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Category: military – Page 66

Surpassing All Existing Designs — Researchers Develop High-Voltage Microbattery With Exceptional Energy and Power Density

A persistent technological challenge has been the difficulty in scaling down the electrochemical performance of large-format batteries to smaller, microscale power sources, hindering their ability to power microdevices, microrobots, and implantable medical devices. However, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have overcome this challenge by developing a high-voltage microbattery (9 V) with exceptional energy and power density, unparalleled by any existing battery design.

Material Science and Engineering Professor Paul Braun (Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, Materials Research Laboratory Director), Dr. Sungbong Kim (Postdoc, MatSE, current assistant professor at Korea Military Academy, co-first author), and Arghya Patra (Graduate Student, MatSE, MRL, co-first author) recently published a paper detailing their findings in Cell Reports.

<em>Cell Reports</em> is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that published research papers that report new biological insight across a broad range of disciplines within the life sciences. Established in 2012, it is the first open access journal published by Cell Press, an imprint of Elsevier.

Multiverse Warfare & Quantum Mania

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If travel to other realities and multiverses is possible, then so is conflict between them, but how would a multiversal war be fought?

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Credits:
Multiverse Warfare and Quantum Mania.
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Episode 382, February 16, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.

Editors:
David McFarlane.
Briana Brownell.
Lukas Konecny.

Graphics:

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US launches artificial intelligence military use initiative

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The United States launched an initiative Thursday promoting international cooperation on the responsible use of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons by militaries, seeking to impose order on an emerging technology that has the potential to change the way war is waged.

“As a rapidly changing technology, we have an obligation to create strong norms of responsible behavior concerning military uses of AI and in a way that keeps in mind that applications of AI by militaries will undoubtedly change in the coming years,” Bonnie Jenkins, the State Department’s under secretary for arms control and international security, said.

She said the U.S. political declaration, which contains non-legally binding guidelines outlining best practices for responsible military use of AI, “can be a focal point for international cooperation.”

The AI Arms Race Is On. Start Worrying

To create is human. For the past 300,000 years we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing before.

Now we have company. While you’re reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. They’re writing pitch decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blueprints, and providing health advice.

Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive impact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on social media. But generative AI, a category of system that can be prompted to create wholly novel content, is much newer.

Why stratospheric balloons are used in era of space-based intelligence

WASHINGTON — When the Pentagon revealed last week that a high-flying, Chinese balloon was spotted over the United States, officials said they didn’t expect the airship would add much value to the intelligence China is already gathering through its network of spy satellites.

“Our best assessment at the moment is that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added over and above what the [People’s Republic of China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low Earth orbit,” a senior defense official told reporters Feb. 2.

While it’s unclear what information the uncrewed airship gathered before the Pentagon shot it down Feb. 4, experts say balloons loitering at high altitudes can offer some advantages over satellites and drones — or could at least augment their intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

Ex-Google CEO says AI as revolutionary for warfare as nuclear weapons

Ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, advocated for implementing AI for the U.S. military use to compete against China and other rivals.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has advocated for the military use of artificial intelligence (AI) to build a more robust and adaptable defense system for the United States against China and other rivals.

“Every once in a while, a new weapon, a new technology comes along that changes things,” he told Wired.

Getty Images.

AI could be just as revolutionary for warfare as nuclear weapons, argued Schmidt, according to an interview published by Wired on Tuesday.

1950s Fighter Jet Air Computer Shows What Analog Could Do

Imagine you’re a young engineer whose boss drops by one morning with a sheaf of complicated fluid dynamics equations. “We need you to design a system to solve these equations for the latest fighter jet,” bossman intones, and although you groan as you recall the hell of your fluid dynamics courses, you realize that it should be easy enough to whip up a program to do the job. But then you remember that it’s like 1950, and that digital computers — at least ones that can fit in an airplane — haven’t been invented yet, and that you’re going to have to do this the hard way.

The scenario is obviously contrived, but this peek inside the Bendix MG-1 Central Air Data Computer reveals the engineer’s nightmare fuel that was needed to accomplish some pretty complex computations in a severely resource-constrained environment. As [Ken Shirriff] explains, this particular device was used aboard USAF fighter aircraft in the mid-50s, when the complexities of supersonic flight were beginning to outpace the instrumentation needed to safely fly in that regime. Thanks to the way air behaves near the speed of sound, a simple pitot tube system for measuring airspeed was no longer enough; analog computers like the MG-1 were designed to deal with these changes and integrate them into a host of other measurements critical to the pilot.

To be fair, [Ken] doesn’t do a teardown here, at least in the traditional sense. We completely understand that — this machine is literally stuffed full of a mind-boggling number of gears, cams, levers, differentials, shafts, and pneumatics. Taking it apart with the intention of getting it back together again would be a nightmare. But we do get some really beautiful shots of the innards, which reveal a lot about how it worked. Of particular interest are the torque-amplifying servo mechanism used in the pressure transducers, and the warped-plate cams used to finely adjust some of the functions the machine computes.