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.

Generally we would shy away from "New Cold War" rhetoric, but sometimes it's hard not to draw comparisons. The ongoing cyber defense arms race and the establishment of an official cyber warfare strategy by the US - and we all know specifically who that is aimed at - more or less smack of the old days when the US and USSR were trapped in that tenuous relationship held fast by the threat of mutually assured destruction. And now there's this: China Daily, in an editorial dated last week, is calling for a Sino-American cyber "red phone." All that's missing is cyber duck-and-cover drills.

The United States Air Force's Blue Devil airshipis 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.

A new, compact gasification contraption can dramatically compress the things our armed forces leave behind, turning trash into ash. Marines at Camp Smith, Hawaii, are testing the new unit to verify whether it could be used at forward operating bases to cut down on landfill. The Micro Auto Gasification System, or MAGS, can bake 45 kilograms of garbage and compress it into 2.3 kilograms of ash, while creating more energy than it consumes.