Russia and China have both recently developed intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of dropping several nuclear bombs at once.
Category: military – Page 39
“Whoever leads in AI will rule the world,” President Vladimir Putin declared at an address commencing the 2017 Russian school year. Six years later, despite intense focus from senior leadership and heavy investment from the federal budget and state-owned enterprises, Russia remains a laggard in this field, hobbled by international isolation and structural challenges.
Military, political, and business leaders in Moscow have long understood the importance of controlling the information space to secure their grasp on power. After the scare of social media powered “color revolutions” on Russia’s doorstep, Moscow doubled down on these efforts. But facing both headwinds intrinsic to the nature of generative AI and deep, self-inflicted wounds from the war in Ukraine, the window for Russia to take a lead is closing quickly.
Russia’s leaders were caught flat-footed by the rise of social media. The supposed dangers of emerging technology were brought to the fore by Chisinau’s so-called “ Twitter revolution,” when protests organized in part on American social networks prevented Moldova’s ardently pro-Russian Party of Communists from winning the election in 2009.
In the evolving landscape of space warfare, conflict is shifting into what experts commonly call the “gray zone.”
Unlike traditional conflicts defined by clear boundaries, rules of engagement and identifiable actors, space battles in the gray zone are ambiguous, with military and civilian activities that can be difficult to discern.
“It’s crucial for U.S. policymakers and military leaders to understand the nuances of future competition in space, and how it will likely play out,” said John Klein, military strategist and adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute.
A team of George Mason University scientists has received a federal grant of more than $13 million to work with the Department of the Navy to study and better understand increased solar activity that could potentially cause an “internet apocalypse” disrupting all electronic communications on Earth, including satellite communications.
Research from the grant, which will total $13.6 million in expenditures over five years, will be done in collaboration with the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and will include state-of-the-art data mining, analysis, and scientific modeling, among other endeavors, led by Mason faculty, students and staff. Under the terms of the contract, Mason provides scientific support for a broad range of astronomy-related activities that are of interest to the U.S. Navy and the nation at large.
“The main focus is on solar activity and the way it can impact systems on Earth,” said principal investigator Peter A. Becker, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy within the College of Science. “This is especially important to the Navy—and more broadly the Department of Defense—because high-energy outbursts from the sun can have a strong negative impact on earthly radio and internet communications. And they can also have a detrimental effect on navigation systems and energy grids on Earth.”
The B-21 Raider took its first test flight on Friday, moving the futuristic warplane closer to becoming the nation’s next nuclear weapons stealth bomber.
The Raider flew in Palmdale, California, where it has been under testing and development by Northrop Grumman.
The Air Force is planning to build 100 of the warplanes, which have a flying wing shape much like their predecessor the B-2 Spirit but will incorporate advanced materials, propulsion and stealth technology to make them more survivable in a future conflict. The plane is planned to be produced in variants with and without pilots.
The new chips were designed to be less powerful than the models sold in the US, according to sources.
NVIDIA really, really doesn’t want to lose access to China’s massive AI chip market.
NVIDIA really, really doesn’t want to lose access to China’s massive AI chip market. The company is developing three new AI chips especially for China that don’t run afoul of the latest export restrictions in the US, according to The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Last year, the US government notified the chipmaker that it would restrict the export of computer chips meant for supercomputers and artificial intelligence applications to Russia and China due to concerns that the components could be used for military purposes. That rule prevented NVIDIA from selling certain A100 and H100 chips in the country, so it designed the A800 and H800 chips specifically for the Chinese market.
However, the US government recently issued an updated set of restrictions that puts a limit on how much computing power a chip can have when it’s meant for export to the aforementioned countries. The A800 and the H800 are no longer eligible for export under the new rules, along with NVIDIA’s other products, which include its top-of-the-line RTX 4090 consumer GPU. Some reports even suggest that the company could end up canceling over $5 billion worth of advanced chip orders in China.
The new chips meant for the Chinese market are called the HGX H20, the L20 and the L2, based on the specs sent to distributors. While the H20 is supposed to be the most powerful model out of the three, all of them don’t go beyond the computing power threshold set by the US government’s new export rules. That means customers using them for AI applications may need more chips than they would if they had access to higher-spec models.
In June 2021, 46-year-old Aaron James of Arkansas miraculously survived a 7,200-volt electric shock.
NYU LANGONE STAFF
The surgical team at NYU Langone Health performed a complex 21-hour procedure to transplant an entire eye along with a part of the face for a military veteran who had experienced a life-altering accident.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is “seriously preparing” for war as it builds its nuclear weapons arsenal, according to an expert on Korean history.
After decades of international pressure attempting to stop its development of nuclear weapons, North Korea announced during the administration of former President George W. Bush that it was conducting nuclear tests and had weapons. The country now has an arsenal that includes an estimated 35 to 63 warheads, according to the Institute for Science and International Security.
In an interview published by The Financial Times on Thursday, Kookmin University history professor Andrei Lankov said that Kim had been emboldened to build the nuclear arsenal due to Western leaders failing to take advantage of earlier opportunities to pressure the regime, wrongly believing that the nuclear program was not “a realistic threat.”
Raytheon’s (an RTX subsidiary) “StormBreaker” smart bomb has achieved initial operational capability for the United States Navy’s F-18 Super Hornet fleet.
RTX
All-weather destruction.