Lifeboat Foundation

DARPA’s effort to track undersea life’s behavior as a means to detect enemy submarines has just entered its second phase. In the first phase, DARPA’s Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS) program sought to prove that sea life would respond to the presence of a submarine in a measurable way. With that seemingly confirmed, the second stage of the program will focus on developing sensors that can identify that behavior and relay a warning back to manned locations aboard a ship or onshore.

While the science is complex, the premise behind the PALS program is fairly simple. Undersea life tends to behave in a certain way when it senses the presence of a large and foreign object like a submarine. By broadly tracking the behavior of sea life, PALS aims to measure and interpret that behavior to make educated guesses about what must be causing it. In other words, by constantly tracking the behavior of nearby wildlife, PALS sensors can notice a significant change, compare it to a library of known behaviors, and predict a cause… like an enemy submarine, even if a submarine was stealthy enough to otherwise evade detection.

With enough data about how animals react to the presence of an enemy vessel as compared to how animals react to the presence of a large predator or more common undersea threat, PALS could serve as an early warning system when enemy subs approach.

Samsung and Stanford have developed a 10,000PPI OLED screen that could lead to completely seamless VR displays.

Seagate’s first HAMR drives will feature a whopping 20TB capacity when they debut later this year.

The hugely expensive TV will go on sale in select premium electronics stores throughout South Korea.

“The SPEAR flight demonstrator will provide the F/A-18 Super Hornet and carrier strike group with significant improvements in range and survivability against advanced threat defensive systems,” Mercer, the firm’s SPEAR program manager, added.

Very-long-range, high-speed strike weapons could be very valuable for the Navy’s carrier air wings, especially as potential near-peer adversaries, such as China and Russia, continue to develop and field increasingly longer-range and otherwise more capable surface-to-air missile systems and associated radars and other sensors. Aircraft carriers and their associated strike groups and air wings are also increasingly at risk from various anti-access and area-denial capabilities, further underscoring the need for weapons with greater range and that are able to prosecute targets faster to help ensure their survival.

Continue reading “Navy Hires Boeing To Develop A Very Fast And Long-Range Strike Missile Demonstrator” »

A very high speed camera.

Wang’s newest camera called, which has the wordy moniker “single-shot stereo-polarimetric compressed ultrafast photography” (SP-CUP), builds on previous iterations that were capable of shooting at even faster rates, some of them capable of shooting up to 70 trillion frames per second.

But what the new Caltech camera brings to the table is its ability to perceive the world more like humans can. The human eye’s depth perception relies on there being two of them — and the new rig can pull off the same stereoscopic trick.

Continue reading “Ultra-Speed Caltech Camera Films Light Moving Through Space in 3D” »

Circa 2016

Scribble Pen is a smart pen that lets you draw in any color simply objects by scanning them with its built in color sensor.

As drones become better and better at everything they do, it’s only natural photographers and videographers alike start pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. This particular boundary push is not for the faint of heart, however. I’m reasonably new to the drone world. While I’d been keen to dip a toe for a long time, I had been waiting for commercial applications to justify the acquisition. Thankfully, I found a window and jumped right through it.