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Category: government – Page 225

DARPA Has a Simple Plan to Clean Up the World’s Deadliest Weapons

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.

The Ghouta attack highlighted two things: one, that the world would be a better place if we could annihilate all chemical weapons. Two, that we really don’t have a safe method of doing so. “The Cape Ray did a great job achieving its objective, which was to demilitarize Syria’s chemical weapons,” said Dr. Tyler McQuade, a chemist and program manager at DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “The downside is, the weapons had to be transported a long distance, and we did the demilitarization on the Mediterranean. If anything had gone wrong, it could have been really horrible for the local environment.”

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Why DARPA Is Pursuing the Reusable Military XS-1 Spaceplane

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.

Elon, of course, is Elon Musk, the optimistic, and some say visionary, founder of SpaceX with plans of eventually colonizing Mars. After landing three first-stage rockets, Musk has said SpaceX would inspect the rockets with plans to later re-fly most of them. [DARPA’s XS-1 Military Space Plane Concept in Pictures].

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Estonia Offers Virtual Government E-Residency To Anyone

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?

Kotka insists that digitization is changing the mechanisms of citizen political involvement, public administration and democracy itself. This is not still news though i.e. groups like the Maker Movement and Code For America have been championing personal individual involvement in public services for some time now.

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DARPA is building acoustic GPS for submarines and UUVs

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.

The system should be ready for sea trials by 2018. It will initially be utilized exclusively for military and government operations but, like conventional GPS before it, will eventually be opened up to civilians as well.

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Draper Gets DARPA Contract to Improve Stealth Capabilities for Undersea Vehicles

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.

By measuring its range to multiple signals emanating from known coordinates, an undersea vehicle can operate continuously with accurate navigation information without needing to surface for GPS fixes or to use high cost inertial systems that are typical of current UUVs. DARPA awarded a contract on March 15 to a Draper-led team to begin development of a solution for the Positioning System for Deep Ocean Navigation (POSYDON).

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Technology Will Replace the Need for Big Government

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.

But it’s not just robots, it’s software programs and weird new tech that will do the replacing. Consider the over 1 million firefighters, a staple part of American government that also represents the ideal of service and career to one’s country. Companies around the world are now building fireproof everything, including couches, furniture, and building materials that simply don’t burn well. And intelligent robots—which I think will be in 50 percent of American households within five years time—will all have fire and carbon monoxide detectors.

In fact, I’m certain many in-home robots will not only be loaded with numerous security alert systems (like intruder alarms, flood warnings, and the ability to detect snakes, scorpions, and spiders) but will also be able to fix problems that occur. It’s likely in just a few years time, in-home robots costing less than a $1,000 dollars will know how to put out a fire with an extinguisher, turn off a flooding bathtub, or squish a black widow.

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Researchers Making Progress With Quantum Computing

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.

Whilst fusion power continues to frustrate, there are signs of real progress being made in quantum computing. There is barely a tech giant in the world that doesn’t have dedicated teams working on the topic, and these teams are beginning to bring quantum computing out of the lab and into the real world.

At the forefront of this is IBM, who recently announced that they would connect up a quantum computer to the web and allow us to play with it. The project involves a 5 qubit machine, with a qubit allowing it to operate in both ‘0 and 1’ states at the same time, thus increasing its potential computational power enormously. A one qubit machine has roughly 16 possible states, but once you get over 300, you begin to exceed the number of atoms in the universe.

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Materialise CEO on medical 3D Printing

I do love and believe in the benefits of 3D printing; however, as a technologist and concerned informed citizen I do worry about this technology getting the hands of drug lords, terrorists, and other criminals. With Medical 3D printing; illegal drug manufacturing can change overnight and expanded to new levels of mass production. Also, illegal weapon production can be enhanced as well with 3D printing.

At this point, law enforcement in 1st and 2nd world countries are going to face harder times than they ever have in the recent past and before. 3D Printing and AI are truly going to take an already difficult situation for government and their law enforcement teams extremely tough in the coming 3 to 5 years; and hope they and tech come together to figure out a good go forward plan to ensure right benefits are received and progress not slowed down while keeping everyone safe.

Materialise incorporates more than 25 years of 3D printing experience into a range of software solutions and 3D printing services, which together form the backbone of the 3D printing industry. Materialise’s open and flexible solutions enable players in a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, automotive, aerospace, art and design, and consumer goods, to build innovative 3D printing applications that aim to make the world a better and healthier place.

Fried Vancraen, CEO of Materialise – recently called upon industry stakeholders to come to an agreement for a common standard for measuring the clinical, economical and patient benefits of medical 3D printing.

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