A strange beeping noise in the Arctic has Canadians puzzled. Is it marine mammals doing something weird? A foreign submarine? Collective hallucination?
A military patrol and acoustic specialists are being dispatched to investigate, the army said Thursday.
Speculation has abounded since Inuit hunters in the village of Igloolik heard the beep several times off the Fury and Hecla Straight late last year.
Smart dust; himm I see many uses for this some good and some truly bad when in the wrong hands.
Pedro Aquila, Staff Writer Waking Times
Smart dust is a name given to extremely small computing particles, RFID chips, or other very small technologies.
A popular article from Extreme Tech describes it in the headline: “Smart dust: A complete computer that’s smaller than a grain of sand.” An article from War is Boring is titled “Future Military Sensors Could Be Tiny Specks of ‘Smart Dust’ New technologies allow for extremely small—and ubiquitous—military sensors.” A paper from University of California, San Diego describes smart dust:
Never ceases to amaze me what DARPA is up to these days.
Drones are everywhere these days – from using them to take elaborate selfies to launching missiles at military targets, delivering aid to war torn areas to imaging the deadly environment around lava lakes, they appear to be the multipurpose tool of the moment. Perhaps slightly strangely, then, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants drones to vanish into thin air. Specifically, they want drones that are biodegradable, able to fade away after completing their mission.
Flower Power!
As you well know, bullets are designed to kill people. So far, so bad, but the metallic compounds in them also tend to leach into the environment and kill off plants and wildlife too.
At training facilities the world over, the US Army uses live ammunition to gear up their soldiers for combat. These bullets just remain in the wild, and do their damage. Deciding that enough is enough, officials are now asking for proposals to design biodegradable bullets that shall harm the environment no more.
Not only that, but they are hoping that the bullets will contain seeds, specialized for each local environment, so that they will ultimately “grow environmentally beneficial plants that eliminate ammunition debris and contaminants.”
The limitless applications of 3D data visualization will enable a more efficient approach to many of life’s problems. Each day, developers exploring this technology are finding new ways to solve these problems in mixed reality; 3D modeling, easier house management, spinal surgery, and forest fire management are just a few recent examples of ways 3D data visualization can benefit us all.
The military, on the other hand, has quite a different set of problems to manage.
From a logistics standpoint, there are a lot of moving parts in the military to consider such as personnel, deployment, training, resources, and supply lines, to name just a few things that have to be managed constantly. Here we are talking big-picture ideas that could utilize 3D data visualization from a top-down view. If we scale down to real-time operations for individual missions, there’s recon, intel, tracking, and response, and this list could keep going.
More smart bullet news; and this is not a fake news flash.
THE MIL & AERO COMMENTARY, 17 Jan. 2017. Military machine guns, with minor modifications, have remained essentially the same since World War I. They’re designed to spray out a hail of metal bullets in one general direction to shred people, supplies, command centers, and lightly armored vehicles. Smart bullets rarely have been envisioned. Machine guns strictly represent a curtain of firepower in one direction; it doesn’t much matter that most of the bullets miss their targets, as long as a few manage to hit home.
Within the next fifty years, scientists at BAE Systems believe that battlefield commanders could deploy a new type of directed energy laser and lens system, called a Laser Developed Atmospheric Lens which is capable of enhancing commanders’ ability to observe adversaries’ activities over much greater distances than existing sensors.
At the same time, the lens could be used as a form of ‘deflector shield’ to protect friendly aircraft, ships, land vehicles and troops from incoming attacks by high power laser weapons that could also become a reality in the same time period.
The Laser Developed Atmospheric Lens (LDAL) concept, developed by technologists at the Company’s military aircraft facility in Warton, Lancashire, has been evaluated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and specialist optical sensors company LumOptica and is based on known science. It works by simulating naturally occurring phenomena and temporarily — and reversibly — changes the Earth’s atmosphere into lens-like structures to magnify or change the path of electromagnetic waves such as light and radio signals.