By that view, it would be impossible to extract enough information from an object to make a perfect copy, because the more accurately an object is scanned, the more it is disturbed by the scanning process, until it reaches a point where the object’s original state has been completely disrupted.

In the 1990s, however, physicist Charles H. Bennett and a team of IBM researchers figured out a theoretical means of getting around this problem, by utilizing something known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. As an article on IBM’s Web site explains:

In brief, they found a way to scan out part of the information from an object A, which one wishes to teleport, while causing the remaining, unscanned, part of the information to pass, via the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, into another object C which has never been in contact with A. Later, by applying to C a treatment depending on the scanned-out information, it is possible to maneuver C into exactly the same state as A was in before it was scanned. A itself is no longer in that state, having been thoroughly disrupted by the scanning, so what has been achieved is teleportation, not replication.

A few years after that, in 1998, Caltech physicists used quantum entanglement to scan a photon, an energy particle, and replicate it in another location a meter away, while the original was destroyed.  Since then, other physicists have managed to teleport photons as far as 89 miles. In 2004, two independent teams of researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology each successfully teleported atoms.

However, teleporting an entire human being is a vastly more difficult challenge. As Edward H. Farhi, director of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics, explained in a 2008 article in New Scientist:

"That really is pretty far down the line," he said. "A living creature probably has 1030 [1 followed by 30 zeros] particles in it, and to get all the information about that to some distant location looks really pretty formidable. I cannot see that as something in the reasonable future."

    That said, Farhi went on to note that if it was someday possible to teleport a person down to the quantum state of each of their atoms from point A to point B, the teleported person at point B should have exactly the same thoughts and memories as the person whose quantum state had ceased to exist at point A.

    So there you have it. Is teleportation our future mode of transportation? Or will it always remain just another sci-fi plot device? Express your opinion below.

And if you love reading about the science behind your favorite TV shows, check out Science Channel's new blog Remote Possibilities.

What if doctors could inject robots the size of microorganisms into our bloodstreams and send them to attack individual cancer cells, remove plaque deposits from the walls of our arteries, fix damaged kidneys, deliver drug treatments and perform various bodily repairs from the inside on a scale too tiny for regular-sized human surgeons to attempt?

Keep reading...there's more!

The benefits of medical micro-robots could be enormous. Some types of operations, such as coronary bypass surgery, would no longer be necessary at all, while others, such as repair of damaged heart valves, conceivably might be transformed into outpatient procedures.

Patients might be spared the potential risks that now accompany invasive surgeries, and they’d conceivably be less vulnerable to “superbug” infections contracted in the hospital, which kill thousands of patients every year.

The downsides, caveats and complications? For one, obviously, we can expect that people who get nervous about going to the doctor are going to be considerably more squeamish about having tiny robots set loose to roam their insides. And unless we also develop bacteria-sized video cams, doctors aren’t going to be able to guide them by sight, so controlling them and tracking what they’re doing inside people is going to be a considerable technical challenge. Additionally, medical micro-robot manufacturers will have to be extremely careful to use only biocompatible materials, or else the little surgeons themselves might only do more damage to the patient’s body, or worse yet, trigger a fierce counterattack by his or her immune system. 

And no, this topic wasn’t inspired by the upcoming remake of the classic 1966 sci-fi flick Fantastic Voyage, which tells the story of the micro-submarine Proteus and its intrepid “four men, one girl” crew, who are somehow shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of the miniaturization process’s ailing inventor to fix a blood clot in his brain. (Though I must confess that it’s one of my faves, especially the scene in which the Proteus and Donald Pleasence, as the treacherous Dr. Michaels, start to de-miniaturize and are devoured by white blood cells.) I actually got the idea for this week's story from the recent revelation that  scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich have created tiny replicas of bacteria called Artificial Bacterial Flagella, which are capable of swimming by whipping their tails, just like the real thing. 

    An article on the institute’s Web site provides more detail:

    Artificial bacterial flagella are about half as long as the thickness of a human hair. They can swim at a speed of up to one body length per second. This means that they already resemble their natural role models very closely. 

They look like spirals with tiny heads, and screw through the liquid like miniature corkscrews. When moving, they resemble rather ungainly bacteria with long whip-like tails. They can only be observed under a microscope because, at a total length of 25 to 60 micrometers, they are almost as small as natural flagellated bacteria. Most are between 5 and 15 micrometers long, a few are more than 20 micrometers.

From YouTube, here’s an institute video of how an ABF looks under a microscope. It sure does a pretty good imitation of an actual bacterium, that’s for sure.

Unlike a garden variety E. coli, though, an ABF is fabricated by putting ultra-thin layers of indium, gallium, arsenic and chromium onto a surface, and then patterning those substances with lithography and etching to create a microbe-like flagellum, or spiral tail. (It sounds a lot like the process for making a computer chip.) A tiny magnetic head made of chromium-nickel-gold tri-layer film is then attached to the tail. By tuning the strength and direction of a rotating magnetic field, scientists can steer the fake microbe in whatever direction they want. The current generation of ABFs can swim slightly slower than E. coli, but scientists envision making ones that thrash along several times faster. (They’re also hoping to make ABFs that are even smaller.)

    While lead researcher Brad Nelson cautions that the faux germs are still in the early stages of development, the goal is to turn them into medical micro-robots. Already, the researchers have been able to get ABFs to carry around tiny polystyrene spheres. Someday, that payload could be a dose of medication or a surgical tool.

    So what do you think? Are bacteria-sized micro-robots the wave of the future? Or is the whole idea too buggy? Express your opinion below.

You’re probably as thrilled as I am by the U.S. Navy’s dramatic rescue of an American ship captain, Richard Phillips, who was being held captive by pirates off the coast of Somalia. (That is, unless you’re a Somali pirate, in which case you’re probably vowing revenge.)

Wait! There's more! Could science and technology be used to prevent these attacks from happening in the first place? Keep reading...

But the incident also reminds us that piracy, a crime with a history that goes back to the ancient Greeks, remains a serious problem all over the world today. The International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre publishes a list of piracy prone areas that includes the coastlines of nations ranging from the Philippines to Brazil.

A recently-released Rand Corporation report says there were 1,845 reported pirate attacks on ships from 2003 through 2008, and that 889 crew members were abducted in 2008 alone. Rand estimates that piracy is costing the shipping industry somewhere between $1 billion and $16 billion in losses annually.

And pirates aren’t merely brandishing cutlasses anymore. Increasingly, they’re armed with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and even anti-ship mines. And as impressed as I am with the Navy SEALs’ guile, ingenuity and fearsome marksmanship skills, it doesn’t seem as if there’s an easy military solution to the large piracy problem. With pirates ranging over vast areas, the world’s navies simply can’t protect every merchant ship on a 24-7 basis. What about providing guns to merchant crews for their defense? And here’s a New York Times article that explains why that might actually endanger ships and sailors even more.

But maybe scientists and engineers are the ones who really can defeat pirates. What if the nations of the world require all merchant ships to be equipped with an array of sophisticated nonlethal technology to thwart potential hijackers?

This approach might have some obvious pluses. If we can stop pirates without having to kill them, maybe we can keep the level of violence on the high seas from escalating still higher. And if we make it difficult enough for them, the whole piracy thing may start seeming like too much work, and its practitioners may be encouraged to give up and switch to some more lucrative and hopefully less menacing pursuit.

The downsides: Anti-piracy technology is going to cost money, though probably nowhere near as much as it cost the U.S. Navy to deploy a destroyer, an amphibious assault ship and a team of SEALs to rescue Captain Phillips. There’s also the question of whether or not it will actually work. And presuming that it gets the job done, there’s always the possibility that pirates will develop more technologically sophisticated—or even more violent—new methods to overcome such defenses.

Ingenious ship crews already have come up with a few low-tech measures for frustrating would-be hijackers. For example, when a gang of armed pirates stormed the Zhenhua 4, a Chinese merchant ship, in the Gulf of Aden last December, sailors fought them to a standoff by dousing the attackers with water hoses, setting off improvised incendiary bombs and even pelting them with beer bottles. 

Once the pirates get on board, though, it’s usually too late to prevent them from taking over. That’s why most anti-piracy inventions aim at keeping them in the water. One such device is the Secure-Ship, a system of electrified wires along the edges of ship decks that can deliver a non-lethal eight-joule shock to an intruder.

Another approach is American Technology Systems’ Long Range Acoustic Device, which projects an ear-splitting noise over a distance to drive away pirates.

GCaptain.com, a website for maritime professionals, has compiled a handy list of other nonlethal devices, some of them originally invented for military use, that might be utilized as well to protect ships.

One is Southwest Research Institute’s Mobility Denial System, which could spray a viscous gel on ship decks, causing pirates to lose their footing and land on their scurvy posteriors while the crew takes refuge behind locked hatches. Raytheon’s Silent Guardian device, could force pirates back by subjecting them to focused beam of millimeter wave energy. As Raytheon’s product brochure explains:

Yet another intriguing nonlethal device with potential anti-pirate applications is the U.S. Air Force’s Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response weapon. The PHaSR could project nonlethal laser beams that would “dazzle” pirates, preventing them from seeing in the direction of the device.

So what do you think? Does it make sense to equip merchant ships with such technology? Or should sailors stick to using fire hoses and throwing beer bottles? Express your opinion below.