A somewhat strange story emerged yesterday involving an extremist antigovernment group, a North Dakota sheriff's office, and six missing cows, but there's a much larger story behind this brief legal tangle between local law enforcement and the Brossart family of Nelson Country. Only in America.

At least on the record.You know, it's one thing to "shoot down" someone else's top secret spy drone. But come on Iran - stop bragging. Iran today released a two-and-a-half minute video and the first images depicting the RQ-170 stealth drone that it claims it shot down on Sunday. It's the first visual proof that leaders of the Islamic Republic are actually holding the drone it their possession.

The US military's M.R.E. - the Meal Ready to Eat, or those freeze-dried packages full of gummy pastes and freeze dried dreck that soldiers carry into the field - is getting a much-needed upgrade. But it's not in the form of better tasting dehydrated foods or better freeze-drying technology. Rather, the US Army has developed the world's most cutting edge sandwich, the BBC reports, one that can be served fresh after sitting on the shelf for a full two years.

Another day, another blacker-than-black materials science breakthrough aimed at making stealthy objects even stealthier. A research team from Michigan University in the States has created a new kind of nanostructured coating made of carbon nanotubes that could cloak an aircraft in complete blackness, concealing it in the visible range and beyond (think: radar). Suspended in paint, the nanomaterial could be rolled right onto aircraft to turn them super-black and super-stealthy.

The United States Air Force's Blue Devil airship is getting yet another high-tech upgrade. Via a federal announcement put out last week, The Register reports that DARPA will outfit the Blue Devil Block 2 ISR airship with up to two Free-space Optical Experimental Network Experiment (FOENEX) systems. Think of them like optical lasers that move through the air with the fidelity of the kind of fibre optic cable going into our very own NBN.

Nanotechnology as a discipline is bleeding-edge cool, but so often we hear more about its amazing potential than its practical application. So it's always refreshing to catch wind of a story like this: Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York have developed and demonstrated a small, relatively inexpensive, and reusable sensor made of graphene foam that far outperforms commercial gas sensors on the market today and could lead to better explosives detectors and environmental sensors in the very near future.