Lifeboat Foundation

US Government may have discovered a new method of safely getting rid of old chemical and other old stockpile weapons.

Getting rid of chemical weapons is one of the military’s most unpleasant duties. But in the future, it may be no more difficult than incinerating garbage, thanks to a team of DARPA-funded scientists who think they can turn some of the world’s deadliest poisons into harmless dirt.

Chemical weapons, including nerve agents and mustards, have been banned under international law since the 1990s, but many countries still harbor large stockpiles. In 2013, a horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria—called the Ghouta attack —claimed hundreds of civilian lives, prompting the international community to intervene and eliminate the country’s chemical weapons reserves. By August 2014, 600 metric tons of deadly weapons had been destroyed (in the military parlance, “demilitarized”) aboard the US Navy vessel MV Cape Ray.

Continue reading “DARPA Has a Simple Plan to Clean Up the World’s Deadliest Weapons” »

Coming clean on the story around the XS-1 Spaceplane. Hmmm; US Government coming clean; really?

ORLANDO, Fla. – Here’s a phrase that’s not repeated everyday in the space community:

“You’ve heard Elon’s comments … we want to go beyond that,” Brad Tousley, the head of the tactical technology office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said May 15.

Continue reading “Why DARPA Is Pursuing the Reusable Military XS-1 Spaceplane” »

Cold Fusion is gaining interest again.

A powerful committee is demanding a report on the technology by the Secretary of Defense.

Ramping up for US Fed. government contract season with DARPA.

DARPA is working to get troops high-tech tools that see beyond walls and automatically provide targets, among other emerging technologies.

Are you tired of your poor selections for political leaders? Maybe you like a new type of government all together. If so, well do I have the story for you. It’s their e-Government as a Service.

If the United Arab Emirates has a minister for happiness (and it does), then why can’t a country have a CIO? Taavi Kotka sees no reason why not and he has been chief information officer for the Estonian government since 2013. Kotka is working to help the country attempt to achieve what it calls a ‘sustained march towards modernity’. The new Estonia wants to be a sort of ‘start-up nation’ with a new digital infrastructure to deliver public and private services.

But E-government (or eGovernment if you prefer) is nothing new, so what makes Estonia worth the E value and is it doing anything radically different?

Continue reading “Estonia Offers Virtual Government E-Residency To Anyone” »

A new underwater GPS.

For all the benefits that the Global Positioning System provides to landlubbers and surface ships, GPS signals can’t penetrate seawater and therefore can’t be used by oceangoing vehicles like submarines or UUVs. That’s why DARPA is creating an acoustic navigation system, dubbed POSYDON (Positioning System for Deep Ocean Navigation), and has awarded the Draper group with its development contract.

The space-based GPS system relies on a constellation of satellites that remain in a fixed position relative to the surface of the Earth. The GPS receiver in your phone or car’s navigation system triangulates the signals it receives from those satellites to determine your position. The POSYDON system will perform the same basic function, just with sound instead. The plan is to set up a small number of long-range acoustic sources that a submarine or UUV could use to similarly triangulate its position without having to surface.

Continue reading “DARPA is building acoustic GPS for submarines and UUVs” »

I love contract season with the US Government because you get to see all of the cool projects being awarded.

CAMBRIDGE, MA — The U.S. military’s unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) depend on stealth as they conduct surveillance and reconnaissance and other missions in the deep oceans. With Global Positioning System (GPS) signals unable to penetrate the ocean’s surface, these UUVs can rely on inertial sensors to provide acceptable positioning information during short missions. On longer missions, however, inertial sensors accumulate error, forcing the vehicles to risk exposing themselves to enemies as they periodically surface to obtain a GPS fix.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is addressing this issue by funding the development of a small number of acoustic transmitters that can be anchored to fixed locations around ocean basins to serve as an undersea navigation constellation, according to a May 10 release by the Cambridge-based nonprofit company Draper.

Continue reading “Draper Gets DARPA Contract to Improve Stealth Capabilities for Undersea Vehicles” »

My new article on how some technologies will inevitably make the government smaller:

However, there’s reason to believe that in the near future, government might dramatically shrink—not because of demands by fiscally astute Americans, but because of radical technology.

Indubitably, millions of government jobs will soon be replaced by robots. Even the US President could one day be replaced, which—strangely enough—might bring sanity to our election process.

Continue reading “Technology Will Replace the Need for Big Government” »

I personally can confirm that QC is not being worked on and advance by just a couple groups such as D-Wave and IBM. The questions/bumps in the road that we will all face is threefold:

1) how do we standardize the QC? right now (like most innovation) is done in siloes and limited cross-collaboration across government, labs & universities, and commercial companies. 2) governance and compliance; how will these need to change across multiple areas 3) id & mitigate all impacts instead of after deployment (don’t be reactive) because we will not have that luxury due to hackers.

There is a temptation to lump quantum computing in with technologies such as fusion power in the sense that both have been proposed for decades with the promise of tremendous leaps in performance.

Continue reading “Researchers Making Progress With Quantum Computing” »