Apart from the AK-47, no other weapon has graced the world’s television screens more in modern times, than the RPG-7. 

Officially known in Russian as the Reaktivnoi Protivotankovii Granatomet (Hand antitank granade launcher), the slender hollow tube with its conical rear and oversized diamond shaped warhead continues to play just as an important role in today’s warfare as its small arms comrade. 

And just like the AK, the reason for this is simple – it’s an easy to operate, reliable, and brutally effective weapon capable of taking out just about all but the latest in modern armor. 

The RPG-7 has established itself as the most dominant shoulder-fired antitank system in the world, and can be expected to continue its reign of destruction well into the coming decades.

The RPG-7 was first introduced Soviet Army service in 1962. It used a design which, like most weapons of that era, could trace its origins to the Second World War, when the Germans began employing simple, cheap and disposable recoilless launchers with an oversized warhead called Panzerfausts.

Consisting of nothing more than a hollow tube with a propellant stick attached to a semi-hemispherical High Explosive AntiTank shaped charge (HEAT), Panzerfausts were employed with great success against Allied armor as they closed in on the Third Reich.

Its design allowed thousands of ill-trained boys and old men of the last ditch VolkSturm units an instant ability to take out tanks and caused great concern whenever armor operated in confined areas, such as forests or cities.

In fact, so disgusted were the Americans at a German technique of destroying a tank, then throwing away the launcher to surrender, that they ordered anyone doing so shot regardless of whether they had their hands up or waved a white flag.

Initially, the Panzerfausts were extremely short range (30 meters), but were worked-up over time by using stronger propellants to 60, 100, 150 and even a 250 meter variant. 

After the Soviets encountered the first versions, they immediately went to work during the conflict trying to come up with their own design, with a primary feature being that it would be reloadable.

The first prototypes were created in 1944 and called the LPG–44. The LPG-44 had a 30mm diameter launcher and weighed 4.4 pounds unloaded, and could fire a PG-70 70mm diameter HEAT round. 

This weapon later received the designation RPG-1, and had a maximum range of 75 meters. Its penetration of 150mm of steel was less than that of the Panzerfaust though, and eventually it was cancelled in 1948.

The next evolution was the RPG-2. Externally, it was similar in size to the RPG-1, but featured some refinements. Most important was a larger 40mm tube (6.4 lbs unloaded), and an 80mm warhead designated the PG-2.  It had double the range, at 150 meters, and fired at a flatter trajectory, giving greater accuracy. It also could penetrate more armor at 200mm. 

Its widespread deployment began in 1954, and this launcher, coincidentally, would be the primary weapon used by the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong in the early stages of the Vietnam War against the U.S. 

Also, many more were Chinese manufactured versions and designated the B40. In theatre, this moniker ended up being used just as often as the word RPG when describing antitank weapons used by the insurgents.

Still another deadlier version showed up that asserted itself as THE standard by which all others were measured. Not resting on the RPG-2, the U.S.S.R had begun looking for its replacement as early as 1958.  The result was the little-known RPG-4, which had a 45mm launcher tube and 83mm warhead.

The launcher weighed 10.3 pounds and doubled the range again to 300mm. It could penetrate a little more armor at 220mm and, for the first time in the series, possessed an optical sight. It showed promise, but the RPG-4 quickly disappeared the moment the definitive RPG arrived: the -7 model.

This new design, even as it was being developed at the same time, proved far and away better than the -4 model with double the range at 300 meters for point targets, and out to 500 meters for an area target. 

It too mounted an optical sight which rode on a smaller tube of 40 mm and fired a slightly bigger 85 mm PG -7 HEAT warhead which was capable of penetrating 260 mm of armor.

The standard RPG-7 round, the most widely used variant, and its subsequent improvements share the same basic functions going back to the Panzerfaust. When the round fires, stabilizing fins deploy and impart a slow spin as it streaks through the sky at approximately 965 ft./s.

When it impacts a hard surface, a piezoelectric element in the nose crushes and sends an electrical signal through the round to a fuse at the base of explosives positioned behind a hollow copper cone. 

Once the explosives ignite, it forces the cone to turn itself inside out, shooting forward as a molten, thumb-sized slug of several thousand degrees, where in the case of an armored turret it will bore a similar sized hole through the metal until it reaches the interior.

Inside, it ricochets about along with flaming particles at several thousand miles per hour until it loses energy.  Anything from metal to flesh is torn asunder, leaving nothing but a charred compartment and human remains so scorched and destroyed that most can be washed out with a hose.

This is how a shaped charge works and it all happens in a fraction of a second.  It is a formula that, until advanced ceramics were incorporated into tank armor in the 1970s, forced designers to deal with a vulnerability gap that could be defeated only by designing a tank with such thick armor that its weight left it virtually unable to move.  So it was a welcome respite when the much lighter ceramic became available.

There were other targets the RPG proved just as adept at destroying, the kind that remains vulnerable. Helicopters. In this role, Western forces and America in particular have become all-too-familiar with the RPG-7’s ability. Mainly due to the most famous incident of when a couple of RPGs were employed to take down U.S. Army UH 60 Black Hawks hovering over Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993. 

This episode caused survivors of what was a planned operation to become trapped and forced to engage in some of the toughest close quarters combat seen since the Vietnam War. Later immortalized into a book, then a movie, it became known forever as ‘Blackhawk Down.’

More recently, the RPG-7 was used against U.S. and coalition forces on the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan, with varying results.

Most modern western tanks have shown they are capable of enduring multiple RPG hits and continue fighting, while lighter armored vehicles often use wire mesh cages extending around the bodies to prematurely detonate the round, making it far less effective at penetrating.

Where it continues to cause problems, though, is against the helicopter. Specifically in 2011, when ‘Extortion 17′, a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter carrying 38 personnel and a K-9 dog was downed over Afghanistan with what likely was an RPG-7.

This encounter remains the largest loss of life suffered by the U.S in a single incident during the War on Terror.

There have been attempts over the years to improve upon the RPG-7 by introducing new designs and much larger warheads. 

These have been produced in small numbers and have never even begun to replace the standard RPG, which continues to see developments in the warhead area such as fragmentation, thermobaric and even tandem designs to defeat modern sophisticated armor.

Nevertheless, the launcher tube itself has remained virtually unchanged since 1962, proving it is a design worthy of merit, like the Kalashnikov. And, at just $300 a copy, the RPG-7 remains the gold standard go-to weapon for a soldier or guerrilla looking to unleash a heavy dose of retail destruction at a wholesale price.

SEE ALSO: Here's The Wild Underwater Vehicle Navy SEALs Use On Stealth Missions

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Dan Bilzerian, the multimillionaire "King of Instagram," could have faced up to six years in prison if he had been convicted of the bomb felony he was arrested for recently, TMZ says. The notorious gun-wielding poker player was arrested in Los Angeles on Tuesday and was initially charged with possession of explosives.

Bilzerian lives a crazy, lavish life — and 2014 has been no exception.

Since he got kicked out of Navy SEAL training school in 1999, Bilzerian has gone on to gamble with millions, act in action movies, and fly around the world with hordes of women wearing very little clothing — and he documents it all on Instagram. 

This is his insane life.

He's rich. He's 34 and has a massive trust fund from his father, who specialized in corporate takeovers:

He hangs out with loads of bikini-clad ladies. This was his last post before the arrest:

And he plays soldier. He had a cameo in the Hollywood blockbuster "Lone Survivor," although his part was cut down — and he sued. Here he is, middle right, with actor Eric Bana, middle:

But there's no indication on his feed about his bomb exploits. Usually he operates a sort of bear-all policy. There's an endless amount of weaponry and profanity peppering his photo stream.

He regularly carries guns — and large amounts of cash:

Once he visited a friend who had decided to put two tiger sharks in his swimming pool, and one "ended up dying," according to The Daily Dot. It must have been upsetting, because deep down, Bilzerian really likes animals.

Especially goats:

And snuggly cats:

Despite Bilzerian's enjoyment of all things fluffy, trouble appears to follow him around. He has been arrested before. Jebiga mentions how in Bilzerian's senior year of high school he was detained by police for having a machine gun in his car on school property. 

So he nearly fell before he even got going:

It's worth pointing out that among all the Champagne and revelry, Bilzerian also enjoys drugs. In this next photo, his caption reads: "I climbed this mountain while I was high as a giraffe's p---y, without shoes, and I don't photoshop."

It's clear he likes adventure and adrenaline: 

But all his cars, yachts, and women — and amazing Instagram empire — could have come crashing down with a lengthy jail term. 

Behind bars, he wouldn't be able to drive this Ferrari Spider and tell us all about it, for instance: 

Bilzerian's arrest warrant was issued in Clark County, Nevada, and was for "violating a law making it a crime to possess an explosive or incendiary device with the intent to manufacture it." TMZ says Bilzerian had ammonium and aluminium powder, along with an ammonium nitrate mix. When mixed together it acts like pure TNT.

Fortunately for Bilzerian's 5 million-plus Instagram followers, he has been released, and the charges have been dropped.

He notified everyone of his freedom in his latest very-typical Bilzerian update — on board a private jet:

But there's been no sign of the bomb. Here's his weird glass fish, which might be a bong, instead:

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As a sniper in the military, I sometimes wished I had a bullet that could steer its own course, especially in multiple shifty crosswinds, or if a target was slightly behind some type of cover. It appears that dream is now becoming a reality.

DARPA has done the “almost” impossible and created something that we’ve only seen in the movies.

This year, DARPA has successfully tested its self-guided, mid-flight-changing .50 cal. projectile. DARPA’s “Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordinance” (EXACTO) project is tasked with “developing more accurate military artillery that will enable greater firing range, minimize the time required to engage with targets, and also help reduce missed shots that can give away the troops’ location.”

It seems that the projectile operates in the same manner as laser-guided bombs used in the GWOT. A few months ago, DARPA successfully tested the .50 cal. bullet at a distance of 1.2 miles. The projectile uses optical sensors in its nose to gather in-flight information and internal electronic systems that control the projectile’s fins—which most likely deploy in-flight, as they cannot be seen from the EXACTO photos.

The video link below shows a live testing of DARPA’s guided bullet with the rifle intentionally aimed to the right of the target. In the video, it shows how the projectile homes in on its intended target, changes its flight path, and connects. If this technology hits our military, snipers may not have to worry about the environmentals on those must-hit shots.

Although I do like the technology, I am also a firm believer in the basics, and will continue to rely on what I was taught and continue to practice in regards to precision shooting.

DARPA's Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program recently conducted the first successful live-fire tests demonstrating in-flight guidance of .50-caliber bullets. The following video shows EXACTO rounds maneuvering in flight to hit targets that are offset from where the sniper rifle is initially aimed.  

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In the wake of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary two years ago, President Obama signed an executive order to review the availability of innovative gun safety technologies.

The shorthand for that is "smart guns," weapons that — through one technical solution or another — only fire when in the hands of their owner.

Significant hurdles have been raised by Second Amendment absolutists and the NRA. Though the technology is out there and available in parts of Europe, smart guns have yet to be consistently available in the United States.

Despite the market's challenges, investing in progress isn't a worthless pursuit. Proving the reliability of these new weapons — a major concern for averse consumers — would help the smart gun's case.

Last year, a report by the National Institute of Justice identified 13 groups (universities, research organizations, and private gun manufacturers) working on solutions.

The Smart Tech Foundation isn't one of them, but it does offer a $1 million prize to stoke innovation. Some 200 people from 35 countries have applied, the youngest just 13 years old.

"We certainly think that the marriage of software technology with firearms is inevitable," Jim Pitkow, a board member the Foundation, told Business Insider. Pitkow was inspired to cofound the foundation after having met some of the Sandy Hook victims' families, and by the apparent lack of capital in the sector.

Bringing new solutions to market may be years away, and Pitkow concedes that domestic resistance has been stiff. But "technology finds its own way," he said. "It'll be applied to the problems where it's able and ready to be applied."

One of the foundation's fund recipients is TriggerSmart, a company based in Ireland. The company won a grant, the sum of which will be announced early next year.

Its founder, Robert McNamara, started the business believing that the biometric approach — like the fingerprint activation technology that has also attracted support from the Smart Tech Foundation — wasn't the best route.

"I wondered why biometrics had failed to make it to market," McNamara said. "And the answer seemed fairly obvious, that it was speed and reliability. Biometrics take a while to analyze and people don't have that five seconds or ten seconds in a situation where they need to use the weapon."

Instead, TriggerSmart uses RFID (or radio frequency identification) technology. The gun doesn't fire unless it's coupled with a device that holds the right chip.

German company Armatix has also created a pistol that leverages RFID, which in its case is paired with a watch worn by the user.

McNamara and others think smart guns could eventually be paired with technology creating "safe zones" around schools or airports, "so that trigger-smart enabled guns coming into that zone could be remotely disabled at point of entry," McNamara said. "We call that feature wide area control."

Conversely, some guns could be authorized only in certain areas. In a military setting, this might reduce the chance of an accident outside a shooting range — or the damage done when a rogue shooter picks up a weapon at the armory.

But for safe zones around schools to be worth the investment, they'd have to exist in a society where most guns are safe ones. "I think there's a gun for every man woman and child in America," said McNamara, whose native Ireland, he added, only has about two thousand licensed owners and an unarmed police force.

He's nearly correct. There are close to 90 guns per 100 Americans — the highest rate of any country — and they go off no matter who's pulling the trigger. Over a third of Americans surveyed by Pew said they or someone in their household owned a gun.

Like others in the hopeful business of smart guns, McNamara has received a few death threats. "I didn't lose any sleep," he said, because they were one-off instances made over social media.

But similar backlash once pressured Maryland gun shop owner Andy Raymond to go back on the decision to carry Armatix's smart pistol.

The power of a sale would have been more than symbolic; a New Jersey law mandates that gun sellers in the state carry only smart guns starting three years after their availability anywhere in the country.

Just earlier this month, however, the New Jersey Attorney General's office ruled out of the "personalized handgun" designation the Armatix pistol once considered by Raymond. Their reasoning: Someone other than the intended user could still fire the weapon if they were close enough to the RFID chip, making the gun not so smart after all (but the iGun's ring, its creator said, transmits "only a couple of inches at most," so perhaps it would meet the state's stringent criteria).  

Belinda Padilla, CEO of Armatix, wrote in an email to Business Insider that "With this verdict, I look forward to working with distribution companies and retail stores and soon you will begin to see our products on the shelves."

Jonathan Mossberg is the CEO of iGun Technology Corporation. The company is working on a smart shotgun (there's more room to innovate in a bigger gun), which the report by the National Institute of Justice stated "could be considered the first personalized firearm to go beyond a prototype to an actual commercializable or production-ready product."

iGun's product uses magnetic spectrum tag technology, similar in function to RFID. And like TriggerSmart's technology, it's embedded in a ring. If you're not wearing it, you can't fire the gun.

Eventually, Mossberg said the technology could fit in a grain of rice.

"There's no electricity no power, totally waterproof, and it lasts, I think, forever," said Mossberg. "So that's a pretty long time."

For a while, smart guns just weren't getting any interest. "The whole company, the whole concept has been on ice for like ten years because there was no demand," said Mossberg. "And in the past couple of years there's been a resurgence of demand and interest in it." Now iGun is in trials with a few police departments.

In 2010, hundreds were unintentionally killed (and thousands injured) by accidents involving firearms. McNamara believes smart gun technology can cut that statistic.

"You can have as many guns as you like," McNamara said. "I'm not suggesting that you can't have your guns. I'm just suggesting that they should be smart guns. A bit like putting a seatbelt in a car."

Recently, he recalled, a police officer told him that a certain dangerous stretch of road had seen 51 fatalities for children under four. "And he asked me the question: 'how many of them had their seatbelts on?' And I'd said, I guessed half of them, or less than half. And he said 'none of them.'

"So I'm sure some of them would be still toddling around the place if they'd had seatbelts on them, and I think likewise if all guns were childproof there'd be lots of kids alive today that unfortunately aren't."

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Long depicted as the rootin'-tootin' capital of American gun culture, Texas is one of the few states with an outright ban on the open carry of handguns.

That could change in 2015, with the Republican-dominated Legislature and Gov.-elect Greg Abbott expected to push for expanded gun rights.

"If open carry is good enough for Massachusetts, it's good enough for the state of Texas," Abbott said the day after his election last month.

And if Texas, which allows concealed handguns, embraces open carry — rolling back a 140-year ban — it would be the largest state to have done so.

Open carry drew wide support in the 2014 statewide election, and at least six bills have already been filed for the upcoming session, which starts in January. Abbott has already pledged to sign one into law if sent to his desk.

Coni Ross, a 63-year-old rancher in Blanco, carries a handgun in her purse for personal protection and said she'd like the option to carry it openly on her belt if she could. She already does when she's on her ranch and feels comfortable with her gun by her side.

"In one-and-a-half seconds, a man can run 25 feet with a knife in his hands and stab you before you get your gun out," Ross said. "If your weapon is concealed you're dead."

Most of the country already allows some form of open carry of handguns, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a California-based group advocating gun control legislation.

But Texas, California, Florida, New York, Illinois and South Carolina, which make up more than a third of the U.S. population and include six of its seven largest population centers, do not.

Large urban areas have traditionally had the strictest controls on weapons in public because of concerns over guns in crowds and crime control, said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, author of "Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America." He said it's "pretty surprising" that Texas still has an open carry ban that dates to the 1870s.

"We've been regulating guns in the interest of public safety, even in places like Texas, since the founding," Winkler said. "The battle over open carry of guns in public remains one of the most heated in the gun debate today."

Of the states that ban open carry, Texas easily has the most gun-friendly reputation.

From manufacturers to dealers, Texas has the most federal firearms license holders in the country. It has few restrictions on gun ownership, and Gov. Rick Perry and state lawmakers have actively lobbied gun makers to move to the state.

Texas allows the public display of long guns, such as rifles and shotguns, and open carry advocates have staged high-profile rallies at the Alamo and state Capitol. Concealed handguns are allowed inside the Capitol, where license holders can bypass metal detectors.

But Texas still insists handguns be kept out of sight.Texas first banned the carrying of handguns "when the carpet-bagger government was very anxious about former Confederates and recently freed slaves carrying firearms," state Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said.

Overturning a century of law proved difficult, and a concealed weapons law failed several times until it finally passed in 1995 when Patterson, then a state senator, led the charge. Texas now has about 811,000 concealed handgun license holders, nearly equal the population of San Francisco.

Even among gun supporters in Texas, the idea of open carry was considered too radical when the concealed carry law passed. Since then, the Legislature has expanded gun rights incrementally. It made the licensing of concealed handguns easier and, during the last three sessions, held heated debates over concealed handguns on college campuses. Open carry backers believe these debates helped rally support to their cause and that an open carry law will pass.

Open carry opponents, such as Moms Demand Action for Gun Safety in America, say carrying guns on the street is less about gun rights than intimidation.

"There is no way to know ... if that person is a threat to moms and our children," said Claire Elizabeth, who heads the group's Texas chapter.

Despite the early momentum, there are no guarantees open carry will pass. Bills to allow concealed handguns on college campus appeared to have widespread support in 2009, 2011 and 2013, but were derailed by objections from universities and law enforcement.

Most of the open carry bills already filed for the upcoming session would still require a license. One, by Rep. Joe Stickland, R-Bedford, would eliminate the licensing requirement for concealed or open carry.

"The idea is we're going to return our Second Amendment rights," Stickland said. "I can't imagine what the citizens would do if they had to take a class or pay a fee to use their First Amendment rights."

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STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Russian arms makers' sales soared 20 percent in 2013, bucking a slowdown in other countries' industries, largely thanks to a Kremlin push to modernize its military, the SIPRI think tank said on Monday.

Russia's figures were strong enough to slow a three-year decline in global arms sales caused mainly by Washington's withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and the economic crisis in Europe, SIPRI researcher Siemon Wezeman said.

"The remarkable increases in Russian companies' arms sales in both 2012 and 2013 are in large part due to uninterrupted investments in military procurement by the Russian Government during the 2000's," Wezeman added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has increased defense spending since coming to power in 2000, seeing rebuilding of the armed forces as a central part of his attempts to restore Russia's position on the world stage.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI's) widely read survey of the world's 100 biggest arms makers, excluding Chinese firms, showed combined turnover down 2 percent to $402 billion (£255.7 billion) in 2013, slower than the 4 percent decline seen in 2012.

Sales by some of the world's biggest suppliers in the United States and Canada continued to fall while the picture was mixed in Western Europe with sales up in France, steady in Britain and down in Spain and Italy.

Wezeman told Reuters that some of the recent declines in Europe had been caused by a perception of a lower military threat.

"In 2014, the threat perception has started to change. Russian actions have woken up many European countries ... That will probably translate into additional procurement from 2015," he added.

Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea region in March and Western powers have accused it of backing and arming separatist rebels in Ukraine's east -- a charge dismissed by Moscow.

Russia's Tactical Missiles Corporation showed the country's strongest growth, at 118 percent, according to the survey.

Topping the global rankings were Lockheed Martin followed by Boeing, both from the United States, and in third place Britain's BAE Systems.

SIPRI recorded strong growth in some suppliers in emerging markets, including South Korea, Brazil and Turkey. China-based companies are not included because of what the think tank says is a lack of reliable data.

(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom; Editing by Daniel Dickson and Andrew Heavens)

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The wildly popular video game "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare" takes place 40 years in the future but supposedly includes only weapons and gear based on current research.

We called up the developers at Activision's Sledgehammer Games to ask for the details.

"Because the experience would be pushing people's boundaries of what is believable, we wanted to show that the research was real," said Michael Condrey, co-founder and studio head at Sledgehammer.

It became a hard fast rule that if the team couldn't point to R&D, prototypes, or at least concepts for their fictional weapons, the creators wouldn't let it into the game. Their sources included The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an R&D group based out of West Point, university researchers, and even arms vendors.

A popular basic weapon in the game is the TAC-19, a directed-energy, pump-action shotgun that shoots a concussive pulse and is highly effective at short range.

Directed-energy weapons are a category that is getting lots of research right now.

"We know today that they're using compressed sound, compressed air, lots of non-lethal forms of directed energy," Condrey said.

The long range acoustic device, or LRAD, has already been used at least once to deter advancing pirates off the coast of Somalia. The weapon, commissioned after Al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, can cause permanent damage to the hearing of its targets more than 300 yards away.

Granted, the LRAD doesn't harness sound in a ballistic capacity, but a starting investment (and a working weapon) in sonic energy was enough to justify speculation by the game developers. In fact, said Condrey, they feel they've been a bit conservative with their guesswork.

"Our game is 2054, it's 40 years out. These things are way, way closer than that," he said.

Then there's the railgun, a very powerful turret players take control of aboard an aircraft carrier in one of Call of Duty's single-player set pieces.

This weapon definitely does have a future.

The US Navy currently has a high-speed railgun that fires projectiles at a speed of 5,000 miles an hour. That velocity makes the railgun's projectiles devastating even without the explosives or chemical propellants of conventional weapons. The weapon, which is electric, cuts ammunication costs significantly while also reaching a powerful new kind of destruction.

The current model was tested on land earlier this year and is set for test aboard a cargo ship in 2016.

"Technology is moving hyper fast today, so the stuff we were finding as prototypes three years ago are real today," said Condrey.

Sledgehammer talked with another source about a world in which an occupying force's ammunition would be manufactured or printed in the theater of war rather than shipped overseas.

"The supply chain management of modern military missions is really expensive and arduous," said Condrey.

Indeed, the Defense Logistics Agency — which sources and ships the military's food, fuel, weapons and more — has a multi-billion dollar budget and spends the most in times of war. The department's director once projected that the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan would be accompanied by a $16 billion dollar drop in its spending, so technology that takes on some of the material burden of war could save a lot of money.

But Call of Duty's IMR (or integrated munitions rifle) goes a step beyond temporary factories that use local resources, like sand, to make bullets. This assault rifle prints its ammunition over time.

"It's happening in the weapon," said Condrey. "There's a raw material canister on the weapon that prints as you need them."

Some of the game's craziest technology isn't found in its guns.

"It's not just the weapons and the bullets and the grenades," said Condrey. "The vehicle technology that we show, like the hovercraft technology, the augmented reality ... [it] was all driven from this idea that we wanted to see the research today."

One of the features standing front and center in the game's commercials is the the pair of mag (or magnetic) gloves that allow players to stick to metal surfaces and scale buildings.

"We were talking to one of the local university programs here, and they weren't developing a military application, but they were developing this concept," said Condrey. "They were studying geckos and crickets and cockroaches to figure out: how do things scale vertical?"

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst explored the gecko's case (and DARPA has funded some of the team's research into synthetic adhesives). Applying what they've learned — the lizard sticks thanks to millions of splitting, microscopic hairs under its feet — they've made a grippy wonder material called Geckskin.

Skip to the video's 2:20 mark and you won't have trouble picturing the potential of Geckskin gloves (or socks).

Naturally, Call of Duty's gloves aren't surface-agnostic — since they leverage magnetic force, its wearers can only stick to metals.

As in the case of directed energy, the game makers took imaginitive license from the starting point of a general research path rather than a specific precursor.

The source material provided stronger groundwork in the case of hoverbikes. A longtime staple of science fiction franchises (and the new Star Wars trailer), vehicles that float above the ground instead of using traction mechanisms like tires and treads have a few working prototypes.  

Chris Malloy, an engineer, is behind one of the more exciting ones, simply named the Hoverbike. Malloy is transferring some of the technology from a smaller, working drone he's also created.

Saddled with a test dummy of sorts, a small-scale prototype of the Hoverbike clears some serious height, as opposed to staying aloft just above the ground.

In fact, the vehicle's site bills the Hoverbike as a suitable replacement for one-man helicopters and cites interest from the US Army and Lockheed Martin.

The fact that the game's fiction was based on reality isn't just a way to help those who play the game suspend their disbelief; it also gave Sledgehammer Games a narrative thread to present to franchise fans while they were hyping the game.

Among a series of "developer diary" videos ahead of its release was one on the game's depiction of future technology.

"It's got to be relatable, got to be believable, but we are taking it to an extent that makes it also fun and new," said Glen Schofield, general manager and co-founder of Sledgehammer Games.

At the same time, Call of Duty's fanbase is so loyal that the developers might be able to throw them just about anything. Competitive players don't pick up the game for the storyline, they do it for the twitchy action the shooter presents them with. Fortunately, futuristic technology — making everything on the battlefield faster, stronger, and hyper-connected — only multiplies that appeal.

SEE ALSO: 15 ways video games make you smarter and healthier

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A Delta Airlines baggage handler is facing federal charges he helped put 18 firearms on a plane at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, WSB-TV, Atlanta, reported Monday. The station obtained an FBI affidavit indicating the employee helped another man smuggle the guns aboard a flight to New York's Kennedy International Airport Dec. 10.

The complaint identifies the Delta employee as Eugene Harvey.

Harvey allegedly used a "buddy pass" to bypass Transportation Security Administration Security checkpoints to smuggle the guns aboard, WSB said. The complaint charges Harvey with smuggling 18 guns aboard the flight. It also says an undercover officer received 129 guns in all, including AK-47s and AR-15 assault weapons. However, it was unclear whether the remainder of the guns also were smuggled aboard, WSB said.

WSB said the charges were filed late Monday afternoon.

International Business Times was unable to reach Delta by phone for comment.

Travelers are barred from bringing firearms and other weapons aboard flights.

"Travelers may only transport unloaded firearms in a locked, hard-sided container as checked baggage. The container must be completely secured from being accessed. All firearms, ammunition and firearm parts, including firearm frames, receivers, clips and magazines are prohibited in carry-on baggage," TSA rules state.

In 2013 TSA reported it had discovered 1,813 firearms in carry-on bags at checkpoints, an average of five a day, with Atlanta topping the list for most firearms intercepted at 111. TSA reported last week, it had detected more than 2,100 guns at airport checkpoints so far this year, eclipsing the 2013 total. One of 29 loaded guns seized last week was found in Atlanta.

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(Reuters) - Gun related deaths of U.S. law enforcement officers rose by 56 percent in 2014 compared to the previous year, with about one-third of officers killed in an ambush, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund said on Tuesday.

Across the country, 50 officers were killed by guns in 2014 compared to 32 in 2013, according to the website of the non-profit fund, which aims to increase safety for law enforcement officers.

The most deadly states were California, Texas, New York, Florida and Georgia, the group said.

"Fifteen officers were shot and killed in ambush, more than any other circumstance of fatal shootings in 2014," the website said.

The deadly ambush of two New York City policemen as they sat in their squad car in New York on Dec. 20 was a flashpoint in a deepening rift between the city's police department and Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The mayor had expressed qualified support for protests sparked by the deaths of unarmed black men in confrontations with white officers, and said he warned his biracial son of the "dangers he may face" in encountering police officers.

The shooter who killed the two policemen and then himself had written online that he was avenging the deaths of two unarmed black men last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York.

Altogether, 126 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in 2014, a 24 percent increase from 2013, when 102 officers were killed, the fund said.

The number of firearms-related fatalities matches 2012 statistics, when 50 officers were killed by guns," the fund said.

The second most common cause of death for officers in 2014 was traffic-related incidents.

(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York; Editing by Bill Trott)

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(Reuters) - A woman was shot and killed at a Walmart store in northern Idaho on Tuesday and local media reported that the gun went off when her toddler pulled a handgun from her purse and discharged it accidentally.

Lieutenant Stu Miller of the Kootenai County Sheriff's Office said on Twitter that a woman in her late 20s was killed in a shooting at the Walmart in Hayden.

"Prelim investigation shows shooting was accidental," Miller said in a tweet. Hayden is located in Kootenai County, north of Coeur d'Alene.

Miller did not say on Twitter who fired the gun and could not immediately be reached by phone.

Local KREM-TV reported that the woman had been shopping with four children when one of them, who was believed to be about two years old, reached into her purse and grabbed the gun.

Miller said the Walmart was evacuated and closed for the day during an investigation.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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In San Pedro Sula, Honduras last year, 187 were murdered for every 100,000 people. That tragic statistic makes the city the most violent in the world.

The statistic is even more startling when you compare it to Detroit, Michigan, the most dangerous city in the US, which had roughly 48 homicides per 100,000 people last year. 

Gangs, drugs, and poverty plague every day in the South American city of San Pedro Sula. These images show how brutal life there can be.

Drugs have wreaked havoc on Honduras, especially San Pedro Sula. Below, members of Honduras' military police arrange almost 900 pounds of cocaine seized in a container carrying soft drinks coming from Costa Rica in July 2014.

Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Roughly 15% of US-bound cocaine lands in Honduras at some point.

Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

More than half of all cocaine seizures in Central America occur in El Salvador and Honduras, and Honduras' numbers more than tripled between 2010 and 2011. In 2011, San Pedro Sula police discovered the first Mexican-run cocaine lab, shown below, ever found in Central America.

Source: PolicyMic, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

On November 3, 1969, president Richard Nixon addressed the nation, at one point laying out "what has been described as the Nixon Doctrine," a three-point foreign policy "to prevent future Vietnams."

The third of these has cast a long shadow over the US's foreign affairs. Nixon called for the US to "furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments." Instead of losing blood and treasure in tomorrow's wars, Nixon suggested, the US could simply arm its preferred side.

The problem, underscored by the Obama Administration's longstanding hesitance to give guns to secular militants fighting the Assad regime in Syria, is that weapons can fall into the wrong hands, tipping the scales of a conflict in unintended and unforeseen ways.

"Smart guns"— weapons that, through various technical means, become inoperable over time or only fire when in the hands of their intended user — could change that.

Particularly dangerous weapons could be engineered in order to have a short shelf life. An unnamed former national security official in the Bush administration told TIME that "You can build obsolescence into MANPADS," the highly portable, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile launchers built to shoot down aircraft.

Speaking with The Economist, Patrick McCarthy, head of the UN's office on International Small Arms Control Standards, spoke of one mechanism for such a design feature: special chemical propellants in missile-launchers and mortars that break down and become inert over time.

In an article exploring possible solutions to the war in Syria, defense policy expert Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies speculated that weapons could be shut off "in the presence of US and allied forces or civil aircraft" or remain locked behind periodically changing passwords that only the weapons' intended recipients would know.

"These are ideas that I know were raised in DDR&E [design, development, research and engineering] more than 20 years ago," Cordesman, who worked at the Defense Department for much of his career, told Business Insider. "The issue is always how urgent is the need. And it's obvious that while the need may be urgent, it isn't one that anyone is prepared to act upon," he said in reference to the situation surrounding ISIS, the extremist group that has killed thousands in Iraq and Syria.

Given the chaos gripping both countries, the US may have an interest in sending arms to Iraq and Syria that ISIS militants wouldn't be able to use if those weapons were ever captured. During the group's seizure of Mosul in June of 2014, ISIS got its hands on weapons and vehicles that the US had once given to the Iraqi military. If those weapons had been password-protected or otherwise blocked from improper end-use the impact of the Iraqi military's defeat would have been somewhat lessened.

But as Cordesman notes, it's unclear just how much practical interest there is at the moment in making smart guns a part of American foreign policy — assuming this is even desirable.

In a world saturated by GPS-friendly smartphones that can be unlocked with the read of a fingerprint, it's easy to envision smart guns' eventual proliferation. But in reality they're only just beginning to appear and haven't yet proven commercially viable in the US.

Blaine Konow, whose company works to keep a tab on guns' locations thanks to installed chips, thinks that market forces will favor a military and police application for smart guns first. "I'm trying to work with military because civilians, they don't want their guns chipped," Konow said. "Nobody wants that. But as far as military and police, law enforcement, FBI and all that — it'd be beneficial to them."

Smart guns have potential uses for domestic law enforcement. Guns could be locked when they aren't being used, or password protected in case they're stolen or lost. But foreign policy is a far different matter, and not everyone's convinced that the weapons should be introduced into the US's strategies abroad.

A blogger at The Arabist called Cordesman's speculation a "Dr. Strangelove-of-insurgency moment" and argued that smart guns weren't necessarily the route towards more responsible US engagement abroad.

Smart guns might skew policymakers' views of the consequences of their decisions, creating a superficial safety-net that causes problems of its own: "Handy to see Bashar al-Assad go because it hurts Iran?," the Arabist writes. "Give al-Qaeda fighters MANPADs (which are not a hygiene product for men) that can be turned off when they're done wrecking the kind of havoc you don't have too much of a problem with."

Jonathan Mossberg, the CEO of iGun Technology Corporation, points to different problems. His company is working on a smart shotgun which, according to a report by the National Institute of Justice, "could be considered the first personalized firearm to go beyond a prototype to an actual commercializable or production-ready product."

The gun is keyed to a low-frequency chip embedded in a ring using magnetic technology. If you're not wearing it, you can't fire the gun. This could save lives in the US by rendering a stolen firearm — like the one used in the Sandy Hook massacre — inoperable. But that doesn't mean the technology is ideally suited to an arms shipment to a US proxy or ally.

"A lot of guys that talk about this technology and write about it and stuff, they don't know that guns need to be taken apart to be maintained to be reliable," said Mossberg. "Every time you do something to make it more difficult for the bad guy to access it, you make it more difficult for the good guy to make it reliable."

Mossberg isn't skeptical of remote shutdown technology but of the feasibility of scaling that function without the costs being prohibitive.

He also warns that disabled smart guns could be hacked back into functionality, although that's a problem more expensive and higher-quality models could all but eliminate.

Robert McNamara, founder of the Ireland-based company TriggerSmart, agrees. "A gun like that could be dismantled, of course. Any gun can be dismantled ... it's like someone stealing a car, you know. They can take the wheels when they get it to some secret lockup."

But McNamara said it would be possible to build a gun that breaks down if anyone tampers with it.

"If you had the technology built right into the chassis of the gun, into the frame of the gun, you can have what they call acid spills and things like that to destroy them," he told Business Insider. RFID tags are already used in a similar fashion to discourage shoplifting — walk out the store with an item that hasn't had its tag removed, and it will break a small container of ink, ruining the item and marking it as stolen.

Some guns could also be programmed to work only in certain areas. In a military setting, this might reduce the chance of an accident outside a shooting range — or the damage done when a rogue shooter picks up a weapon at the armory.

But these applications are modest compared to limiting a gun's use to a particular city, country, or war zone. Though the smart gun concept might get its trial run with domestic US police, the day in which they're used to selectively arm foreign fighters is probably far off.

The seemingly distant and futuristic character of the technology could lessen the sense of urgency to develop it. And as Cordesman notes, the US isn't very good at assessing its future technological needs in the defense sphere.

"Time and cost are often factors based on estimates of what takes place in peacetime," Cordesman said. "And that is a very poor way of meeting war-time needs." Smarter weapons would need to receive funding and concerted research to see the light of day (DARPA has specified to Business Insider that it is not working on smart weapons).

Cordesman said the common logic was that "we can't get it done, according to the calendar we have set for [a] particular incident. Now, since some of these crises last a decade, the calculation is usually not terribly accurate."

Smart gun use in US policy might be hampered by deficiencies in long-term strategic planning. But few believe the Syrian civil war will end in 2015, or expect that the humanitarian disaster in the country won't brew future conflict. The coming decades might hold no shortage of crises where the technology could be applicable from Washington's perspective.

But there's still the question of whether smart guns would only help elide deeper, more general issues in US policy. There isn't universal agreement on how and whether the US can benefit from arming foreign militias, or if the US and its allies should ever be tinkering with the balance of power in the Middle East.

Smart guns might eventually become a way of allowing the US to arm its allies while keeping usable weapons out of the hands of bad actors. But they're no shortcut towards resolving the larger dilemmas at the heart of US foreign policy.

SEE ALSO: A look at the 'smart guns' that could prevent future tragedies

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US Army weapons officials will not evaluate an improved version of the service's Cold War-era 9mm pistol, choosing instead to search for a more modern soldier sidearm.

In early December, Beretta USA, the maker of the U.S. military's M9 pistol for 30 years, submitted its modernized M9A3 as a possible alternative to the Army's Modular Handgun System program — an effort to replace the M9 with a more powerful, state-of-the-art pistol.

The improved M9 features new sights, a rail for mounting lights and accessories, better ergonomics and improved reliability, Beretta USA officials said.

But by late December, it was all over for Beretta's engineering change proposal for the M9. The Army's Configuration Control Board decided not to evaluate the M9A3, according to a source familiar with the decision.

The move clears the way for the Army to release a pending request for proposal that will launch the MHS competition.

Program Executive Office Soldier would not comment for this story until Army Public Affairs has approved a statement, PEO Soldier spokesman Doug Graham said Thursday night.

The Army began working with the small arms industry on MHS in early 2013, but the joint effort has been in the works for more than five years. If successful, it would result in the Defense Department buying nearly 500,000 new pistols during a period of significant defense-spending reductions.

Current plans call for the Army to purchase more than 280,000 handguns from a single vendor, with delivery of the first new handgun systems scheduled for 2017, according to PEO Soldier officials. The Army also plans to buy approximately 7,000 sub-compact versions of the handgun.

The other military services participating in the MHS program may order an additional 212,000 systems above the Army quantity.

The effort is set to cost at least $350 million and potentially millions more if it results in the selection of a new pistol caliber.

Beretta USA officials said they have not received official notification of the Army's decision.

"Obviously, they didn't take a whole lot of time on this," said Gabriele De Plano, vice president of military marketing and sales for Beretta USA, reacting to the news of the Army's pre-Christmas decision after the M9A3's December 10 unveiling.

Army officials "didn't ask a single question; didn't ask for a single sample" for evaluation, De Plano said.

The Army maintains that the M9 design does not meet the MHS requirement. Soldiers have complained of reliability issues with the M9. One problem has to do with the M9's slide-mounted safety. During malfunction drills, the shooter often engages the lever-style safety by accident, Army weapons officials say.

The M9A3's "over-center safety lever" can be configured to act as a de-cocker, a change that eliminates the accidental safety activation, De Plano said.

As part of the joint requirement process for MHS, Army weapons officials did a "very thorough cost-benefit analysis" that supported the effort, Army weapons officials said. The old fleet of M9s is costing the Army more to replace and repair than to buy a new service pistol, officials said.

The M9A3 is not a perfect pistol, De Plano says, but the Army should at least evaluate it.

The M9 pistol can be "improved for hundreds of millions less than a new MHS pistol," De Plano said. "We can sell them this new pistol for less than the M9 pistol."

Beretta currently has an open contract for M9s that the Army awarded in September 2012 for up to 100,000 pistols. Deliveries of about 20,000 have been scheduled, leaving 80,000 that could be ordered in the M9A3 configuration for less than the cost of the current M9, De Plano said.

"Why not do a dual-path like they have done in other cases," De Plano said.

The Army was determined to do just that when it set out to search for a replacement for the M4 carbine. The service launched a competition to evaluate commercially available carbines while, at the same time, it evaluated improvements to the M4.

In the end, the service scrapped the competition and ended up adopting the M4A1 version used by special operations forces.

"They could explore this," said De Plano, by ordering 10 M9A3s. "What's the downside?"

SEE ALSO: The Pentagon doesn't know how it's going to fund its next generation of submarines

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A California-based company is looking to provide police departments with the ability to know when and where an officer fires a shot or even unholsters a firearm the moment it happens.

Yardarm Technologies' gun censor looks like a small door-stop. At only 2.5 inches in length, the device houses two accelerometers and a magnetometer.

Inserted into the grip of a gun, these instruments can monitor the weapon's movements and can tell when it's fired. And since a chip inside of the sensor is connected to individual officers' phones via Bluetooth, it also puts these developments on a digital map and shares them with other law enforcement officers. That way, police dispatch can get in touch or send back-up immediately once a firearm is discharged.

Thanks to $2 million in angel and seed funding raised in 2013, the company is testing its technology on a dozen guns at a sheriff's office in Santa Cruz County, California and a police department in Carrollton, Texas.

Jim Schaff, the company's VP of marketing, recently showed Business Insider how the Yardarm sensor works in tandem with an airsoft gun and iPad.

Schaff was logged into a user interface that tracks the activities and location of each gun linked with the system. On the left of the display, recent developments were automatically layered at the top of an event feed, with each of them time-stamped down to the second. Schaff pulled the trigger on his airgun. The event "Weapon Fired" popped up on the feed against a red triangle.

On the right, the gun's location was continuously flagged on a map.

To make their electronics accurately report something as dramatic as a gunshot, Yardarm's developers analyzed the recoil that rocks a gun every time it's fired. Accelerometers inside the weapon are tuned to pick up on that kinetic signature.

"We're profiling signatures for different events," Schaff said. Yardarm's field trials are providing further data for which signatures match which actions. Holster, unholster, and fire are the major targets for the device's development. But Yardarm is hoping to add a few additional actions that the system can identify, such as when a weapon is moved away from its armory, reloaded, or handled by a police officer in hot pursuit.

"Foot pursuit's been the big, hairy beast for law enforcement for a long time, right? Because as soon as an officer gets in foot pursuit, they start losing where that officer is," Schaff said. Yardarm's tracking system could solve this problem.

To spare the chip's battery life, the device passively sends an update on its location every ten minutes. But if the profile accompanying hot pursuit were met, a human responder could remotely increase that to every second to stay updated on an officer's movement, said Schaff.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff Phil Wowak retired from the department last month, after 32 years of service. But he's staying on to help bring Yardarm into the organization's day-to-day workflow.

After talks with the company in 2013, Wowak offered his department as a test site for Yardarm's product. That was a few months after Santa Cruz Police Department, one of the four municipal police agencies under the county sheriff's office, saw two of its police officers — detectives in plain clothes — shot and killed while on duty.

For him, Yardarm's service is most useful "as an alarm" signaling dangerous situations to the department's decision-makers.

"This is what we're displaying: the person, the event, the time," Schaff summarized. "We're giving the location. It's all being recorded. So we're keeping a full history," he said.

A gun's history can be important far beyond the scope of real-time events. In the court of law, Yardarm could potentially supply a wealth of forensic information useful for reconstructing incidents like the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last year.

Eventually, Schaff said it's possible Yardarm would have a "somebody struggling for the gun" profile, which was part of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson's narrative of what happened during the incident in which he killed the unarmed Brown, sparking widespread protest.

Even more decisive to corroborating his story would have been the ability to reference the direction Wilson's gun was pointing each time he fired his weapon. That capability is in reach, Schaff said, but not yet with the reliability Yardarm hopes to deliver. It would take a small gyroscope to be able to make the censor capable of providing the information needed to go back and analyze a weapon's direction of fire at professional-level accuracy. Schaff thinks "will be a gen two" capability.

Yardarm's system is at the cutting-edge of technologies that aim to provide exact data to law-enforcement officers while enabling greater accountability for those officers' actions. Body cameras are one high-profile example. Another is a system called ShotSpotter, which uses microphones installed on college campuses (or even entire cities) to pinpoint where gunshots occurred and what type of gun they came from.

Divisive and high-profile cases of police abuse like Michael Brown's killing may spark a push for the technology's adoption. But Schaff also thinks it provides a critical crutch at a time when police forces are still suffering from a post-recession reduction in size.

"When you get a reduction in force, what you have is fewer officers in the field, more officers who are alone in the field; so officer safety becomes a question," Schaff said. "They're offsetting this with technology."

Schaff and Yardarm are also seeking clients in the world of private security, and industry which counts more employees than there are police officers in the United States. In that field, Schaff said, Yardarm might be more useful for employee oversight than security. "At 3:00 in the morning, did a private security officer actually walk patrol?" Schaff asked hypothetically.

Yardarm Technologies is looking to raise another round of funding in the first half of the year and in the next 45 days plans to manufacture one to two hundred test guns from their base of engineering and manufacturing in Alpharetta, Georgia. Purchase and use by law enforcement agencies could come as early as this summer or fall.

SEE ALSO: A look at the "smart guns" that could prevent future tragedies

MORE: How "smart guns" could eventually help shape US foreign policyq

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Marine Corps Special Reaction Teams act as a SWAT force within the military police community. Because of their specialized mission, they sport some pretty sweet gear. This recent Marine Corps photos of the SRT from III Marine Expeditionary Force showed off its kit during a training session at Camp Hansen, Okinawa. Lance Cpl. Royce Dorman and Sgt. Matthew Callahan provide a glimpse of what these teams carry.

Here are the weapon systems used by the Okinawa team, including the M4A1 rifle, the M1014 shotgun, M45A1 pistol, and the M9A1 pistol. The M45A1, a modern version of the classic M1911A1 .45 caliber pistol, is now being issued to special operations-capable units within the Marines like the Special Reaction Teams.

 Special Reaction Teams are tasked with performing close-quarters breaches and entries, and a ballistic shield can help protect the pointman as they enter a room. Also seen here are two pieces of gear not common in the Marine Corps: the olive drab combat uniforms and the Diamondback Tactical plate carriers.

The Modular Integrated Communications helmet, Ops-Core night-vision shroud, and Surefire helmet light he’s sporting are all popular pieces of gear for special operations forces. 

A Marine cleans the upper receiver of an M110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System, the Special Reaction Team’s long-range rifle. 

Christian Beekman is a writer and military enthusiast from northern New York. Follow Christian Beekman on Twitter @tacbeekman.

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Haaretz reports that the unnamed Belgian arms dealer is a "known figure in Brussels' underworld" who turned himself into police in the southern city of Charleroi on Tuesday out of fear.

Earlier, Belgian authorities had detained a man for arms dealing and are investigating whether he supplied one of the Islamist gunmen who together killed 17 people in Paris last week, prosecutors said on Thursday. 

He confessed that he had been in touch with Amedy Coulibaly, the militant who took hostages in a Jewish supermarket in the French capital and was later killed by security forces.

Police searched his home and allegedly found documents relating to negotiations over the sale of arms.

According to police officials, the Scorpion machine gun and the Tokarev handgun used by Coulibaly during his attack on the kosher supermarket, which resulted in the deaths of four Jewish Parisians, came from Brussels and Charleroi.

The man said he also swindled in a car sale, but police later found evidence that the two had been negotiating the sale of ammunition for a 7.62 mm caliber firearm. 

Bullets of this caliber are needed for the Tokarev pistol that Coulibaly used in his attack on the supermarket in Paris, where he killed four hostages, and possibly in the shooting and injuring of a jogger two days earlier.

"The man is being held by the judge in Charleroi on suspicion of arms dealing," a spokesman for Belgium's federal prosecution said. "Further investigations will have to show whether there is a link with the events in Paris," he added.

The Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers used by the Kouachi brothers in the Charlie Hebdo attack, which killed 12, were purchased by Coulibaly near the Gare du Midi in Brussels for less than  $5,867 (€5,000/£3,870), The Telegraph reports.

Earlier this week, Al Qaeda in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, saying the assault on the paper's offices was ordered by the Islamist militant group's leadership, according to a video posted on YouTube. Those claims have met scrutiny.

The search continues for France's most-wanted woman, Hayat Boumeddienne, Coulibaly’s common-law wife, who is believed to have crossed the border to Spain to fly from Istanbul, where she later crossed into Syria.

Police suspect she might have had a hand in Coulibaly's supermarket hostage-taking, though she was not identified among the dead or wounded, AFP reports.

The couple lived in a modest apartment in a poor suburb south of Paris.

Boumeddienne reportedly accompanied Coulibaly several times to a forest in southern France to shoot a crossbow. Le Monde published several photos of the couple holding up the weapon, with Boumeddienne wearing her niqab.

A court in Antwerp is due to deliver its verdict on 46 people accused of recruiting young men to join jihadists or of becoming jihadists in Syria, Belgium's largest Islamist militant trial to date. The court was to have given its verdict this week, but it was delayed for a month after the Paris violence.

SEE ALSO: 2 Killed And 1 Arrested In Belgian Anti-Terror Raid

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Archaeologists conducting a survey in Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada have stumbled upon a 132-year-old Winchester rifle propped against a tree, possibly having been left there more than a century ago.

The rifle, which records show was manufactured and shipped by the gun maker in 1882, had been leaning against the Juniper tree for so long that the wood of its stock was cracked and deteriorated from the desert sun, its barrel rusted.

"It really is a mystery," said Nichole Andler, a public information officer for Great Basin National Park. "We know it has been out there awhile because the stock was buried in dirt. But we do not know for how exactly how long."

Andler said more than 700,000 Winchester Model 1783 rifles were manufactured by the company between 1873 and 1916, becoming known as the "gun that won the West" because of its popularity.

The remote, rugged area now encompassed by the park, in the high desert of eastern Nevada near the Utah border, was used primarily for mining and ranching at the time the rifle was sold.

Great Basin National Park was established there in 1986, known for its 5,000-year-old pine trees and other desert flora and fauna.

So far experts have not been able to establish who purchased the gun or where it has been in the 132 years since.

It was first spotted in November by a member of a park archaeology team surveying the area and Andler said it might have been overlooked in the past because the gray stock of the wood blended in with the tree.

Andler said the rifle would be conserved by experts to keep it from deteriorating any further but not be restored to newer-looking condition before it is put on display at the park.

(Editing by Will Dunham)

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For 2o years Russians were equipped with a triple-barreled gun with a swing-out machete for space missions.

The TP-82 pistol was included in the Soyuz Portable Emergency-Survival Kit after two cosmonauts crash-landed into a forest in Siberia in 1965. They struggled to hunt prey, build shelter, and send a distress signal and thus, the "space gun" was born to shoot rifle bullets, shotgun shells, and flares.

During flight, the gun is stowed in a metal canister and if all goes well, the canister is never opened, NBC News space analyst James Oberg reports. "At the end of the mission, after landing, the gun is usually presented as a gift to the Soyuz spacecraft commander," Oberg reports.

Astronomer Matija Cuk at Harvard University explains that the only difference between shooting a gun on Earth and in space is that the bullet will keep traveling forever. "The bullet will never stop, because the universe is expanding faster than the bullet can catch up with any serious amount of mass," Cuk told LiveScience.

Astronomer Peter Schultz at Brown University also notes that in space you could technically shoot yourself in the back.

"For example, while in orbit around a planet, because objects orbiting planets are actually in a constant state of free fall, you have to get the setup just right. You'd have to shoot horizontally at just the right altitude for the bullet to circle the planet and fall back to where it started (you)," Shultz told LiveScience.

Russia replaced the gun with the semi-automatic Makarov pistol because all the in-stock ammunition for the TP-82 had expired.

While the conjoined gun-machete no longer exists in the Soyuz portable emergency-survival kit, an individual gun and machete are still included.

Here is a look at some of the item in the Russian survival kit: 

SEE ALSO: The 10 Most Incredible Weapon Systems Used By The Russian Army

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Nearly 200,000 Texas women hold licenses to carry a concealed handgun, and the number of licenses issued to women has tripled in the last four years.

While their reasons for packing heat vary, one thing is for sure: These women won't hesitate to pull the trigger if their, or a loved one's, life depends on it.

Photographer Shelley Calton is one of them. In an effort to document and elucidate women's roles in modern gun culture, Carlton took portraits women in her native Lone Star State for her book "Concealed: She's Got a Gun."

You can buy the book in Europe in March and in the US in September, or preorder it on her website.

For some heat-packing women in Texas, carrying a concealed handgun is not only their right but a matter of life or death.

State law permits them to hold a handgun if it is hidden — worn on the body or tucked away in a glovebox or purse, as below — and provided that they secure a license through the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Source: Texas Department of Public Safety

More women are packing heat than ever before. The number of women who applied for a concealed handgun license, or CHL, tripled in the last four years, with 67,000 licenses issued in 2014 alone.

Source: Texas Department of Public Safety

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