Lifeboat Foundation

US Government may have discovered a new method of safely getting rid of old chemical and other old stockpile weapons.

Getting rid of chemical weapons is one of the military’s most unpleasant duties. But in the future, it may be no more difficult than incinerating garbage, thanks to a team of DARPA-funded scientists who think they can turn some of the world’s deadliest poisons into harmless dirt.

Chemical weapons, including nerve agents and mustards, have been banned under international law since the 1990s, but many countries still harbor large stockpiles. In 2013, a horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria—called the Ghouta attack —claimed hundreds of civilian lives, prompting the international community to intervene and eliminate the country’s chemical weapons reserves. By August 2014, 600 metric tons of deadly weapons had been destroyed (in the military parlance, “demilitarized”) aboard the US Navy vessel MV Cape Ray.

Continue reading “DARPA Has a Simple Plan to Clean Up the World’s Deadliest Weapons” »

Another Nvidia success.

A game-changing technology from Pentagon researchers could save the lives of soldiers fighting in urban environments.

Someone could trigger these UAVs to emerge from the ocean depths from thousands of miles away.

By Jennings Brown.

Excellent read about future Commerce in Space — could we see an Amazon or a HomeDepot in space?

In space there are no service stations to pull into and get replacement parts for your satellite. Nor is there a towing service if a satellite is in the wrong orbit, a construction contractor to help you build structures, or a “Space Depot” for those who wish to “do-it-themselves” on orbit. In other words, we still operate within a first-generation space industrial enterprise, i.e. all commerce is on Earth, and we only focus on bits (data) coming from monolithic things that go up (i.e., satellites), which eventually die or just come down with no chance of repair or reuse.

Today the commercial space industry focuses exclusively on applications that support launching science, exploration, military, or established earth-bound data communication or delivery services, focusing data to/from space. The lack of technology to support or “markets” to enter has resulted in nebulous, unconsolidated and without-a-critical-mass investment in space-based infrastructure, industrialization, space resources (survey and process maturation) and global utility creation and delivery applications in space. However, all that may finally be changing.

Continue reading “From data to service: the transition to ‘space-to-space’ commerce” »

Coming clean on the story around the XS-1 Spaceplane. Hmmm; US Government coming clean; really?

ORLANDO, Fla. – Here’s a phrase that’s not repeated everyday in the space community:

“You’ve heard Elon’s comments … we want to go beyond that,” Brad Tousley, the head of the tactical technology office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said May 15.

Continue reading “Why DARPA Is Pursuing the Reusable Military XS-1 Spaceplane” »

A new form of light which makes fiber optics more secure. Los Alamos has been key player in this space due to their work on the Quantum Internet.

In a breakthrough that has the potential to alter our understanding of the fundamental nature of light, scientists from the Trinity College Dublin School of Physics and the CRANN Institute in Ireland have discovered a never before seen new form of luminescence.

Lead author Paul Eastham attests to how exciting this finding is, saying in a statement that this very fundamental property of light that has always been thought to be constant can, in fact, change.

Continue reading “Scientists Find New Light Form — And It Changes Everything” »

A new form of light has been discovered by physicists from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Physics and the CRANN Institute, Trinity College, which will impact our understanding of the fundamental nature of light.

One of the measurable characteristics of a beam of light is known as angular momentum, The Spectrum reports. Until now, it was thought that in all forms of light the angular momentum would be a multiple of Planck’s constant (the physical constant that sets the scale of quantum effects).

Now, recent PhD graduate Kyle Ballantine and Professor Paul Eastham, both from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Physics, along with Professor John Donegan from CRANN, have demonstrated a new form of light where the angular momentum of each photon (a particle of visible light) takes only half of this value. This difference, though small, is profound. These results were recently published in the online journal Science Advances.

Nice.

Imec will implement qubits and supporting nanoelectronic functionality for quantum computing, leveraging its advanced silicon (Si) platform that was established within the framework of its industrial affiliation program with additional support from the EU through e.g. ECSEL projects SENATE and TAKE-5.

EU betting big on Quantum Technology.

The European Union (EU) aims to embark on an ambitious common strategy on quantum technologies, European Commissioner for digital economy and society Gunther Oettinger said here Tuesday.

At a conference which brought together some of the world’s leading experts in the field of quantum technology, European scientists and entrepreneurs launched a “Quantum Manifesto” laying out future priorities and activities to create a new “knowledge-based industrial ecosystem” in Europe.

“We aim to launch an ambitious large-scale flagship initiative to unlock the full potential of quantum technologies, accelerate their development, and bring commercial products to public and private users,” Oettinger told the conference.