I found this on NewsBreak: NASA accuses China of ‘hiding military projects’ in space as it warns of ‘extraordinary strides’
NASA administrator Bill Nelson has warned the US is in a space race with China and fears the East Asian powerhouse will land on the moon by the end of the decade.
The U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were finalists for the 2023 Robert J. Collier Trophy, a formal acknowledgement of recent breakthroughs that have launched the machine-learning era within the aerospace industry. The teams worked together to test breakthrough executions in artificial intelligence algorithms using the X-62A VISTA aircraft as part of DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program. In less than a calendar year the teams went from the initial installation of live AI agents into the X-62A’s systems, to demonstrating the first AI versus human within-visual-range engagements, otherwise known as a dogfight. In total, the team made over 100,000 lines of flight-critical software changes across 21 test flights. Dogfighting is a highly complex scenario that the X-62A utilized to successfully prove using non-deterministic artificial intelligence safely is possible within aerospace.
“The X-62A is an incredible platform, not just for research and advancing the state of tests, but also for preparing the next generation of test leaders. When ensuring the capability in front of them is safe, efficient, effective and responsible, industry can look to the results of what the X-62A ACE team has done as a paradigm shift,” said Col. James Valpiani, commandant of the Test Pilot School.
I found this on NewsBreak: The big idea: are we about to discover a new force of nature?
Intriguingly, both disciplines are grappling with unexplained results that could be pointing to the existence of a new force of nature. If such a new force were to be confirmed, the implications for our understanding of the universe, its history and makeup would be profound.
There are four forces that we already know about. Gravity governs the grandest scales, marshalling the planets in their orbits and shaping the evolution of the universe as a whole. Electromagnetic force gives rise to a vast range of phenomena, from the magnetic field of the Earth to radio waves, visible light and X-rays, while also holding atoms, molecules and, by extension, the physical world together. Deep within the atomic nucleus, two further forces emerge: the vice-like “strong force”, which binds atomic nuclei, and the “weak force”, which among other things causes radioactive decay and enables the nuclear reactions that power the sun and the stars.
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Today is the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “Venado” supercomputer, which was hinted at back in April 2021 when Nvidia announced its plans for its first datacenter-class Arm server CPU and which was talked about in some detail – but not really enough to suit our taste for speeds and feeds – back in May 2022 by the folks at Los Alamos National Laboratory where Venado is situated.
Now we can finally get more details on the Venado system and get a little more insight into how Los Alamos will put it to work, and more specifically, why a better balance of memory bandwidth and compute that depends upon it is perhaps more important to this lab than it is in other HPC centers of the world.
Los Alamos was founded back in 1943 as the home of the Manhattan Project that created the world’s first nuclear weapons. We did not have supercomputers back then, of course, but plenty of very complex calculations have always been done at Los Alamos; sometimes by hand, sometimes by tabulators from IBM that used punch cards to store and manipulate data – an early form of simulation. The first digital computer to do such calculations at Los Alamos was called MANIAC and was installed in 1952; it could perform 10,000 operations per second and ran Monte Carlo simulations, which use randomness to simulate what are actually deterministic processes.
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The mission named STP-S30 is projected to launch in 2026 on a Rocket Lab Electron small launcher from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
On April 9, 1959, reporters and news media crammed into the ballroom of the Dolley Madison House in Washington—the location of NASA Headquarters at that time—to learn the names of the first American astronauts who came to be known as the Mercury 7. Public Information Director Walter Bonney kicked off the announcement by pointing to the seven men sitting on stage. “These are our astronaut volunteers,” he announced. “Take your pictures as you will, gentlemen.” One of those men on the dais, Deke Slayton, a test pilot from Edwards Air Force Base, recalled the pandemonium he witnessed. “I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since.” He described the event as, “a frenzy of light bulbs and questions…it was some kind of roar.” His colleague, Wally Schirra, a test pilot from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, called the media’s interest scary because he soon came to realize that their, “private lives were in jeopardy.”
SpaceX launched a military weather satellite designed to replace aging satellites from a program dating back to the 1960s. The United States Space Force-62 (USSF-62) mission featured the launch of the first Weather System Follow-on Microwave (WSF-M) spacecraft.
The potential of AI, particularly in narrow domains, is immense and has the capability to revolutionize various fields, but it also poses significant dangers if not carefully managed and understood Questions to inspire discussion What are the potential dangers of AI? —The potential dangers of AI include the possibility of open sourcing technology leading to the creation of atomic bombs and the dangers of open sourcing large language models for bad purposes.
Surgeons at NYU Langone have performed the world’s first whole eye transplant. The recipient can’t see out of his new eye, but it’s still healthy more than five months after the operation — putting doctors a major step closer to restoring vision with donor eyes in the future.
The patient: Aaron James, a 46-year-old military vet living in Arkansas, was working as a high-voltage lineman in 2021 when he came in contact with a live wire. The accident caused severe burns that led to the loss of his left eye, his nose, his mouth, half of his face, and his left arm from just above the elbow.
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In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8,200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
