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Oct 4, 2020

DARPA’s SIGMA Program Transitions to Protect Major U.S. Metropolitan Region

Posted by in categories: biological, biotech/medical, chemistry, terrorism, transportation

On a blustery winter day last December, a car carrying radioactive material approached one of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s major transportation hubs. As the car got closer, an alarm flashed and sounded on a large monitor in the police operations center, identifying on a digital map the exact location of the vehicle and the specific radioactive isotope radiating from the car – Cesium-137. Within minutes, officers in the Port Authority Police Department – equipped with vehicle-mounted and pocket-sized radiation sensors displaying the same real-time digital map – tracked the vehicle and apprehended the suspects in a parking lot. Thankfully, the potential terrorists and radiation-emitting isotope were not a threat, as the scenario was only a drill.

The December exercise marked the capstone for DARPA’s SIGMA program, culminating a five-year effort to develop and deploy an automated, high-performance, networked radiation detection capability for counterterrorism and continuous city-to-region scale radiological and nuclear threat monitoring. The transition of the radiation-detection system took place prior to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. In the eight months since the SIGMA transition, DARPA has been developing and testing additional sensors under its SIGMA+ effort to detect chemical, biological and explosive threats as well.

“We want to thank the Port Authority for their outstanding support throughout the SIGMA program and their continued support as we test SIGMA+ sensors,” said Mark Wrobel, DARPA program manager in the Defense Sciences Office. “Being able to test and refine the system in the country’s largest metropolitan region was invaluable in taking SIGMA from a research project to an operationally deployed system in just five years.”

Oct 4, 2020

A DARPA-Funded Implantable Biochip to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Markets by 2021

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, health

An experimental new vaccine claims to be able to change human DNA and could be deployed against COVID-19 by 2021 through a biochip implant.


The most significant scientific discovery since gravity has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade and its destructive potential to humanity is so enormous that the biggest war machine on the planet immediately deployed its vast resources to possess and control it, financing its research and development through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and HHS’ BARDA.

The revolutionary breakthrough came to a Canadian scientist named Derek Rossi in 2010 purely by accident. The now-retired Harvard professor claimed in an interview with the National Post that he found a way to “reprogram” the molecules that carry the genetic instructions for cell development in the human body, not to mention all biological lifeforms.

Continue reading “A DARPA-Funded Implantable Biochip to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Markets by 2021” »

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

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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.