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Category: military – Page 273

Britain will spend more than £800million funding next-generation military technology including tiny “dragonfly drones” for gathering intelligence and laser weapons to eliminate missiles.

Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, will today announce an innovation unit which will encourage individuals and companies to pitch ideas to a panel of experts. The best ideas will be fast-tracked with the support of an £800million fund over the next decade.

Projects which will be funded include a “micro-drone” with tiny flapping wings inspired by the biology of a dragon fly, which could have a “huge impact” on operations in urban environments.

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A Mission Impossible Battery that self destructs.

Here at HEXAPOLIS, we have talked about biodegradable electronics that are designed to automatically dissolve once their job is done. Such self-destructing devices could be especially useful in the world of medicine, where implants currently have to be surgically removed, as well as the military. As part of a new research, scientists at the Iowa State University have devised an innovative transient battery, which as its name suggests can melt away in less than 30 minutes.

Technological advancements in recent years have allowed researchers to develop an array of self-destructing electronics that are capable of performing specific functions. Up until now, however, these devices were driven by external power sources. Previous attempts to create transient batteries largely gave birth to contraptions that lacked power, stability and a substantial shelf life. More often than not, they were also quite slow in demolishing themselves. Speaking about the research, recently published in the Journal of Polymer Science, Part B: Polymer Physics, the team stated:

Unlike conventional electronics that are designed to last for extensive periods of time, a key and unique attribute of transient electronics is to operate over a typically short and well-defined period, and undergo fast and, ideally, complete self-deconstruction and vanish when transiency is triggered. Any device without a transient power source isn’t really transient. This is a battery with all the working components. It’s much more complex than our previous work with transient electronics.

Continue reading “Innovative Transient Battery Is Designed To Self-Destruct In 30 Minutes” | >

Nifty.

Radio communication is a weak point for most military operations — it is often not long enough or strong enough to adequately meet soldiers’ needs. The U.S. Air Force’s “go big or go home” solution to improve their long-distance calls? Supercharge the atmosphere by detonating aerial plasma bombs attached to tiny satellites, reports New Scientist.

The Air Force is asking for help in developing plasma bombs, which would be delivered to the atmosphere by tiny cube satellites and then detonated to release ions upon arrival. The Air Force is working with several research teams, each of which is tasked with coming up with their own design for the plasma bombs. The first stage of the project is theoretical, requiring researchers to come up with an atmospheric plasma delivery method. Selected researchers then will be invited to test their proposal in a vacuum chamber simulator and eventually on exploratory flights.

One team, comprised of researchers from Drexel University and General Sciences, is developing a controlled bomb that uses a chemical reaction to heat a piece of metal beyond its boiling point. Once vaporized, the metal will react with atmospheric oxygen to create the ionized plasma. Another proposal under development by researchers from the University of Maryland and Enig Associates also uses vaporized metals to supercharge the atmosphere. This proposal is much more explosive, though, using mini-detonations to heat pieces of metal rapidly, causing them to vaporize. The amount of plasma produced in this latter reaction can be controlled by changing the intensity and form of the explosion.

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Glad folks realizes and admit to the risks; however, I stand by my argument until the underpinning technology is still tied to dated digital technology; it will be hacked by folks like China who are planning to be on a new Quantum network and platforms. Reason why all countries must never lose sight of replacing their infrastructure and the net with Quantum technology.

A team of researchers from Pittsburgh has won DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge – a competition billed as the ‘world’s first automated network defense tournament.’ The implications for the Internet of Things (IoT) are grave, as the machines on display threaten to ravage the already flaky state of IoT security.

DARPA, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a wing of the US military that investigates how the latest technological breakthroughs can be put to use on the battlefield. With nation-state cybersecurity now declared a new front in conventional warfare, militaries around the world will be flocking to gather the tools needed to exert force in this new medium.

So while the DARPA competition presents itself as a smiley affair, it dies represent the new face of an emerging weapon – and the most promising weapon on display came from the aforementioned ForAllSecure, a startup with close ties to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University.

Continue reading “DARPA competition sees dawn of autonomous IoT hacking” | >

New way for IoT and data centers in general to improve energy use, costs, etc.

Arrays based on vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers offer a high-bandwidth, low-power, and low-cost solution for intra-data centers.

With the emergence of high-performance digital systems and the rapid growth of Internet traffic in the 1990s, the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Micro Electronics Technology Directorate correctly predicted the growing need for optical interconnects and thus initiated several efforts to develop such technologies for the next generation of high-performance digital systems. This work was also prompted by significant advances in optical materials (i.e., III-V materials and polymers), devices (vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, VCSELs), and packaging technologies that were also made during this period.1 In collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Electronic Technology Office, the AFRL thus initiated several major programs in this area.

Continue reading “Pioneering research in parallel optical interconnect technology for cloud computing” | >

Reminds me of the 1980s all over again with Reagan’s StarWars Program.

Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov has revealed that the Russian military has commissioned several types of laser weaponry, but remains tight-lipped about the kinds of systems being developed. What kinds of systems does the officer have in mind? Military experts speaking to one of Russia’s leading independent newspapers attempted to find out.

Laser beam

© Flickr/ andrea.pacelli

Continue reading “Facts About the Secret Laser Weapons Systems Russia is Developing” | >

Amazing and can serve many areas.

(DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) In work that aims to protect soldiers from biological and chemical threats, a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists has created a material that is highly breathable yet protective from biological agents.

This material is the first key component of futuristic smart uniforms that also will respond to and protect from environmental chemical hazards. The research appears in the July 27 edition of the journal, Advanced Materials.

High breathability is a critical requirement for protective clothing to prevent heat-stress and exhaustion when military personnel are engaged in missions in contaminated environments. Current protective military uniforms are based on heavyweight full-barrier protection or permeable adsorptive protective garments that cannot meet the c, ritical demand of simultaneous high comfort and protection, and provide a passive rather than active response to an environmental threat.

Continue reading “‘Second skin’ protects soldiers from biological and chemical agents” | >