Lifeboat Foundation

“We don’t have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us,” Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

“Both Russia and China are aggressively pursuing hypersonic capabilities,” Hyten added. “We’ve watched them test those capabilities.”

Researchers and engineers at Rand explain what a hypersonic weapon is, which countries are developing them and how the U.S. could look to defend against them.

Continue reading “Russia and China are ‘aggressively developing’ hypersonic weapons — here’s what they are and why the US can’t defend against them” »

A clever configuration of industrial lasers is set to finally make laser weapons practical.

The US military likes to stay at the forefront of the cutting edge of science — most recently investigating ways they can ‘hack’ the human brain and body to make it die slower, and learn faste r.

But in an unexpected twist, it turns out they’re also interested in pushing the limits of quantum mechanics. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced it’s funding research into one of the strangest scientific breakthroughs in recent memory — time crystals.

In case you missed it, time crystals made headlines last year when scientists finally made the bizarre objects in the lab, four years after they were first proposed.

Continue reading “DARPA Is Researching Time Crystals, And Their Reasons Are ‘Classified’” »

JERUSALEM (Reuters) — Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile shield was launched on Sunday against Palestinian machine gun fire originating in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip, and not against incoming militant rockets, the Israeli army said.

Flaming streams of about 10 Iron Dome rockets could be seen rising into the night sky in a spectacular light show, but there was no indication that Islamist militants in Gaza had fired rockets, a military spokeswoman said.

A subsequent army statement said: “Following reports of sirens sounding in southern Israel, unusual machine gun fire towards Israel was identified. No rocket launches were identified. The (military) is looking into the circumstances which led to the activation of the Iron Dome system.”

Continue reading “Israeli interceptors deployed against machine gun fire, not rockets: army” »

Considering how often lasers show up in science fiction, it’s interesting that the concept of “talking lasers” might show up in reality before eventually finding their way into sci-fi.

But the United States’ military Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is getting close to creating one, according to a new report in Defense One. The device in question will soon be capable of reproducing human speech as a means of scaring off trespassers or enemies, making announcements, or just sending discrete messages to somebody who dropped their phone or walkie talkie.

Continue reading “Pentagon Tries to Replicate Human Voices Using Lasers” »

Small drones that can automatically spot, identify and target vehicles and people are planned by the US military, although humans would still be overseeing them.

Perfect vision is great. But like any advantage it comes with limitations. Those with ease don’t develop the same unique senses and strengths as someone who must overcome obstacles, people like Lana Awad, a neurotech engineer at CTRL-labs in New York, who diagnosed her own degenerative eye disease with a high school science textbook as a teen in Syria and went on to teach at Harvard University.

Though they see themselves as clear leaders, visionaries with all the obvious advantages—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for example—can be blind in their way, lacking the context needed to guide if they don’t recognize their counterintuitive limitations. This is problematic for humanity because we’re all relying on them to create the tools that increasingly rule every aspect of our lives. The internet is just the start.

Tools that will meld mind and machine are already a reality. Neurotech is a huge business with applications being developed for gaming, the military, medicine, social media, and much more to come. Neurotech Report projected in 2016 that the $7.6 billion market could reach $12 billion by 2020. Wired magazine called 2017, “a coming-out year for the brain machine interface (BMI).”

Continue reading “Lana Awad is engineering the neuro-tech that will transform humanity” »

When the first laser was invented the idea of using it as a superweapon seemed like science fiction. Almost 60 years later and it still seems that way, despite a remarkable degree of progress. Prototypes have been used to destroy small watercraft, shoot down missiles and drones, and have even been deployed at least once in a war zone, but the revolutionary destructive ray that would change the face of battle as fundamentally as the longbow or the airplane has yet to appear. So just what is the current state of laser weapons technology, and what does it hold in store for the future of warfare?

Neutral-particle beams, a concept first tried in the 1980s, may get a fresh look under Michael Griffin.

“Directed energy is more than just big lasers, Griffin said. ”That’s important. High-powered microwave approaches can effect an electronics kill. The same with the neutral particle beam systems we explored briefly in the 1990s” for use in space-based anti-missile systems. Such weapons can be ”useful in a variety of environments” and have the ”advantage of being non-attributable,” meaning that it can be hard to pin an attack with a particle weapon on any particular culprit since it leaves no evidence behind of who or even what did the damage.

Like lasers, neutral-particle beams focus beams of energy that travel in straight lines, unaffected by electromagnetic fields. But instead of light, neutral-particle beams use composed of accelerated subatomic particles traveling at near-light speed, making them easier to work with (though the folks that run CERNs hadron collider may disagree). When its particles touche the surface of a target, they takes on a charge that allows them to penetrate the target’s shell or exterior more deeply.

Continue reading “Pentagon’s New Arms-Research Chief Eyes Space-Based Ray Guns” »