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Category: military

New Wright-Patt supercomputer calculates in a day what would take average laptop 500 years

Wright Patterson Air Force Base has a new advanced problem solver for future military systems and weapons. It’s called the Flyer, named in honor of Wilbur and Orville Wright and their research in aerodynamics.

The Flyer is the Pentagon’s latest supercomputer. It has more than 186,000 cores able to process millions of advanced calculations in a few seconds.

David Shahady, deputy director of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Digital Capabilities Directorate, equated the abilities of this unit to a pop-culture sci-fi character.

AI isn’t a dual-use technology, it is inherently violent

When the Pentagon branded Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei “a liar with a god complex” over fears that his company’s AI could be used for weapons and surveillance, it exposed a deeper truth: the boundary between civilian and military technology no longer exists. The same systems that power translation, logistics, and digital assistants can just as easily identify targets or manipulate populations. Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis argue that today’s AI is not simply “dual use” — it is inherently violent in design. Adaptive, autonomous, and globally networked, these machines fuse daily life with geopolitics, making peace itself a fading abstraction.

Drones have become an uncanny threat—not least in the wake of the cost of human life and the degrees of suffering and destruction they have inflicted in Russia’s war on Ukraine. In many European countries they have been sighted near critical infrastructure or military sites, either used for reconnaissance or sabotage, at times causing major disruptions in civilian air travel. Drones unsettle a population that is fearful and weary of the brutality of war at their doorstep. They have become a major element to what is labelled hybrid warfare, fought beyond the conventional ways of violence.

But this is not the whole picture. For years, drones have also been envisioned as a technology that bears the potential of bringing about major changes for the better: more efficient disaster relief, medical supply chains reaching even the remotest areas, optimized logistics or transportation. Drones also introduced a new visual – bird’s-eye-aesthetic of how to see the world.

David Brin: What’s Important Isn’t Me. And It Isn’t You. It’s Us!

David Brin warned us. In 1989.

Global warming. Cyberwarfare. The World Wide Web, named in a novel before most people had ever heard of it.

I recorded this conversation with him 14 years ago. Astrophysicist. Hugo and Nebula winner. The mind behind the Uplift novels and Existence.

We dug into the most powerful form of science fiction. Not the prophecy that comes true. The prophecy that prevents itself. Orwell’s 1984 is the classic case. The warning so loud the future course-corrects.

We also went straight at #transparency. His book asks a question that hits harder now than it did then: will technology force us to choose between #privacy and freedom? Fourteen years on, with AI watching everything, that question is no longer hypothetical.

And then there is the line from David that I have never been able to shake.

Continue reading “David Brin: What’s Important Isn’t Me. And It Isn’t You. It’s Us!” | >

Fusion reactors could be monitored for covert plutonium production

In the next few decades, many physicists are hopeful that nuclear fusion could become a realistic source of practically limitless energy. But before this can happen, it will be critical to ensure that reactors cannot be covertly misused to produce materials for nuclear weapons.

Through new analysis published in Physical Review Applied, a team led by Patrick Huber at Virginia Tech has shown that an existing type of particle detector could be used to flag any such misuse.

US Army’s breakthrough sensor to pinpoint radio signals on battlefield

US Army scientists have demonstrated a new quantum sensor that can measure the full 3D direction of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields, a milestone that could reshape how signals are detected on the battlefield.

The breakthrough was achieved by scientists at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory.

According to the researchers, the sensor could improve situational awareness, strengthen secure communications, and help soldiers make faster, better-informed decisions in complex battlefield environments.

E= mc^2

Einstein’s famous equation has grown into one of the great symbols of the 20th century. It is the one equation in science that people recognize, if any is. It has a kind of iconic status and dual connotations: the brilliance and insight of Einstein and the darkness of atomic bombs. Images.

The basic idea behind the formula E=mc2 is easy to state. Mass and energy are really just the same thing. At first that seems impossible.

• Mass is a measure of the quantity of stuff and manifests as a resistance to acceleration. A body with little mass, like a pebble, is easy to set in motion.

From Supernova Physics to Fusion Energy: The Laser Experiments Changing Science — Dr. Mario Manuel

Fusion energy is no longer just science fiction — it’s becoming experimental reality. Dr. Mario Manuel, Ph.D. — General Atomics.

What if we could recreate the inside of a star — not in theory, but inside a laboratory on Earth using the world’s most powerful lasers?

Dr. Mario Manuel, Ph.D. is a plasma physicist and laser-science researcher at whose work sits at the frontier of fusion energy, laboratory astrophysics, high-energy-density physics, and advanced laser diagnostics. Trained in applied plasma physics and aerospace engineering, Dr. Manuel has spent his career developing new ways to visualize and understand the extreme electromagnetic environments created when ultra-powerful lasers interact with matter.

Dr. Manuel’s research has spanned some of the most ambitious scientific efforts underway today — from inertial fusion energy and plasma-instability control to recreating supernova-like shock waves in the laboratory and generating ultra-intense gamma-ray and particle beams using petawatt-class lasers.

Early in his career, Dr. Manuel helped pioneer advanced proton-radiography techniques capable of imaging invisible electric and magnetic fields inside laser-produced plasmas, work that opened new windows into the turbulent physics that can either enable or destroy fusion reactions.

Continue reading “From Supernova Physics to Fusion Energy: The Laser Experiments Changing Science — Dr. Mario Manuel” | >

Russian satellites linked to mysterious GPS disruptions across several countries

Since 2019, GPS signals across Europe, Greenland and Canada have experienced a huge spike in sudden, widespread signal blackouts. These have resulted in disruptions and degraded performance in navigation systems that airplanes and ships rely on to travel safely.

Some causes are known, such as military jamming on the ground, but others have been a total mystery. A new paper published on the arXiv preprint server points an accusatory finger at Russia, claiming that a constellation of Russian satellites is likely responsible for many of these interference events, which have been blasting out waves of radio static from space.

The study focuses on how these events affected the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) that GPS relies on. The researchers studied 75 separate days on which at least one major interference event occurred.

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