How would you like to use your Wiimote to defuse bombs? Well, it won't exactly be you doing the defusing - a robot by the name of Packbot will be doing the actual work. All you need to do is control it, as the US Army is doing. This innovative idea actually came from a couple of engineers who modified the Wiimote for the US Army's use.

For more motion-sensing bomb disposal news, turn to the full article after the jump.

Who else would try and find ways to stop severe bleeding? The U.S. Army, of course. Soldiers are mostly sent to far off places - far from proper medical facilities. Medics can only do so much and normal bandages sometimes aren't enough.

They finally found a way for this problem. And they found it in Icelandic crustaceans. Shrimps have polysaccharides in their exoskeletons called chitosan (a derivative of chitin) which proved to be very effective for dressing wounds. It is mucoadhesive as it gets sticky when drenched in blood.

According to Dr. John McManus of the Army's Combat Casualty Care, "The chitosan dressing has achieved over 97 percent success rates for external hemorrhage control in current combat operations."

The Army purchased around 400,000 bandages from HemCon, after testing a number of alternatives such as collagen sponges, fibrin bandages and nanoporous ceramic powder. The bandages are edible, though don't expect them to taste anything like seafood. They won't cause any allergic reactions on people with food allergies.

Sam Medical Products also has a chitosan-based product in powder form that stops bleeding. These products are perfect for areas far from medical facilities and high risk zones like construction sites.

Yep, the U.S. Army is now taking their trainings seriously, and first and foremost among the things that they'll be spending more time on would be... well, playing video games. These aren't just plain, old games though, as they will be using computer simulators which have been tailor-made for the purpose. In fact, these simulators are now being used in places like Fort Carson in Colorado, where recruits are now learning the basics of M-1 tanks and M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

These things don't go cheap, either, as the government is shelling out US$ 50 million for the project. Officials find that this is still the more efficient alternative as it saves on fuel and prevents real-life accidents from occurring.

So what else does this new way of training soldiers need? The soldiers say that sadly, "computers can't replicate is the smell of being inside of a tank".

Smell-o-vision, anyone?

Yep, as odd as the title of this post sounds, MIT researchers are already putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip. The whole thing would end up the size of a quarter, and the resulting device could run around 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight. The engine can power laptops, cell phones, iPods, radios, future versions of the PSP... the list goes on and on.

Okay, so how do you go about building a coin sized fuel-burning engine?

Well you'll need a compressor, a combustion chamber, a spinning turbine, and almost everything else you see in a normal engine. If you've looked inside the hood of your car long enough, you know what we're talking about.

To make the whole thing really tiny, the MIT researchers turned to etched silicon wafers. In fact, their micro-engine is made up of six, piled up like pancakes and bonded together. Each wafer is a single crystal that has its atoms perfectly aligned, so that it is outlandishly strong.

Making single micro-engines costs an arm and a leg, so to save on funds, the researches made up to 60-100 components on a large wafer that they then carefully cut apart into single units.

At the moment the team is having difficulties with getting the combustion to work properly. You see, inside that mini-combustion chamber, the turbine blades spin at 20,000 revolutions per second - that's 100 times faster than in jet engines. Imagine trying to manage that speed in something the size of a quarter. Thankfully, they claim that cooling all that speed down has so far been manageable.

The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Obviously, they're very much interested in shrinking the huge battery packs that soldiers are now carrying for their electronic equipment.