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Two years ago, Barack Obama appointed a new Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter—a technocrat physicist, an arms control veteran, and a professor at Stanford—to help close this divide. During his tenure, Carter set up a virtual outpost in Silicon Valley. He worked to make it easier for tech companies to sell things to the Pentagon, for their engineers to work there, and for their bosses to offer up advice. He even let WIRED tag along and write a profile of him. He also impressed the local royalty. “He’s been amazing,” Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, told me in an interview.


The former Secretary of Defense built a bridge between tech and the Pentagon. Here, he talks about its importance in an uncertain time.

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The US-Australia Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HiFIRE) program had at least one successful hypersonic flight at Woomera testing range in South Australia last week. A round of experiments concluded on 12 July, confirmed Australian defense minister Marise Payne.

UQ hypersonics researchers collaborated with the Defence Science and Technology Group (DST Group) and US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Boeing, and BAE Systems for test flights in July 2017. This vehicle is a free-flying hypersonic glider, designed to fly at Mach 8 (8000 km/hr). It is designed to separate from its rocket booster in space and perform controlled manoeuvres as it enters the atmosphere. The test flight was intended to enable learning about how to fly a hypersonic vehicle at high altitude.

BAE Systems Australia said in a statement that “the successful flight trial [was] the most complex of all HIFiRE flights conducted to date”.

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Warfare and technology make the perfect partners of destruction. Military innovations from wooden catapults to nuclear bombs have been transforming the way war is waged since prehistoric humans carved arrows from stones some 10,000 years ago.

The visions of futurists don’t always match the experiences of military personnel, but the battlefields of the future will bear little resemblance to the war zones of today.


The future of technology in warfare: From AI robots to VR torture.

Geopolitical developments have raised fears of another world war. Technological advances mean it should at least be over quickly.

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According to the report, the US Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy and other special forces are looking to improve troops’ performance by looking at their bodies at a genetic level (stock)

Earlier this year the AirForce successfully tested a helmet that can monitor brain activity and tell if the pilot is feeling stressed or panicked.

One research project is using a laptop-camera lens to find out if a person’s haemoglobin is oxygenated. This can then be used to work out a person’s heart rate.

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ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. — Thanks to a new “suit” being developed by the DOD-funded Warrior Web program, future Soldiers will be able to march longer, carry heavier gear and improve mental sharpness.

The suit has pulleys and gears designed to prevent and reduce musculoskeletal injuries caused by the dynamic events typically experienced in the Warfighter’s environment.

Scientists and engineers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory have been testing variations of the suit for more than three years at the Soldier Performance and Equipment Advanced Research, or SPEAR, facility at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

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US military reveals $65m funding for ‘Matrix’ projects to plug human brains directly into a computer…


The US military has revealed $65 of funding for a programme to develop a ‘brain chip’ allowing humans to simply plug into a computer.

They say the system could give soldiers supersenses and even help treat people with blindness, paralysis and speech disorders.

The goal is ‘developing an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world,’ DARPA officials said.

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