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Archive for the ‘military’ category: Page 219

Dec 2, 2018

Harvard Scientists to Release Sun-Dimming Sky Chemical in 2019

Posted by in categories: climatology, engineering, military, sustainability

Critics say that geoengineering efforts are Band-Aid solutions that treat the symptoms of climate change instead of the cause: global carbon emissions. Jim Thomas, the co-executive director of an environmental advocacy organization called the ETC Group, told Nature that he fears the Harvard project could push the concept of geoengineering into the mainstream.

But advocates say that anything that could buy some extra time in the face of looming climate catastrophe is worth exploring.

“I’m studying a chemical substance,” Harvard researcher Zhen Dai told Nature. “It’s not like it’s a nuclear bomb.”

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Dec 2, 2018

Astronaut says a neglected telescope is NASA’s best chance of defending Earth from ‘city killer’ asteroids — ‘for God’s sake, fund it’

Posted by in categories: asteroid/comet impacts, existential risks, government, military

Killer asteroids might be a bigger threat than you think.


  • Small asteroids can strike Earth with the force of many nuclear weapons and destroy entire cities.
  • A small fraction of such asteroids is estimated to have been found, but NASA is supposed to find 90% of them by 2020.
  • Retired astronaut Rusty Schweickart says a relatively inexpensive space telescope, called the Near-Earth Object Camera, could find these space rocks — and quickly.
  • NASA has denied full funding to NEOCam multiple times because the agency’s mission selection process is weighted against the telescope.
  • NEOCam’s supporters say the telescope needs just $40 million more in NASA’s budget to launch into space.
  • It’s up to President Trump and Congress to raise NASA’s budget enough to support the mission.

A former NASA astronaut says the agency he used to work for has a duty to protect civilians from killer asteroids, but that it isn’t meeting that obligation.

The threat of asteroid strikes might seem as abstract as outer space itself. But the risk, while infrequent, is real — and potentially more deadly than the threat posed by some of the most powerful nuclear weapons ever detonated.

Continue reading “Astronaut says a neglected telescope is NASA’s best chance of defending Earth from ‘city killer’ asteroids — ‘for God’s sake, fund it’” »

Nov 29, 2018

Machine learning, meet quantum computing

Posted by in categories: military, quantum physics, robotics/AI

Back in 1958, in the earliest days of the computing revolution, the US Office of Naval Research organized a press conference to unveil a device invented by a psychologist named Frank Rosenblatt at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. Rosenblatt called his device a perceptron, and the New York Times reported that it was “the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence.”

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Nov 29, 2018

Telesat wins study contract for DARPA’s experimental constellation

Posted by in categories: business, military, satellites

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded satellite operator Telesat a contract to study the use of commercial buses in the agency’s experimental low-Earth-orbit constellation program known as Blackjack.

Telesat of Ottawa, Canada, is the third company to receive a study contract for Blackjack, a DARPA demonstration mission that envisions deploying 20 satellites — each carrying one or more payloads. DARPA’s goal is to find lower cost alternatives to traditional military satellites. DARPA aims to pay no more than $6 million per satellite, including launch. European satellite manufacturer Airbus Defence and Space and small satellite manufacturer Blue Canyon Technologies of Boulder, Colorado, received similar contracts over the past four weeks.

Telesat’s contract, which the company announced Nov. 27, is a 12-month study to assess the utility of Telesat buses as the company refines its plans for a constellation of roughly 300 small, broadband satellites. Telesat has yet to select a manufacturer for its satellites. Two contenders, Airbus Defence and Space and a team formed by Thales Alenia Space and Maxar Technologies, are competing to build an unspecified number of satellites. Michael Schwartz, Telesat’s senior vice president of corporate and business development said the company still plans to down select a manufacturer in the spring.

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Nov 29, 2018

Reinventing Drug Discovery and Development for Military Needs

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, military

Flying at 50,000 feet, diving deep in the ocean, or hiking for miles with gear through extreme climates, military service members face conditions that place unique burdens on their individual physiology. The potential exists to develop pharmacological interventions to help service members complete their toughest missions more safely and efficiently, and then recover more quickly and without adverse effects, but those interventions must work on complex physiological systems in the human body. They will not be realized under the prevailing system of drug discovery and development with its focus on engaging single molecular targets. DARPA created the Panacea program to pursue the means of rapidly discovering, designing, and validating new, multi-target drugs that work with the body’s complexity to better support the physiological resilience and recovery of military service members.

The premise of Panacea is that the physiological systems of the human body work in complex and highly integrated ways. Drugs exert effects on our bodies by physically interacting with and changing the functional state of biomolecules that govern the functions of cells and tissues. Most drugs target proteins, which are the principle cellular workhorses. Ideally, drugs would target multiple proteins simultaneously to exert precise, network-level effects.

One major problem facing the drug development community is that the functional proteome — the complete collection of proteins and their roles in signaling networks — is largely dark to science. Despite being able to identify many of the proteins within a cell, researchers do not have a firm grasp on everything those proteins do and how they interact to affect physiology.

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Nov 28, 2018

Microsoft Wins $480 Million Army Battlefield Contract

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, military

The military plans to purchase as many as 100,000 HoloLens augmented reality devices.

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Nov 27, 2018

World War II fighter plane flown

Posted by in category: military

An extremely rare World War II Spitfire fighter plane flown by a pilot who later took part in the “Great Escape” has been recovered from a remote Norwegian mountainside.

Specially equipped for long-range reconnaissance, the Royal Air Force Spitfire AA810 was shot down on March 5, 1942, during a mission to photograph the German battleship Tirpitz. The Spitfire’s pilot, Flt. Lt. Alastair ‘Sandy’ Gunn, bailed out from the plane but was captured by German forces. In 1944 he was part of the famous “Great Escape” breakout from the Stalag Luft III POW camp. Recaptured shortly after the breakout, the Scot was among 50 escapees executed by the Gestapo.

Gunn’s plane was a specially adapted Mk 1 Spitfire stripped of guns and armor and fitted with additional fuel tanks to extend its range from 575 miles to nearly 2,000 miles.

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Nov 26, 2018

From Fog of War to Flames of Peace–Wildfires Surge in Post-FARC Colombia

Posted by in category: military

The end of guerrilla warfare has led to an increase in woodland conflagrations and deforestation.

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Nov 14, 2018

Twenty-First Century Warfare: Secret and Silent Frequency Wars

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, internet, military, mobile phones

It’s imperative that Humanity understands the reality of warfare in these times when advanced and secret technologies are used against us on a daily basis.

From WiFi and cell phone frequencies to televisions and microwave ovens on up to the most exotic sonic weapons—it’s all disruptive and even lethal to the Human body and mind.

Because these weapons are silent and invisible, the war-loving aspects of society have been able to experiment with these methods for decades but the time for secrecy and these covert attacks on the life on our planet has come to an end.

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Nov 14, 2018

The Future of Flight: AI in the Cockpit

Posted by in categories: drones, military, robotics/AI

The U.S. military is investing billions of dollars each year in developing autonomous technologies that could enable planes, helicopters and drones to fly into some of the world’s most dangerous places, without a human pilot.


AI-empowered systems may soon allow autonomous flying machines to reduce the number of pilots and soldiers working in high-risk environments. Could these flying robots also be firing weapons? WSJ’s Jason Bellini reports, in the latest episode of Moving Upstream.

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