When the secretive military technology agency asked for help finding an underground tunnel system for “experimentation,” Twitter went wild.
Category: military – Page 209
According to media reports, SpaceX refused to move its satellite even after it was alerted by the US military, which monitors space traffic.
Editor’s Note: This article by Matthew Cox originally appeared on Military.com, a leading source of news for the military and veteran community.
Marine infantrymen may soon be able to see through the floor of an MV-22 Osprey and track terrain features as they approach their attack objective.
It sounds like science fiction, but Marine Lt. Col. Rory Quinn of the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force says it could become reality if the Marine Corps decides to field the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), a sophisticated Microsoft technology that the Army is developing to give soldiers a new level of situational awareness in combat.
Tomorrow’s wars will be faster, more high-tech, and less human than ever before. Welcome to a new era of machine-driven warfare.
W allops Island —a remote, marshy spit of land along the eastern shore of Virginia, near a famed national refuge for horses—is mostly known as a launch site for government and private rockets. But it also makes for a perfect, quiet spot to test a revolutionary weapons technology.
If a fishing vessel had steamed past the area last October, the crew might have glimpsed half a dozen or so 35-foot-long inflatable boats darting through the shallows, and thought little of it. But if crew members had looked closer, they would have seen that no one was aboard: The engine throttle levers were shifting up and down as if controlled by ghosts. The boats were using high-tech gear to sense their surroundings, communicate with one another, and automatically position themselves so, in theory, .50-caliber machine guns that can be strapped to their bows could fire a steady stream of bullets to protect troops landing on a beach.
“Over decades, both military and space programs all around the world have known the negative impact of radiation on semiconductor-based electronics,” says Meyya Meyyappan, Chief Scientist for Exploration Technology at the Center for Nanotechnology, at NASA’s Ames Research Center. What has changed with the push towards nanoscale feature sizes is that terrestrial levels of radiation can now also cause problems that had previously primarily concerned applications in space and defence. Packaging contaminants can cause alpha radiation that create rogue electron-hole pairs, and even the ambient terrestrial neutron flux at sea level – around 20 cm−2 h−1 – can have adverse implications for nanoscale devices.
Fortunately work to produce radiation-hardy electronics has been underway for some time at NASA, where space mission electronics are particularly prone to radiation exposure and cumbersome radiation shielding comes with a particularly costly load penalty. Vacuum electronics systems, the precursors to today’s silicon world, are actually immune to radiation damage. Alongside Jin-Woo Han and colleagues Myeong-Lok Seol, Dong-Il Moon and Gary Hunter at Ames and NASA’s Glenn Research Centre, Meyyappan has been working towards a renaissance of the old technology with a nano makeover.
In a recent Nature Electronics article, they report how with device structure innovations and a new material platform they can demonstrate nanoscale vacuum channel transistors that compete with solid-state system responses while proving impervious to radiation exposure.
The two million event goers won’t be able to Naruto-run past this.
Facebook has removed a mega-viral event called “Storm Area 51,” claiming it violated community standards. Before it was removed, the tongue-in-cheek event amassed more than 2 million Facebook users, grabbing the attention of the mainstream media.
The idea, according to the even description, was to invite an army of memelords and alien enthusisasts to raid the top-secret Air Force military base in the middle of Nevada’s desert. “Let’s see them aliens,” the event description read.
Area 51 has long been the subject of wild speculation and alien conspiracy theories. The 5,000 square mile base has hosted hundreds of nuclear weapons tests and has served as testing grounds for a range of new stealth aircraft.
On Wednesday, at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva, a panel of government experts debated policy options regarding lethal autonomous weapons.
Dutch NGO Pax created a report that surveyed major players from the sector on their view of lethal autonomous weapons. They categorised companies based on 3 criteria: whether they were developing technology that’s potentially relevant to deadly AI, working on related military products, and if they had committed to abstaining from contributing in the future.
By these criteria, Microsoft scores rather highly in the birthplace of Skynet rankings. Microsoft has invested extensively in developing artificial intelligence products, has very close relationships with the US military, and Satya Nadella has committed to providing the military with their very best technology. While Microsoft has fallen short of explicitly developing AI for military purposes, we do know that they have developed a version of the HoloLens for the military that is specifically designed to increase the lethality of soldiers in the field.
Hmmmm.
ATTENTION owners of truly massive, human-built tunnels and subterranean complexes: The US military’s secretive research agency urgently needs your underground lair for some undisclosed experiments.
DARPA tweeted on Wednesday that within the next 48 hours it must find a “human-made underground environment spanning several city blocks with complex layout & multiple stories, including atriums, tunnels & stairwells. Spaces that are currently closed off from pedestrians or can be temporarily used for testing are of interest.”
I’m imagining something along the lines of the underground world used by the tethered in the movie Us, though it also sounds like abandoned underground malls, bunkers, cities, and as-to-yet undiscovered sites of lost civilizations may qualify, so long as the space is found by 5 PM Friday (Eastern Time; the government’s hours are very rigid.)