A radar-tag remedy for friendly fire: A national weapons lab in New Mexico has developed radar technology that produces synthetic echoes designed to help military pilots identify “friendly” ground targets.

The Defense Department has said 24 percent of the 146 U.S. battle deaths and 15 percent of the 480 wounded in the 1991 Gulf War resulted from “friendly fire” incidents.

The new technology from Sandia National Laboratories, dubbed Athena for the mythical Greek goddess-protector of armies, allows aircraft to read radar profiles of friendly ground vehicles and tanks differently from enemy profiles.

Athena dovetails with radar that pilots already employ. Radar generates energy that reflects off objects on the ground. The synthetic echo can modify the reflection that friendly ground vehicles bounce back so that a special icon appears on a plane’s radar screen.

The new technology could also supplement an imaging system that commanders used during last year’s war to show them where friendly forces were located on the battlefield. That system did not enable an American pilot, in the heat of battle, to communicate with a tank or other obscured object to determine for certain whether it was friend or foe.

Athena has yet to receive the Pentagon’s green light.

Intel to adopt new numbering system: Intel Corp. has a new numbering system for its Pentium and Celeron microprocessors to highlight features beyond speed.

Clock speed had been Intel’s primary method of distinguishing its chips, but by June, Intel will incorporate such factors as how much cache memory is onboard and how quickly data moves outside the chip.

“The sum of all those features is greater than just gigahertz alone,” said Intel spokesman Bill Calder.

Other companies, including Advanced Micro Devices Inc., IBM Corp. and Apple Computer Inc., also have moved away from rating chips based solely on their frequency, measured in cycles per second.

Apple, which sells Macintosh computers that use Motorola and IBM chips, has long complained that a chip’s megahertz number is not representative of overall performance. In fact, chips with lower frequencies can be designed to do more work per clock cycle.

In October 2001, AMD also started blasting what it called the megahertz myth, instead listing its processors with numbers that are representative of performance. Its Athlon XP 2800, for instance, runs at 2.08 GHz.

Under the new system, Intel’s processors will each sport three-digit numbers beginning with a 3, 5 or 7. A Celeron in the 300 range generally will be slower or sport fewer features than one in the 500 or 700 range. The same is true of Intel’s Pentium 4 and Pentium M lines.

NEC debuts voice-recognition device: Travelers at Tokyo’s Narita international airport had a recent opportunity to try out a portable translator for the English and Japanese languages.

NEC Corp.’s experimental device, which resembles a personal digital assistant and is slightly bigger than a pack of cigarettes, uses the Japanese electronics maker’s voice-recognition technology. Its vocabulary was limited to those used in travel such as, “Where is the nearest Japanese restaurant?” or “Which way to the escalators?”

Ask something in English, and the gadget will interpret that into Japanese. When a person replies in Japanese, it translates that right back within a second into English.

Associated Press