South Korea is ‘almost 100 per cent certain’ that North Korean hackers have stolen the blueprints for their warships and submarines.
The despotic regime is thought to have taken the documents after hacking into Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co Ltd’s database in April last year.
North Korea has often been implicated in cyber attacks in South Korea and elsewhere but Pyongyang has either ignored or denied accusations of hacking.
DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program envisions future small-unit infantry forces using small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or small unmanned ground systems (UGSs) in swarms of 250 robots or more to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the program seeks to enable rapid development and deployment of breakthrough capabilities to the field.
To augment enhance OFFSET’s potential contributions to the warfighter, DARPA aims to engage with a wider developer and user audience through rapid technology-development and integration efforts called swarm sprints. Participants in these experiments—“sprinters”—can work with one or both integration teams and each other to create and test their own novel swarm tactics and enabling technologies.
For more information, visit www.darpa.mil.
China has carried out a test flight of an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that could provide rapid cargo delivery to remote islets in the South China Sea without airstrips, in Beijing’s latest move to secure its presence in the disputed waters.
The drone – built from a modified low-cost fixed-wing plane – can carry 1.5 tonnes of cargo and land on a runway of just 200 metres, according to the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, which led the project.
It can also use a dirt track or grass field for take off and landing at military facilities that do not have an airfield, the institute said on its website on Friday.
NASA’s new X3 thruster, which is being developed by researchers at the University of Michigan in collaboration with the agency and the US Air Force, has broken records in recent test. It’s hoped that the technology could be used to ferry humans to Mars.
The X3 is a type of Hall thruster, a design that uses a stream of ions to propel a spacecraft. Plasma is expelled to generate thrust, producing far greater speeds than are possible with chemical propulsion rockets, according to NASA.
A chemical rocket tops out at around five kilometers per second (3.1 miles/sec), while a Hall thruster can reach speeds of up to 40 kilometers per second (25 miles/sec).
Military applications of gene-altering technology must also be considered (Op-Ed by Tomasz Pierscionek)
Recent developments in the field of biotechnology have shown that mutations can be edited out of the human genome. What are the future implications of this research and will it be used to the benefit or detriment of society?
Last month, UK scientists performed gene-editing experiments for the first time in order to gain a greater understanding of how embryos develop, and it is likely researchers in other countries will soon follow suit.
UK law permits experiments to be performed on embryos that are no more than 14 days old and prohibits their implantation into a human host.
The future of military success will now be owned by those who conceive, design, build and operate combinations of information-based technologies to deliver new combat power. Caution, bureaucratic inertia, vested interest and institutional preference for evolution won’t work: this will only leave room for competitors to steal decisive advantage in the most challenging of competitions on Earth.
Unless the private and public sectors start sharing ideas, the UK will be left behind in the new arms race says former Joint Forces Command chief Richard Barrons.
