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Oct 4, 2020

DARPA mind-machine interface: US military readies TELEPATHIC ‘cyber defence’ tech

Posted by in categories: military, robotics/AI

#DARPA is the US military department responsible for developing cutting edge technologies for use on the front line. Boasting an annual budget of billions and with some of the world’s smartest minds on its roster, DARPA is responsible for some of the world’s most exciting tech. And it has now emerged the secretive research arm is advancing brain-machine interface capable of allowing soldiers to telepathically control “active cyber defence systems” and “swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles”.


US MILITARY Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is preparing telepathic technology which some fear is capable of remotely controlling war machines with military minds.

Oct 4, 2020

Astronomers Find Monster Black Hole With 6 Galaxies Trapped in Its Gravitational Web

Posted by in category: cosmology

Astronomers have discovered six galaxies ensnared in the cosmic “spider’s web” of a supermassive black hole soon after the Big Bang, according to research published Thursday that could help explain the development of these enigmatic monsters.

Black holes that emerged early in the history of the Universe are thought to have formed from the collapse of the first stars, but astronomers have puzzled over how they expanded into giants.

The newly discovered black hole — which dates from when the Universe was not even a billion years old — weighs in at 1 billion times the mass of our Sun and was spotted by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Oct 4, 2020

Astronauts found God in space

Posted by in category: space

I didn’t realize there was a moon-landing Bible verse until my pastor mentioned it a few weeks ago.

It seems that while returning from the historic first landing on the moon 50 years ago, astronaut Buzz Aldrin took part in a TV broadcast the night before splashing down. During the broadcast, the second man to set foot on the moon’s surface read Psalms 8:3–4: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of Man, that thou visitest him?”

It turns out Aldrin’s religious faith is not an anomaly. In fact, the 29 astronauts who visited the moon during the Apollo program were a generally religious cohort. According to NASA, 23 were Protestant and six Catholic, with a high proportion of them serving as church leaders in their congregations.

Oct 4, 2020

UK Military Develops Drone With a Double Barreled Shotgun

Posted by in categories: drones, military

O,.o.


It uses “machine vision” to identify targets indoors.

Oct 4, 2020

Hubble Detects Smallest Known Dark Matter Clumps

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a new observing technique, astronomers have found that dark matter forms much smaller clumps than previously known. This result confirms one of the fundamental predictions of the widely accepted “cold dark matter” theory.

All galaxies, according to this theory, form and are embedded within clouds of dark matter. Dark matter itself consists of slow-moving, or “cold,” particles that come together to form structures ranging from hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the Milky Way galaxy to clumps no more massive than the heft of a commercial airplane. (In this context, “cold” refers to the particles’ speed.)

The Hubble observation yields new insights into the nature of dark matter and how it behaves. “We made a very compelling observational test for the cold dark matter model and it passes with flying colors,” said Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a member of the observing team.

Oct 4, 2020

Scientists Create Clear, Glasslike Material Out of Wood

Posted by in categories: futurism, materials

It’s a lucrative concept that has drawn the attention of researchers across the globe in recent years.


But thanks to a new generation of futuristic building materials, those materials could be poised for a significant upgrade. A team of researchers at the USDA and several research institutions say they’ve developed “transparent wood,” a glass-like material made almost entirely out of trees that they claim is stronger, safer, more cost efficient and more thermally efficient than glass.

Kicking Glass

Continue reading “Scientists Create Clear, Glasslike Material Out of Wood” »

Oct 4, 2020

Russian state hackers appear to have breached a federal agency

Posted by in category: cybercrime/malcode

Evidence suggests Russia’s state-backed Fancy Bear group was behind a hack targeting a US federal agency.

Oct 4, 2020

New Eco-Friendly Color Thin-Film Solar Cells

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Research on solar cells to secure renewable energy sources are ongoing around the world. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in South Korea succeeded in developing eco-friendly color Cu(In, Ga)Se2 (CIGS) thin-film solar cells.

CIGS thin-film solar cells are used to convert sunlight into electrical energy and are made by coating multiple thin films on a glass substrate. They have a relatively higher absorption coefficient among non-silicon based cells, resulting in high conversion efficiency and long stability. Also, they require less raw materials compared to silicon-based cells; hence less process and material costs.

One downside has been the difficulty in commercialization as they use the buffer layer which contains toxic heavy metal, cadmium. Thus, the ETRI team replaced the cadmium sulfide (CdS) buffer layer with zinc (Zn) based materials — which is not harmful — and managed to achieve approximately 18% conversion efficiency; thus eliminating the obstacle to commercialization.

Oct 4, 2020

#SpaceWatchGL Opinion: Satellite Technologies Use To Monitor Climate Change and Manage Environmental Disasters

Posted by in categories: climatology, economics, existential risks, habitats, satellites, sustainability

The recent 2020 US West Coast wildfire has opened infernos, as it ravaged hundreds of homes and charred hundreds of neighborhoods. On September 10, 2020, CNN announced that the Creek Fire had taken more than 166,00 acres after destroying 360 structures in Central California, Amidst a state emergency, firefighters had to defeat the “beast” that turned the scenery to a similar fiction movies scene on a doomsday. Wildfire causes environmental disasters that were attributed by many scientists to climate change. The preparedness, detection, and management of wildfires and other environmental disasters, that affected the environment hinge on satellite technologies, essentially, the Remote Sensing of sea surfaces and land areas, and the civil space-based Earth Observation and its applications. Such space-based technologies are deployed to assess, monitor, and manage local, regional, and large-scale transboundary environmental issues that impact the societies, economies, and ecosystems. Thanks to its large areas’ data collection and high-frequency capabilities Earth Observation, in particular, has become a powerful tool to monitor the terrestrial environment and manage environmental disasters as it be addressed in this article.

Satellite technologies have been used to understand climate change better to find solutions to mitigate its deteriorating consequences, such as hurricanes, droughts, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, wildfire, and floods. Scientists relied upon various observation systems and satellite technologies, networks of weather balloons, buoys, and thermometer, to collect climate change’s evidence from the depths of the oceans to the top of Earth’s atmosphere. For instance, EO is relied upon to map the greenhouse gases. Earth Observation (EO) monitors the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration, the second most abundant greenhouse gas component after water vapor, satellite monitored through water management, and weather forecast [1]. Public and private entities harnessed spectroscopy and satellites to monitor externalities data from various sources.

Oct 4, 2020

A new technique for the production of plasmonics devices

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, particle physics

Research laboratories are constantly developing new materials that are expected to exhibit novel properties bound to revolutionize this or that technology. But it’s not enough to simply create these materials; scientists also need to find efficient methods of processing and fine-tuning them.

Moreover, composites are often made via the addition of nanoparticles into a base matrix, which is why it is necessary to find a way of manipulating the location, size, and concentration rate of these particles that would exclude even the smallest deviations that are invisible to the human eye.

Researchers from ITMO University have improved on the technique of local processing of composites based on nanoporous glass with addition of silver and copper. Now, it is possible to predict with high accuracy the optical properties of a plasmonic component during its treatment.