Gillian Bussey, director of the Joint Hypersonics Transition Office, said the Department of Defense will need to boost its production capacity for offensive and defensive hypersonic systems, DOD News reported Tuesday.

Bussey said at a discussion with the Center for Strategic and International Studies that DOD should boost the rates of additive manufacturing for cruise missiles engines and thermal protection systems for glide vehicles.

She said these particular aspects of hypersonics production take the most time and addressing them can produce significant results.

“Those are the things that take the longest. If we can reduce the production time and increase the capacity and you know double, triple, quadruple those production numbers, I think that’s how we’ll really make a difference,” she said.

Bussey also noted that DOD is prioritizing offensive hypersonic systems over defensive ones because the latter presents higher costs and complexities.

Researchers from Switzerland have found that an implanted electrode device enabled three patients with spinal cord injury to stand and walk again, CNN reported Monday.

Participants in the STIMO clinical trial were able to independently take steps on a treadmill using body weight support a day after undergoing surgery to place the epidural device from Onward Medical.

“For the first time, we have not only immediate effect – though training is still important – but also individuals with no sensation, no movement whatsover, have been able to regain full standing and walking independently of the laboratory,” said Gregoire Courtine of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Courtine is one of the study’s authors who led the trial with Dr. Jocelyne Bloch from Lausanne University Hospital.

Using a tablet computer, the researchers stimulated the patients’ trunk and leg muscles by initiating and sending unique sequences of electrical pulses to the implanted device through the pacemaker.

The research team plans to hold a larger clinical trial in the U.S. The study was published in the journal Nature Medicine.

The Department of Energy is investing $28 million in research and development projects aimed at applying clean hydrogen to electricity production, industrial activities and transportation.

The funding opportunity announcement would drive the use of carbon capture technologies to generate clean hydrogen from waste materials, such as plastics, biomass, legacy coal and municipal solid waste, DOE said Monday.

The projects will focus on the following topic areas: clean hydrogen cost reductions for DOE’s Hydrogen Shot effort, clean hydrogen from high-volume waste materials and biomass, and sensors and controls for co-gasification of waste.

The FOA also supports front-end engineering design studies for carbon capture systems at domestic steam methane reforming facilities and autothermal reforming facilities, which produce hydrogen from natural gas.

DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management announced the FOA, which supports the Biden Administration’s goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Sohail Chaudhry, the Food and Drug Administration’s acting chief technology officer, said the agency’s digital transformation plan is focusing on automation and user experience, Nextgov reported Monday.

He said the FDA will need to consistently test and adjust machine learning models as the agency adopts ML technology.

Chaudhry said he wants to ensure that users will not have much to worry about on how the digital transformation technologies are made and implemented.

The agency’s automation will span applications including language translation, handwriting recognition, content comprehension and dataset validation, the report noted.

The acting CTO noted that applying a user-friendly approach can promote the adoption of new information technology services across the FDA enterprise.