LAS VEGAS - Military personnel and defense contractors attending the year's largest unmanned systems convention here awoke this morning to a bit of breaking robotics news unraveling thousands of kilometers away from their briefing rooms and exhibition booths. First lighting up Twitter and later acknowledged by the Army, the first flight of Northrop Grumman's robotic Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) took place this morning in New Jersey, marking the first flight of one of the DoD's next generation military airships.

NASA asked the world's top aircraft engineers to solve the hardest problem in commercial aviation: how to fly cleaner, quieter and using less fuel. The prototypes they imagined may set a new standard for the next two decades of flight.

During the Cold War, both sides liberally used the "bug" - the remote listening device - to surreptitiously get wind of what the other side was up to by listening in on a room, a building, or, in the case of East Berlin, an entire city. But in America's cooling war in Afghanistan, US forces may undertake what could be the biggest bugging operation of all time, planting sensors all over the entire country that could feed the US military intelligence from inside that country for the next two decades.

One possibility for future energy production involves harvesting the warmth of Earth's tropical oceans, using the natural heat differentials in the water to drive turbines. It would be relatively simple if you didn't need a ludicrously large piece of pipe, 10 metres in diametre and stretching a kilometre beneath the water. To put that in context, that's a New York subway tunnel wide and two and a half Empire State Buildings high.

Orbital debris is a large and growing problem, and no one is quite sure how to deal with it - polar lasers, nets and other concepts are still merely ideas. But we should at least monitor all that space trash, to be certain where it is and whether it's heading for something we want to protect, like the ISS or a military satellite. The Air Force's new Space Fence, designed to keep an eye on space trash, is getting closer to reality.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter hasn't enjoyed a whole lot of good press lately, with a slew of budget overruns, technology concerns, and one very public grounding for the Marine Corps' F-35B variant casting long shadows over the effort to develop America's new fifth-generation fighter jet. But that hasn't stopped the press team at Lockheed Martin from casting the F-35 in a more favorable light in these newly released images of the jet's first night flight.