Lifeboat Foundation

A research collaboration and ensuing friendship between a trauma surgeon in Oregon and a handful of engineers in Florida has resulted in a new ventilator design that requires no electricity and could be a game-changer during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Albert Chi, who specializes in critical care and prosthetics, was keeping a close eye on COVID-19 during the early days. He immediately began working with his team at Oregon Health and Science University to develop a new, easy way to replicate ventilators that could be deployed anywhere. Specializing in trauma, Chi as a retired commander of the U.S. Navy Reserve and well versed in extreme conditions.

When Chi had a design, he called his friend and clinical-trial collaborator Albert Manero CEO and co-founder of Limbitless Solutions in Orlando, Florida.

The service is seeking information from industry on how fast development and production can go.

“Most of the vendors have a plan to have a pilot as well as autonomous operations,” he added.

“Since we have put our hand up and said, ‘We want to accelerate this market so that it’s dual-use, the military wants to buy the exact same vehicle that would be available domestically,’ companies have shared with us privately that they have seen the amount of investment given by venture capitalists go up,” Roper said. “And they expect that that will continue the further we go through the door on competition.”

The Air Force plans to request funding for flying car research in the fiscal 2022 budget request, in addition to the research funding the service already set aside for the experiment, he said.

Why not both?

Circa 2019

But perhaps soldiers should be glad that the Army didn’t go with the infamous Heckler & Koch G11 or the futuristic XM29 OICW, or the ill-fated XM8 assault rifle.

Instead of a very conventional rifle firing the 5.56 NATO round, the Army is now rapidly progressing towards developing and field-testing a new weapon that can double the muzzle speeds of a bullet.

Continue reading “New research shows the Army could soon develop a rifle with hyper-velocity rounds” »

The U.S. Air Force’s fleet of B-52H heavy strategic bombers are on track to becoming a fleet of flying centenarians. The service wants to purchase over 600 new engines for its B-52s, ensuring that the “Big Ugly Fat Fella” can fly on to 2050 or later. This will practically ensure that some bombers, delivered in the early 1960s, will still be dropping bombs in the early 2060s.

The Pentagon has created top secret military artificial intelligence that has a higher intellect than humans.

A Defense Intelligence Agency experiment shows AI and humans have different risk tolerances when data is scarce.

In the 1983 movie WarGames, the world is brought to the edge of nuclear destruction when a military computer using artificial intelligence interprets false data as an imminent Soviet missile strike. Its human overseers in the Defense Department, unsure whether the data is real, can’t convince the AI that it may be wrong. A recent finding from the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, suggests that in a real situation where humans and AI were looking at enemy activity, those positions would be reversed.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Outperforms Human Intel Analysts In a Key Area” »

British Air Traffic Control says Russia’s long-range military aviation, flying south outside Norway towards the North Sea, is posing a hazard to civilian air traffic.

SEAKR Engineering, Inc. has been awarded as the prime contractor for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Pit Boss contract to further expand its contractual work supporting the Blackjack program. The award for Phase I Option II is part of a three-phase effort seeking on-orbit demonstration of full processing capability in a multi-satellite constellation. SEAKR was first awarded a DARPA Pit Boss contract in October 2019.

DARPA’s Blackjack program focuses on integrating commercial satellite technologies into a constellation of military satellites. As sole prime, SEAKR will continue developing it’s Pit Boss solution to support the Blackjack program’s mission as a next generation on-board processor.

SEAKR said the solution will leverage off-the-shelf electronics adapted through design implementation to function reliably in space. The company said this award validates its program success in seeking on-orbit demonstration of state-of-the-art processing capability incorporating autonomous operations, Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning techniques, and bridged terrestrial and on-orbit technologies.