January 28 will mark the 30th anniversary of the day Americans looked to the sky and witnessed the unthinkable – the Space Shuttle Challenger lifting off and exploding a mere 73 seconds later, nine miles above the earth’s surface. Among the seven Challenger crewmembers who sacrificed their lives that day was Ron McNair, a former Hughes Research Laboratories physicist.

Researchers at HRL Laboratories, LLC, have achieved a new milestone in 3D printing technology by demonstrating an approach to additively manufacture ceramics that overcomes the limits of traditional ceramic processing and enables high temperature, high strength ceramic components.

Many New Year’s resolutions are abandoned come mid-January, but HRL Laboratories, LLC, succeeded in its quest to acquire more than 100 patents in 2015. As a result, the research and development company recently celebrated the acquisition of its 1001st patent.

Funded under the Atoms to Product (A2P) program through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), HRL’s Billion particle per second Nanoparticle Assembly project will develop processes to assemble nanoscale materials into forms that are compatible with existing manufacturing technologies.

Boeing features HRL Laboratories in this video about the Microlattice, the lightest metallic structure ever made. At 99.99% air, it’s light enough to balance on top of a dandelion, while its structure makes it strong. Strength and record breaking lightness make it a potential metal for future planes and vehicles.

HRL Laboratories, LLC announced today that it will develop new ultra-lightweight materials for future aerospace vehicles and structures under NASA’s Game Changing Development Program. These new materials can enable NASA to reduce the mass of spacecraft for deep space exploration by 40 percent and are necessary for the journey to Mars and beyond.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate has awarded HRL Laboratories, LLC, $2.2 million to develop technology that is capable of continuously confirming that the person operating a mobile device is the device’s authorized user. HRL’s Information and Systems Sciences Laboratory, in conjunction with its Microelectronics Laboratory, will create this new mobile device authentication technology.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected HRL Laboratories’ Dr. Logan Sorenson as a “DARPA Riser,” one of approximately 50 early-career researchers who demonstrate the potential to be future technology leaders. During “DARPA Rising,” an event held on September 9, 2015, in St. Louis, Mo., Sorenson will have the opportunity to deliver a poster presentation to the DARPA director and technical team.

According to Dr. Christopher Roper, HRL senior research staff engineer and co-author of “Enabling Ultra-Lightweight Structures: Microsandwich Structures with Microlattice Cores,” published in APL Materials, “Sandwich structures improve the performance of weight-sensitive vehicles like airplanes and helicopters because they’re lighter than solid materials.”

HRL Laboratories, LLC is pleased to announce that staff members Dr. Andrea Corrion and Dr. Kevin Geary have been invited to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) highly selective symposium, U.S. Frontiers of Engineering. According to the NAE, Corrion and Geary are among the nation’s brightest young engineers, 89 of whom will attend the symposium to discuss advances in four fields: optical and mechanical materials, natural disaster forecasting, cybersecurity, and the hunt for earth-like exoplanets.