The coveted “Best of What’s New” for the year awards from Popular Science include, for 2006, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II and the recently de-cloaked Polecat unmanned aerial vehicle. Popular Science evaluates thousands of products each year to find those new products that “change the way we think about the future,” said Editor Mark Jannot, per a company news release. Lockheed Martin just unveiled the Polecat, a product of the secretive Skunk Works, this past summer.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
