Lifeboat Foundation

The new tactics and operating concepts will draw on three years of Syrian operations.

The Russian military is gathering proposed tactics, techniques and procedures for using robots in urban and coastal combat, the RiaNovosti state news agency said Sunday.

The defense ministry has asked various military-industrial enterprises to provide proposals for review by early next year to the military’s Combined Arms Academy. The initiative is meant to address “the virtual absence of a unified concept for the use of military robotics by the Russian armed forces,” the Russian agency wrote.

An intelligence startup warns that China is exploiting Western quantum scientists for military ends. The evidence is thin, but tensions are rising.

Future armies could be made up of half-human half-machine cyborgs with infrared sight, ultrasonic hearing and super strength, equipped with mind-controlled weapons.

In a US Army report, experts from Devcom — the Combat Capabilities Development Command — outlined a number of possible future technologies that could be used to enhance soldiers on the battlefield by 2050.

It is the dream of every molecular geneticist: an easy-to-use program that compares datasets from different cellular conditions, identifies enhancer regions and then assigns them to their target genes. A research team led by Martin Vingron at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin has now developed a program that does all of this.

“DNA is pretty boring, since it is practically the same in every cell,” says Martin Vingron, director and head of the Department of Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. “While the genome is like the book of life, I am most interested in the side notes.”

These “notes” are small chemical marks attached to the DNA molecule that do not alter the genetic information itself, but influence what happens to the DNA at the respective site. In other words, these marks have an epigenetic effect. They serve as regulators of genomic regions that are responsible for the activation and deactivation of genes, such as promoters and enhancers.

The military is particularly keen on giving soldiers the ability to control drones with their minds.

[Editor’s Note: Mad Science Laboratory is pleased to excerpt below the Executive Summary from a DoD Biotechnologies for Health and Human Performance Council (BHPC) study group report entitled, Cyborg Soldier 2050: Human/Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD. This report, authored by Peter Emanuel, Scott Walper, Diane DiEuliis, Natalie Klein, James B. Petro, and James Giordano (proclaimed Mad Scientist); and published by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center (CCDC CBC), culminates a year-long assessment to forecast and evaluate the military implications of machines that are physically integrated with the human body to augment and enhance human performance over the next 30 years. This report summarizes this assessment and findings; identifies four potential military-use cases for new technologies in this area; and makes seven recommendations on how the U.S. should proceed regarding human/machine enhancement technologies. Enjoy!]

A DoD BHPC study group surveyed a wide range of current and emerging technologies relevant to assisting and augmenting human performance in many domains. The team used this information to develop a series of vignettes as case studies for discussion and analysis including feasibility; military application; and ethical, legal, and social implication (ELSI) considerations.

Continue reading “Cyborg Soldier 2050: Human/Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD” »

The US Navy has awarded Boeing contracts worth a total of $274.4m to produce five Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs). Based on Boeing’s Echo Voyager prototype UUV, the 15.5m-long submersible could be used for mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, electronic warfare and strike missions. Berenice Baker finds out more.

An asteroid estimated to be around the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza may hit the Earth on May 6, 2022, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Despite the one in 3,800 odds — a measly 0.026% chance — of the asteroid smashing into the Earth, the worst-case scenario will surely be of a scene akin to the climax of an apocalypse movie, or even worse, as per NASA via The Daily Express on Nov. 16.

If the “city-killer” asteroid, labeled JF1, is to hit Earth, the impact would be equivalent to the detonation of 230 kilotons of TNT. That is 15 times stronger than the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima in 1945, which destroyed the whole city with 15 kilotons of force.

The Russian military will be going all out sci-fi, with Vladimir Putin saying the plan for boosting the Armed Forces until 2033 should focus on AI and weapons based on ‘new physical principles.’

With the introduction of a whole range of state-of-the-art arms in recent years, Russia has been “able to make a step forward compared to the world’s other military powers,” Putin said during a meeting of the Russian Security Council on Friday.

Continue reading “Drones, robots, lasers, supersonic gliders & other high-tech arms: Putin wants Russian military to be up to any future challenge” »