Britain’s battleship of the future: torpedoes that travel at almost 350 mph, an electromagnetic rail gun, drones made on board and a holographic control room.
Category: military – Page 303
Drones are everywhere these days. They’re at your local park, they’re in the ocean, they’re hovering over the White House lawn, and they may even be hovering overhead armed with tear gas.
In a world that’s becoming increasingly drone friendly, there are some serious safety considerations that shouldn’t be ignored.
Specifically, government and military officials have cautioned that drones might soon be outfitted with explosives or chemical weapons and flown into either public or sensitive spaces.
With that in mind, Boeing recently developed a portable laser cannon that can eviscerate unwanted and pesky drones mid-flight. In the future, these types of lasers might be installed in all sorts of locations, including airports and sensitive military installations.
A consortium of top tech companies, laboratories, and universities is partnering with the Department of Defense to improve the manufacturing of flexible electronics, which could one day end up in aircraft, health monitors, military tools, or consumer electronics like wearables. The department is awarding the consortium, known as the FlexTech Alliance, $75 million over five years, with other sources, including universities, non-profits, and state and local governments, contributing an additional $96 million.
The consortium is composed of well over 100 organizations, with key partners including Apple, Boeing, GE, GM, Lockheed Martin, Motorola Mobility, and Qualcomm, among many others. Partnering universities include Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, and MIT, also among many others.
Funds will be distributed to FlexTech members through a bidding process, with field experts from these organizations applying to tackle specific problems. Timelines will be set for each of these, though there don’t appear to be specific goals just yet.
There was no one standing beside Chimp with a joystick, manipulating the robot’s every movement. Instead, Chimp’s head and body are packed with cameras, sensors and processors that allow it to generate a 3D model of its environment, which it sends back to a control team. “If it is a task that is familiar, we can say ‘grab that drill or turn that valve’,” says Tony Stentz, a Carnegie Mellon university professor who runs Chimp. Or to put it more bluntly, the robot was making many of the decisions itself.
Invisibility cloaks, cyborg insects, laser beam weapons…you name it, it’s probably secretly being development as you read this right now. Advances in modern weaponry have leapt straight out of science fiction films and into military reality. The US Military budget for 2016 is $786.6 billion. With that kind of spending, it’s not surprising that there have been some insane recent advancements. Here is a list of the 10 most futuristic weapons that will change modern warfare for ever.
The Pentagon is working on technology that will allow it to engineer a new organism within a day of it being found in the wild.
“The Biological Technologies Office (BTO), which opened in April 2014, aims to support extremely ambitious — some say fantastical — technologies ranging from powered exoskeletons for soldiers to brain implants that can control mental disorders. DARPA’s plan for tackling such projects is being carried out in the same frenetic style that has defined the agency’s research in other fields.” Read more
- Popular Science
The Air Force’s secret robot space plane is going to try out a new engine. The X-37B has so far spent a total of 1367 days tooling around in Earth’s orbit, doing classified things. Yesterday, the Air Force Research Lab announced that on its fourth flight, the X-37B will come with a new fuel-efficient engine for maneuvering in space. Read more
Next Big Future
Operator Suit, or TALOS, project, according to an announcement from the company. With this latest award, Ekso will now have garnered $35 million in contracts in the four-phase project, the company said. Its Phase 2 work is expected to be completed later this year. Read more
Article: Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction
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