Spotting Snipers With Sound

In the movies, action heroes can dodge bullets or even catch them with their hands. In the real world, your average soldier is happy just to know where the shooter is. For three years now, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have had help locating snipers. An acoustics system known as Boomerang, developed by BBN Technologies, in Cambridge, Mass., determines the location of a shooter by sensing the blast at the rifle's muzzle and the air pressure of the bullet as it whizzes past. Now BBN is taking the technology further, building and testing a version for helicopters, which it hopes to ship next year.