Recent Warfare Technologies

[a_majoor]

Laser trucks. This is the 21rst century, after all:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/us-army-mounts-high-energy-laser-on-big.html

US Army mounts high energy laser on a big truck for anti-mortar and anti-drone defense

Tweet The Army used a vehicle-mounted high-energy laser for the first time to successfully engage more than 90 mortar rounds and several unmanned aerial vehicles in flight.

The Army High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator, or HEL MD, underwent multiple test events between Nov. 18 and Dec. 10, at White Sands Missile Range.

This was the first full-up demonstration of the HEL MD in the configuration that included the laser and beam director mounted in the vehicle, according to officials of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command. They said a surrogate radar, the Enhanced Multi Mode Radar, supported the engagement by queuing the laser.

The HEL MD is being developed to show directed-energy force-protection capabilities against rockets, artillery and mortars, known as RAM. It is also intended to protect against unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs, and cruise missiles.

Mortars travel at low velocities for short ranges in high-arching trajectories. These weapons, as well as UAVs, are representative of the threat encountered by U.S. and allied forces on the battlefield, officials said.

Initial system effectiveness was proven through low- and medium-power test demonstration that took place in 2011. High-power testing has now concluded at the High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility on White Sands Missile Range.

The demonstration and testing confirms the capability of a mobile solid-state laser weapon system to counter mortars, UAVs, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensors mounted on the UAVs, officials said.

The recent testing utilized a 10-kilowatt class laser. In the future, a 50-kW class laser will be integrated into the HEL MD platform, officials said. The 50-kW laser is scheduled to be upgraded to a 100-kW class laser in subsequent demonstrations, they added.

The supporting thermal and power subsystems will also be upgraded to support the increasingly powerful solid-state lasers, according to USASMDC/ARSTRAT officials. They said these upgrades will increase the effective range of the laser or decrease required lase time on target.

 

[a_majoor]

Darpa cracks the incompatible radios problem. Having experienced this myself, I am glad something has finally emerged. Wonder how they handle the bandwidth issue since this is supposed to be a "backbone" for all kinds of data transmission:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/12/connecting-warfighters/

Darpa Cracks Radio Incompatibility Problem Once and for All
By Allen McDuffee12.16.139:30 AM

After more than 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s research group has announced a new system that could help U.S. troops and multinational forces communicate  — a problem that frequently plagued the countries’ cooperation in the field.

Darpa’s nearly-completed Mobile Ad-Hoc Interoperability Gateway (MAINGATE) is said to overcome the “technical incompatibility between communications systems [that] can hinder information sharing and timely command and control decisions.” The latest version of the system will soon make its way to Afghanistan, even as U.S. forces draw down.

“MAINGATE is designed to be a potent communications force multiplier for joint and combined forces,” said Keith Gremban, DARPA program manager, in a statement. “From a radio perspective, MAINGATE allows coalition forces to plug in their own radio systems and MAINGATE takes the necessary steps so everyone can communicate in real time.”

Darpa has been developing MAINGATE since 2008, awarding Raytheon an initial $155 million contract in 2009 to make the concept into a reality. Certain elements of the project have already been used into U.S. Army systems.

The system relies on two technologies to provide an interoperable network for connecting forces. A high capacity Wireless IP Network (WIPN) radio provides a “terrestrial ‘Everything over IP’ backbone” with enough capacity to simultaneously support many channels of voice, video and data. The second is MAINGATE’s Interoperability Gateway, which provides interconnectivity for otherwise incompatible communications equipment. According to Raytheon, MAINGATE provides 10 megabits per second to a network of as many as 128 nodes that could include drones, ships, bases and vehicles on the ground.

“We’re transitioning a proven capability that can be kept up to date with the latest IP technology standards,” said Gremban. “Just as a smartphone offers the capability to do more than make phone calls, MAINGATE is much more than a radio—it’s a backbone architecture enabling video, data and voice sharing among a diversity of networks and devices.”

According to Darpa, MAINGATE is designed to accommodate upgrades with future technologies, so that the system stays as current as the latest commercial IP-based communication tools to provide the most advanced capabilities to front-line troops.

Afghanistan will likely not be the only opportunity the Pentagon has to deploy MAINGATE, and Darpa also points out that it could support emergency first responders where multiple agencies and organizations often have incompatible communications systems.

 

[a_majoor]

Progress on the idea of "flying trucks". It isn't particularly elegant to look at, but as a niche vehicle may have some useful applications:

https://www.advancedtacticsinc.com/advanced-tactics-unveils-the-at-transformer/

Advanced Tactics Unveils the AT Transformer:
The Future of Roadable VTOL Aircraft and Modular Cargo Systems

Posted on January 8, 2014
EL SEGUNDO, California, 8 January 2014 – Advanced Tactics Inc., a small aerospace company, released details about its AT Transformer vehicle technology and announced that a full-scale technology demonstrator has completed its first driving tests.


The AT Black Knight Transformer, the world’s first roadable VTOL aircraft. It is designed to be a low-cost rapid response ambulance to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield or transport cargo.

The AT Transformer technology makes possible the world’s first roadable, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft. The patented AT Transformer technology combines the capabilities of a helicopter, such as the ability to take off and land anywhere, with the capabilities of an off-road automobile. The first technology demonstrator, the AT Black Knight Transformer, completed driving tests in December 2013 in Southern California and is scheduled to fly in early 2014.


The AT Black Knight Transformer technology demonstrator (top) and the AT Black Knight Transformer operational concept vehicle (bottom) with turbo diesel engines.

Advanced Tactics began work on the AT Black Knight Transformer in 2010. The Black Knight Transformer is designed for autonomous casualty evacuation and manned or unmanned cargo resupply missions. Its unmanned capabilities keep pilots out of harm’s way, making it the safest casualty evacuation option. The interior volume is comparable to a Blackhawk helicopter, making it well-suited for cargo missions as well. In 2012, Advanced Tactics began work on the AT Panther Transformer, a similar vehicle designed specifically for Special Operations missions. It is a low-cost vehicle that carries two passengers and their gear, is transportable in a CV-22 Osprey cargo hold, and is operable with minimal training. This vehicle is shown below and will be used to transport passengers to a remote location that is inaccessible by traditional air or ground based means.


The Panther concept vehicle (left) and scaled technology demonstrator (right).

Imagine a situation where a soldier has been wounded on the front lines in an urban firefight – he’s being protected by the rest of his squad but he needs to be evacuated immediately or he will die. A nearby base is notified of the casualty and dispatches an AT Black Knight Transformer vehicle to evacuate him. The vehicle autonomously takes off and heads toward the front lines, 20 miles away. The squad is deep in the city and there are no safe landing zones within a half mile radius. Two members of the squad designate a safe landing zone in an open courtyard and wait for the vehicle there.

Once it arrives, it lands and the two soldiers climb inside. The flight engines are stowed and the vehicle enters driving mode. It is manually driven through the narrow streets to the casualty, who is quickly loaded onboard and connected to life support equipment. The vehicle is driven back to the courtyard where it takes off. Several minutes later the wounded soldier arrives at the base where he can be given full medical treatment within the “Golden Hour” after injury. The Black Knight Transformer’s unique air and ground ingress and egress options dramatically reduced the time needed to evacuate the casualty and his life was saved without risking a flight crew or the need for a ground transport.


The Black Knight Transformer technology demonstrator in flight configuration.

The Black Knight and Panther Transformers both utilize the AT Transformer technology, which leverages the simplicity and robustness of a “multicopter” helicopter at a full-scale size. Like the small electric multicopters that are prevalent today, the AT Transformer uses engines with a direct drive connection to prop-rotors. The components of the propulsion system, including the engines and prop-rotors, are low-cost commercially available parts and the aircraft’s structure is made of modular field-replaceable components. Like an electric multicopter, the vehicle is stabilized and controlled by differential thrust between opposing sets of prop-rotors. This design is simple and robust, eliminating the mechanical complexity and cost of the articulated rotor system that stabilizes and controls a conventional helicopter and replacing it with a high-speed computerized feedback control system. Additionally, the configuration negates the need for a tail-rotor or engine transmission. The AT Transformer has the ability to perform controlled engine-out flight in case of a critical component failure.


AT Black Knight Transformer technology demonstrator during driving tests. The engines are stowed along the side of the vehicle to reach a street-legal width.

The design benefits from a large interior volume compared to the overall footprint of the vehicle, which makes it an ideal candidate for unmanned cargo resupply missions as well as civil missions such as package delivery and fire-fighting. Both the Black Knight and the Panther Transformers have automotive suspensions and drive-trains similar to those used in off-road trucks. Large truck tires and shocks provide excellent terrain handling and soften the vehicles’ landings. The wheels are driven by an independent engine and transaxle for speeds up to 70 mph.

The AT Transformer design is highly modular for rapid repair and reconfiguration. For instance, each of the eight propulsion subsystems can be replaced in the field by two people and the payload bay can be changed from casualty evacuation life support equipment to cargo for multi-mission capabilities. Additionally, the modular automobile portion of the vehicle can be replaced with a boat hull or an amphibious hull for water operations.


Four-engine technology evaluation aircraft flown in 2012. It is gas powered and weighs over 2,000 lbs.

The Black Knight and Panther Transformer vehicles have been developed through an iterative prototyping process starting with small scale electric prototypes and moving to the larger internal combustion powered technology demonstration vehicles. The first electric prototypes were flown in 2010 followed by a 2,000 lbs gas-powered vehicle in 2012, shown in Figure 6. A scaled prototype of the Panther vehicle has been tested and the full-scale version is in the early design phase.


AT engineer, Rustom Jehangir, is standing next to the vehicle for scale. He is six feet tall.

The operational concept design of the Black Knight Transformer is a streamlined aircraft that has been optimized for payload carrying and multi-mission capabilities. That vehicle will use turbo diesel engines and aerodynamic enhancements to provide a payload capacity of over 1,000 lbs or five passengers with a 250 nm range. Configured without the ground drivetrain, the aircraft can carry up to 1600 lbs of payload or eight passengers. The aircraft will cruise at a speed of 130 kts and drive at up to 70 mph. This highly capable vehicle will provide a safe, low-cost option for casualty evacuation, medical and cargo resupply, and other military or civil missions.


Black Knight Transformer operational concept design with streamlined aerodynamics and more powerful and efficient turbo diesel engines.

After its first flight, the AT Black Knight Transformer technology demonstrator will enter an iterative testing program leading to a full-capability demonstration in late 2014. Advanced Tactics is interested in collaboration and joint development opportunities for taking this, and other patented AT technologies, into full production.

 

[CougarKing]

Progress on the idea of "flying trucks". It isn't particularly elegant to look at, but as a niche vehicle may have some useful applications:

Speaking of the AT Black Knight Transformer:

Military.com video: AT Black Knight flight model test

 

[GAP]

US military is testing gun that could turn ANYONE into an ace sniper

    Users simply 'tag' their target using a button near the trigger
    Smart rifle can then work out the range and weather conditions before shooting
    Can even send target details to other nearby rifles - and be controlled by an iPad app

By Mark Prigg  16 January 2014
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2540879/US-Military-testing-smart-rifle-automatically-aim-turn-ANYONE-sharp-shooter.html

The US military is testing a radical 'smart rifle' that can automatically aim itself, it has been revealed.

The army is believed to have acquired six $27,000 'smart rifles' from Texas firm Tracking Point.

It uses a built in computer to aim at a target, and can even 'lock on' top targets and automatically track them.

Oren Schauble, a marketing official with the Austin, Texas-based company, confirmed the military bought a handful of them in recent months for evaluation.

The military has purchased several units for testing and evaluation purposes,' he said during an interview with Military​.com at the annual SHOT Show, the country’s largest gun show with 60,000 attendees.

The system includes a Linux-powered computer in the scope with sensors that collect imagery and ballistic data such as atmospheric conditions, cant, inclination, even the slight shift of the Earth’s rotation known as the Coriolis effect.

A laser rangefinder is used by the shooter looking through the scope to identify the target that he or she wants to hit.

The high-tech sight then takes into account humidity, wind and the typical ballistic drop you'd expect from a bullet fired over such a distance.

Once the target has been selected, the scope provides cross-hairs which have to be lined up with the pin that is dropped on the target.

To ensure accuracy, the shooter can not even squeeze the trigger unless the cross-hairs and pin are alined.
more on link

 

[a_majoor]

The USN is moving aggressively towards energy weapons (railguns and lasers). While the article suggests that missiles will be de emphasized, I think they actually fill a useful "middle ground" between long range projectiles fired from railguns and intense, short range engagements using lasers:

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/01/10/future-destroyers-likely-to-fire-lasers-rail-guns.html

Future Destroyers Likely to Fire Lasers, Rail Guns
Jan 10, 2014 | by Kris Osborn

The Navy is in the early phases of starting research to determine what kind of hull, ship defenses, propulsion technology and weapons systems will be engineered for a new class of DDG Flight IV destroyers to begin service in the 2030s.
Capt. Mark Vandroff, program manager for DDG 51 acquisition, cautioned that predicting what the Navy will build in 17 years is difficult, but it's a conversation that has to start early in order to deliver the ship the Navy needs.

Although the conversations regarding DDG Flight IV configurations are preliminary and likely to change as various technologies mature, lasers and electromagnetic rail guns are figuring prominently in the early discussions, Vandroff said.
Part of the discussion includes the business of war and the costs of ship defense systems.

"Some of the thinking involves senior leaders talking about getting on the other side of the cost curve. Right now if someone shoots a missile at us, we shoot a missile back at them. The missile we shoot at them cost about as much, if not more, than the missile that got shot at us. They are burning money and we are burning money to defend ourselves," he added.

A directed energy weapon or rail gun, however, might be able to offer an effective deterrent or ship defense system at a fraction of the cost of a missile, Vandroff said.

"The down side is this kind of technology does not exist today and even if it does, you have to look at what kind of maritime platform could you put it on and what that would look like. When that technology starts to get close to mature, then you will see the Navy start to figure out what it has to do in order to field that technology," he said.

The Navy is progressing with laser and rail gun technology. Senior Navy officials have routinely talked about plans for the service's Laser Weapons System, or LaWS, a high-energy, solid-state directed energy weapon slated to deploy this year aboard the USS Ponce, a transport dock.
"We're taking the laser weapon system prototype to sea this year. We are hoping to develop a system that we can produce and install aboard future warships," said Navy spokesman Chris Johnson.

The idea with LaWS is to deploy a low-cost, high-energy offensive and defensive weapon against a range of potential threats, including Unmanned Aircraft Systems, fast-attack boats and small-boat swarm attacks.

The Navy also plans to test a ship-mounted electromagnetic rail gun on Navy vessels, service officials said. The rail gun, which can hit ranges of 100 miles or more, uses electricity stored on the ship to generate a high-speed electromagnetic pulse sufficient to propel a kinetic energy warhead. The result is an inexpensive, high-impact and long-range offensive weapon, service officials said.

The Navy, which has been testing the rail gun at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., plans to integrate it aboard a ship by 2016, Johnson said.

The rail gun's hyper-velocity projectile can also be fired from standard Navy 5-inch guns as well as 155mm Howitzers, service officials said.
At the moment, Navy destroyers, carriers and cruisers are designed to have a kinetic interceptor layered ship defense system comprised of sensors, radar and various interceptor missiles.

The DDG Flight IV program, now in its infancy, is planned as an upgrade to the Navy's current Flight III destroyer program slated to being construction in 2016. Overall, the Secretary of the Navy's long-range shipbuilding plan calls for construction of 22 Flight III DDGs, Vandroff explained.
Flight III destroyers will be engineered with a series of technological improvements when compared to the current Flight IIA ships. For instance, the Flight IIIs will be configured with a next-generation Air and Missile Defense Radar, or AMDR, a radar that is 30 to 35 times more powerful than existing ship radar systems, such as the current SPY-1D, he said.

"You can see something one-half the size and twice as far away," Vandroff added.

 

[a_majoor]

This article is even more interesting when read after reading about the huge weight gains in the LAV 6.0 program. While materials like this might not make the best armour, using materials less dense than water but as strong as steel in structural members could deliver a big "diet" for vehicles and other structures. Logistical follow on effects such as lower fuel consumption and the ability to use roads and tracks which cannot support the weight of heavier vehicles (or heavy loads carried on vehicles) also make this a promising technology to watch:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/new-laser-printed-material-is-lighter-than-water-as-strong-as-steel/

New laser-printed material is lighter than water, as strong as steel
An internal structure like that of bone keeps the material porous but tough.

by Akshat Rathi - Feb 3 2014, 4:07pm EST

Materials shape human progress—think Stone Age or Bronze Age. The 21st century has been referred to as the molecular age, a time when scientists are beginning to manipulate materials at the atomic level to create new substances with astounding properties.

Taking a step in that direction, Jens Bauer, at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and his colleagues have developed a bone-like material that is less dense than water but as strong as some forms of steel. "This is the first experimental proof that such materials can exist," Bauer said.

Material world

Since the Industrial Revolution, our demand for new materials has outstripped supply. We want these materials to do many different things, from improving the speed of computers to withstanding the heat when entering Mars' atmosphere. However, a key feature of most new materials remains in their strength and stiffness—that is, how much load can they carry without bending or buckling.

All known materials can be represented quite neatly in one chart (where each line means the strength or density of the material goes up 10 times):

The line in the middle at 1000kg/m3 is the density of water—all materials to its left are lighter than water, and those on the right are heavier. Few fully dense solid materials are lighter than water. Those that are tend to be porous, like wood or bone, and they exhibit exquisite structures when observed under a microscope, and they served as inspiration for Bauer's work.

For many years, material scientists have long thought that some empty areas on the compressive strength-density chart should be filled by materials that theory predicts. Computer simulations could be used to indicate an optimum microstructure that would give a material the right properties. However, nobody had tools to build materials with defined patterns at the scale of a human hair.

With recent developments in lasers and 3D printing, however, a German company called Nanoscribe started offering lasers that could do just what Bauer wanted. Nanoscribe's system involves the use of a polymer that reacts when exposed to light and a laser that can be neatly focused on a tiny spot with the help of lenses.

A drop of a honey-like polymer is placed on a glass slide and the laser is turned on. A computer-aided design is fed into the system, and the slide carefully moves such that the laser’s stationary focus touches only those points where the material is to be made solid. Once complete, the extra liquid is washed away, leaving behind materials with intricate internal structures.

However, these materials on their own are not as strong as Bauer wanted. So he coats them with a thin layer of alumina (aluminium oxide) before subjecting them to stress tests. Based on the tests, he was able to improve the theoretical models he used to design the internal structure of the materials. Their results were just published in PNAS.

Stress test on honeycomb-structured material.

Even though alumina layers increase the density of these materials, all of them remain lighter than water. Bauer's strongest material has a specific honeycomb internal structure and is coated with a 50 nanometer-thick (billionth of a meter) layer of alumina. It beats all natural and man-made materials that are lighter than 1000kg/m3, being able to withstand a load of 280MPa (mega pascals is a unit of measuring pressure), which makes it as strong as some forms of steel.

There are limitations. Nanoscribe's system can only make objects that are tens of micrometers in size. "One of their newer machines can make materials in the millimeter-range, but that's about it for now" he added. But that is not enough for any real-life application.

However, there have been rapid improvements in all the areas this work relies on: 3D printing, new polymers, and laser technology. That means we may soon have a suite of new, super lightweight materials for everything from skis to aircraft parts. If nothing else, Bauer’s work shows that we are definitely in the molecular age.The Conversation

PNAS, 2014. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1315147111 (About DOIs).

This article was originally published at The Conversation.

Correction: There are some fully-dense solid materials lighter than water. The text has been modified to reflect that.

 

[a_majoor]

The use of robotics to dispense drugs may have useful implications for us as well in terms of cost and quality control. This is somewhat related to the ideas that drive Amazon.com's warehouse delivery model; really the only difference between something like that and implementing a military model would be the final delivery of the item, package or medicines would be via the CQ rather than the USPS or FedEX.

http://www.wired.com/design/2014/02/pillpack-uses-design-thinking-become-pharmacy-future/

A Drug-Dealing Robot That Upends the Pharmacy Model
BY JOSEPH FLAHERTY02.14.146:30 AM

For $20 a month, PillPack will deliver prescription drugs to patients with the efficiency of Amazon Prime.
PILLPACK

For all the emphasis on design in the business world, there are entire classes of objects and experiences that feel stuck in time. Take a trip to the pharmacy—you wait in line, peruse the latest celebrity scandal in US Weekly, ponder whether peanut M&M’s purchased at the pharmacy count as health food, and pray that no embarrassing instructions accompany your meds.

A startup pharmacy called PillPack hopes to change this archaic process. For $20 a month, PillPack will deliver prescription drugs to patients with the efficiency of Amazon Prime. Pillpack came to life thanks to a new incubator program at the famed design consultancy IDEO and the core of their service is a small blue box that organizes all of your med into “dose packets,” little plastic baggies marked with the date and time they’re to be taken. A jumble of amber bottles are replaced by an efficient to-do list made of drugs.

‘CVS’s iPad app is a 3-D representation of their store. In one fell swoop it shows everything wrong with pharmacy and software.’
This simple innovation makes life easier for seniors who can be a bit forgetful and have difficulty with bottles. Younger patients with active lifestyles and chronic diseases can just pull as many packets as they need and go. The trail of empty packets means there is never any doubt about missed doses, and each order comes with a custom infographic that shows a full color picture of each pill, explains what it does, and clarifies any special instructions. Ointments, inhalers, and other non-pill products are included in the box as well. All told, PillPack means you’ll never have to help your grandma sort pills into a tacky day-of-the-week organizer again.

Despite being a mail-order operation, PillPack is a licensed pharmacy, just like CVS or Walgreens, and serves patients in 31 states. They accept most major insurance plans, as well as Medicare Part D, and customer service is available 24/7. Switching prescriptions only takes a few minutes on their website and patients as young as 12 and as old as 88 have been testing the service for the past few months. Unlike brick and mortar pharmacies, they don’t carry cigarettes or homeopathic “treatments,” but otherwise the experience is just like going to your local drug store.

Meet the Drug-Dealing Robots

The technical backbone of PillPack is a suite of drug-dealing robots. A large, beige machine in PillPack’s New Hampshire office is filled with a cornucopia of curatives which are dispensed into the plastic packets. The strip of dose packs is then fed through another robot that reviews each plastic packet for quality control purposes before a team of pharmacists double check the prescriptions and send them off to patients.

TJ Parker is the co-founder and CEO of PillPack and a second-generation pharmacist who spent his high school years working for his father. His dad used similar robots to deliver drugs to hospitals and assisted living centers, but the younger Parker realized that with a few design modifications the pill packs would be an ideal consumer product.

Big Problems Require New Kinds of Designers

Parker attended the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, which happened to share a dining hall with MassArt, the state’s art school. “I was sitting in the cafeteria and said, ‘Wait, these are my people; I should be here.’” He registered for as many classes as possible, and like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey even took a class on pattern making for clothes. Despite the creative coursework and his Warby Parker glasses, Parker isn’t your typical designer. His talent is an ability to reorganize the disparate parts of a complex and often dysfunctional system, and less of an ability to create pixel perfect artworks in Photoshop.

The life-saving text is presented in a full-color, large format, easy-to-read infographic.
Take the labeled dose packets at the core of the service. “A lot of pharmacists put everything they can on the labels,” says Parker. “Our design contribution was taking as much off of as possible.” The machine that prints them has serious limitations—pharmacists can select 8 or 16 point fonts, but can’t spec more design-y elements, like a font from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Instead of squeezing the life-saving text onto a small label, it’s presented in a full-color, large format, easy-to-read infographic.

By focusing on a mail-order model, PillPack only needs to stock the medications its customers are actually buying. Moreover, retail pharmacies often have to repackage drugs if no one has claimed them at the counter after two weeks. It’s a law to prevent fraud, but because PillPack is sending the pills directly to the customer, they can operate more efficiently. “If you go through a retail pharmacy there are 15 active ingredients, and they make two aisles of products from them that everyone thinks are completely different,” says Parker. “It’s totally insane.”

pillpack-inline

A jumble of amber bottles are replaced by an efficient to-do list made of drugs. Photo: PillPack
Most designers can kvetch about terrible clients, but most of Parker’s difficulties stem from having to navigate the byzantine system of rules and regulations that govern pharmacies. For instance, in order for PillPack to serve South Carolina, Parker had to appear in-person before the state’s Board of Pharmacy. The process ended up taking all of five minutes, but is evidence of a system created before the advent of the internet.

Parker also believes pharmacists should have personalities. By using robots to pack pills, his team of pharmacists can spend more time on the phone with customers. When he discovered pills to treat Obsessive Compulsive Disorder were packed in a chaotic jumble, he posted the picture to Reddit. Hoping to learn about how people currently manage their pills, he propagated the hashtag #MedGyver to see how doctors, nurses, and patients cleverly deliver care. “Most pharmacists could do a lot more if they were given the tools and regulatory environment to do so,” says Parker.

Enter IDEO

Despite his desire to get his hands dirty designing, Parker knew that his skills weren’t commensurate with the task at hand. In return for equity in the company, IDEO’s Boston office incubated the startup, providing key feedback on everything from the sign up experience on the website to the packaging details while the company was at its formative stage.

According to Parker, the experience of working with the legendary design firm was immensely helpful, but didn’t lead to a dramatic reinvention of the service. The product doesn’t look much different than it did when PillPack first entered IDEO’s studio, but the site has become far better focused. In the original version, the bulk of the content focused on the inventive packaging—a rookie mistake in the world of human-centered design. “People didn’t grok that we were a pharmacy or that we replace your pharmacy, which seems relatively obvious, but took some work to get there,” says Parker. “They also helped reduce the signup process from about 10 screens to three.”

PillPack is designed to serve patients of all ages, but Parker is uncompromising to his commitment to design at all levels. “We got a lot of feedback that said the design doesn’t look like it’s for old people,” says Parker. “Even if people don’t seek out nice things, they still appreciate them, and it would be a travesty if people didn’t get to experience good design in all facets of their life.”

PillPack will surely win a bevy of design awards, but the big question is if anyone will use it.

The Future of Pill-Popping

Despite its size, the pharma industry has seen little innovation in consumer experience over the last few decades. Target shook up the pharmacy in 2007 with the debut of its ClearRX bottle which traded in the cylindrical form for a wedge-shaped design. GlowCaps was an interesting solution that tried to link pill bottles to the internet, but flopped as no one wanted to pay for the product. Parker hopes his product can succeed where others have failed. “In my opinion, for maintenance medications it’s a better experience if they show up automatically and pre-sorted,” he says.

Established giants Walgreen’s and CVS have gotten into the digital realm, but Parker isn’t too worried about them squelching his startup. “CVS’s new iPad app was literally a 3-D representation of their store,” he says. “In one fell swoop it shows everything wrong with pharmacy and software.”

PillPack will surely win a bevy of design awards, but the big question is if anyone will use it. The dose packets look cool, and the service discards the unpleasantness of retail pharmacy like so much wadded up cotton in an aspirin bottle, but will it be enough? It may sound crazy, but nearly a quarter of people who suffer a heart attack never pick up their prescriptions at the pharmacy. The cost of patient’s not using prescribed medications costs more than $290 million a year. Will a modern sensibility and the Amazon-esqe efficiency really be enough to change this suicidal behavior?

Even if patients are non-compliant, PillPack has revealed the massive potential of combining design thinking and the drug market. Big pharma is boring to many, yet the opportunity for designers to make an impact on healthcare and a company’s bottom line is staggering.

For instance, sales of Abilify, a drug used to treat depression, accounts for sales of about $6.4 billion per year versus $5.3 billion spent on digital music downloads. Put another way, one pharma product is bigger than the entire digital music industry. Think of all the energy focused on designing better music experiences—Pandora and Spotify, Beats by Dre and Jawbone, not to mention Apple’s contributions—compared to the underserved world of pharma products.

PillPack is one, but far from the only, possible improvement. Figuring out ways to dispense enemas might not be as glamorous as designing an app to better appreciate Eminem, but it’s a lot more important.

Joseph Flaherty
Joseph Flaherty writes about design, DIY, and the intersection of physical and digital products. He designs award-winning medical devices and apps for smartphones at AgaMatrix, including the first FDA-cleared medical device that connects to the iPhone.

 

[a_majoor]

The IDF is now working to include high energy lasers in their arsenal to target inching missiles, shells and UAV's. Note how this is part of a comprehensive and integrated system, which would have to be ruggedized and made portable to work as a counter to AA/AD (Anti-Access/Area Denial) systems seeking to use the same missile and aircraft/UAV/UCAV technologies against *Western* force es attempting to launch an operation.

Israel Wants to Use Lasers to Shoot Down Missiles
February 18, 2014 at 4:37:00 PM by Joshua A. Krisch | 5 Comments

Comments
5
Share



One of Israel's Iron Dome batteries, which will work in tandem with the Iron Beam laser system. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

A homemade rocket ignites in the Gaza strip and screams toward a small town in Southern Israel. Warning sirens blare as civilians duck for cover, but miles away the Iron Dome missile defense system has already begun its sweep across the skyline. In a matter of seconds, the Iron Dome locks onto the incoming rocket, fires a missile and strikes home. A mid-air explosion marks a successful interception.

That's how Israel's missile defense system is supposed to work, and the country claims that its web of Iron Dome batteries repels 90 percent of Hamas rocket attacks. But at $100,000 a pop, missile interception isn't cheap. And that's why Israel is investigating lasers. Last week Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd, the company behind the Iron Dome, unveiled its new Iron Beam system, a less expensive and more versatile laser-based addition to Israel's defensive arsenal. The Iron Beam, which could be deployed as early as 2015, will reportedly vaporize short-range rockets, mortars, and even drones using high-kilowatt lasers.

"It's exactly like what you see in Star Wars," Amit Zimmer, a company spokesperson, told the Associated Press. "You see the lasers go up so quickly, like a flash, and the target is finished."  (note: at the sorts of wavelengths and firing rate these weapons use, you probably would not see anything but hear a sharp report as the air slammed back into the path of the laser beam. Frankly, if you did "see" anything, it would be the last thing you ever saw...)

The Iron Beam represents a fifth layer in Israel's comprehensive missile defense system, which is in various stages of completion. Once assembled, the Iron Dome and Iron Beam will work in tandem to stave off short-range and very short-range attacks, respectively, while the David's Sling will take on medium-range rockets and the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 systems will deflect long-range ballistic missiles. Company officials predict that the Iron Beam's lasers will reduce collateral damage on impact and catch close-range rockets that the Iron Dome might have missed.

The United States is working on this kind of laser tech, too. The Army recently announced its High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD), which includes lasers that can zap football-sized mortars out of the sky. And while the HEL MD could be a decade away from deployment, the U.S. Navy is already outfitting ships with its Laser Weapon System (LAWS), a laser cannon that can bore a hole through steel and costs only about $1 to fire.

Rafael Advanced Defense Systems says that the Iron Beam took five years to develop. The Iron Beam is expected to enter service within two to three years, but the company is still working on increasing the laser's power from tens of kilowatts to hundreds, and garnering funds from the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

Over 100 test launches have already seen drones and artillery shells blasted out of the sky by an Iron Beam prototype, but just how accurate and how destructive the laser can be remains to be tested on the battlefield.

Read more: Israel Wants to Use Lasers to Shoot Down Missiles - Popular Mechanics
Follow us: @PopMech on Twitter | popularmechanics on Facebook
Visit us at PopularMechanics.com

 

[a_majoor]

DARPA is working on something similar to a giant "Quadcopter" to carry various sorts of standard modules around. As a sort of logistics flying delivery system it will certainly allow units to operate with more dispersal, and some of the other applications seem pretty obvious. Notably absent in the press release is converting this into some sort of UCAV with a weapons dispenser or pod, but as a flying fire support vehicle able to move with the manoeuvre units, it frees up other airframes for other missions:

http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2014/02/11.aspx

ARES AIMS TO PROVIDE MORE FRONT-LINE UNITS WITH MISSION-TAILORED VTOL CAPABILITIES

February 11, 2014

Unmanned aerial logistics system would bypass ground-based threats and enable faster, more effective delivery of cargo and other essential services in hard-to-reach areas

U.S. military experience has shown that rugged terrain and threats such as ambushes and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) can make ground-based transportation to and from the front lines a dangerous challenge. Combat outposts require on average 100,000 pounds of material a week, and high elevation and impassable mountain roads often restrict access. Helicopters are one solution, but the supply of available helicopters can’t meet the demand for their services, which cover diverse operational needs including resupply, tactical insertion and extraction, and casualty evacuation. 

To help overcome these challenges, DARPA unveiled the Transformer (TX) program in 2009. Transformer aimed to develop and demonstrate a prototype system that would provide flexible, terrain-independent transportation for logistics, personnel transport and tactical support missions for small ground units. In 2013, DARPA selected the Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System (ARES) design concept to move forward.

“Many missions require dedicated vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) assets, but most ground units don’t have their own helicopters,” said Ashish Bagai, DARPA program manager. “ARES would make organic and versatile VTOL capability available to many more individual units. Our goal is to provide flexible, terrain-independent transportation that avoids ground-based threats, in turn supporting expedited, cost-effective operations and improving the likelihood of mission success.”

ARES would center on a VTOL flight module designed to operate as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of transporting a variety of payloads. The flight module would have its own power system, fuel, digital flight controls and remote command-and-control interfaces. Twin tilting ducted fans would provide efficient hovering and landing capabilities in a compact configuration, with rapid conversion to high-speed cruise flight similar to small aircraft. The system could use landing zones half the size typically needed by similarly sized helicopters, enabling it to land in rugged terrain and aboard ships.

It is envisioned that the flight module would travel between its home base and field operations to deliver and retrieve several different types of detachable mission modules, each designed for a specific purpose—cargo pickup and delivery, casualty extraction or airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, for instance. The flight module would have a useful load capability of up to 3,000 pounds, more than 40 percent the takeoff gross weight of the aircraft.

Units could direct the flight modules using apps on their mobile phones or ruggedized tablets. Initially, the system would be unmanned, with a future path towards semi-autonomous flight systems and user interfaces for optionally manned/controlled flight.

ARES is currently in its third and final phase. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works ® is the lead vehicle design and system integration performer for Phase 3 of the program.

# # #

Associated images posted on www.darpa.mil and video posted at www.youtube.com/darpatv may be reused according to the terms of the DARPA User Agreement, available here: http://go.usa.gov/nYr.

 

[a_majoor]

The use of spectrum and especially broadband technology is going to be more important as military systems depend on more remote data feeds, and commanders demand things like video on demand from UAV's and other sorts of imagery. Even the need for a data centre might not be as arduous as you may imagine, nVidia offers a supercomputer that is the same form factor as your average PC tower, and IBM's long term plan is to shrink massive supercomputers to the size of a kitchen garbage can. This may be a promising way of delivering broadband to mobile users:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/02/pcell-wireless-broadband-with-cubic.html#more

pCell wireless broadband with cubic centimeter sized cells around antennas for massively shareable wireless spectrum

  Steve Perlman, the serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who brought us OnLive and WebTV, has announced a new wireless broadband technology called pCell.

The technology will enable full-speed wireless broadband to every mobile device, regardless of how many users are using the same wireless spectrum at once, Perlman promises.

Artemis Networks, has been working on the technology for a long time. Perlman first disclosed the technology, formerly known only as DIDO, a few years ago and is now launching it.

The new pCell technology will enable mobile data users to enjoy fast internet with no congestion, no dead zones, and no weak signals, according to Artemis. With pCell, mobile networking will feel like you’re on a fiber optic network, the company says.

The technology is compatible with standard LTE (Long-Term Evolution) devices such as the iPhone and Android mobile phones.

Under Perlman’s pCell system, interference from the cells is not an issue. Instead of blasting out a dumb signal across a given area, Perlman and his team of researchers have developed a smart transmission system. Their networking equipment locates a device like a smartphone and uses complex mathematical operations to create a unique signal—hence the personal cell idea—just for that device. The upshot of this is that you can place the pCell transmitters anywhere and not worry about their signals bleeding into each other. And instead of sharing a signal, each person gets to tap into close to the full capacity of the transmitter. “We believe this is the largest increase in capacity in the history of wireless technology,” says Perlman. “It’s like the wireless equivalent of fiber-optic cables.”

Artemis Networks is the company Perlman has formed to sell this technology. It’s in the process of putting pCell transmitters on about 350 rooftops in San Francisco, and Perlman is looking to work with a telco or technology company like Google (GOOG) or Microsoft (MSFT) to get a commercial service running in the fourth quarter. “We’ll do San Francisco first and then do New York, Chicago, Dallas, and other congested cities,” says Perlman.

To work properly, a company backing the pCell technology would need to build out a large data center in addition to deploying the transmitters. It’s in the data center where servers constantly crunch away on the algorithms that form the unique wireless stream aimed at each device. As people move about, the servers must keep recalculating and processing a new stream. Perlman expects that a single data center could satisfy the needs of a city like San Francisco.

SOURCES - Venture Beat, Business Week

 

[a_majoor]

While this invention was designed for use in hospital rooms, the ability to rapidly clean and sterilize a zone cold make it an important part of a field hospital's kit. Rooms can be rapidly sterilized and converted for medical use in the field, and the implications for cleaning out medical vehicles should not be overlooked as well.

http://knlive.ctvnews.ca/canadian-invention-to-clean-hospital-rooms-may-save-10-000-lives-a-year-1.1728286

Canadian invention to clean hospital rooms may save 10,000 lives a year

Jordan Chittley, Kevin Newman Live
Published Thursday, March 13, 2014 6:36PM EDT
Last Updated Friday, March 14, 2014 10:20AM EDT

It’s being called a silent epidemic, killing about 8 – 10,000 Canadians each year. Hospital rooms that aren’t able to get completely clean between patients are responsible for people getting what are called hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA, C. difficile and E. coli among other infections. And it isn’t a small problem, it affects about five per cent of patients. But Canadians may just have the solution.

In many hospital rooms when one patient, who may have been in isolation leaves, a cleaning crew goes into the room and uses a lot of elbow grease to get it clean. Staff take down and wash the curtains, remove objects like walkers and then clean the rooms. Even if they remove 99.9 per cent of bacteria, plenty are left behind.

“They have some very good cleaning solutions, but unfortunately these solutions don’t take out all of the bacteria,” says co-inventor of AsepticSure Dr. Michael Shannon to Kevin Newman Live. Shannon has spent his career dealing with infectious diseases and is the former director at Canada’s Centre for Disease Control. “Even if you leave less than one per cent of the bacteria, within eight hours they have all grown back.”
PHOTOS
(Credit: AsepticSure)
(Credit: AsepticSure)
Skip ahead to the 36-minute mark of the video above to see our full interview with Dr. Shannon.

Shannon says he and his co-inventor, Dr. Dick Zoutman looked at this problem and realized that the best case scenario with current practices is to hold the epidemic at current levels. The product is being marketed by the California company Medizone.

“My colleague and I, neither of us are smart enough to figure this out,” Shannon says. “We, by accident, stumbled upon something that happens when you mix ozone…and low-dose peroxide.”

When they did the first test they were sure they did something wrong because they got a 100 per cent kill rate. So they patented the solution and now sell it in a machine that basically mists a room with a vapour solution. It is the first product ever to make a hospital room tainted by drug-resistant superbugs “terminal clean.”

A hospital in Belleville, Ont. used it on a contaminated ward and seven months later not a single patient has been infected by MRSA, a bacteria that kills about 2,200 patients in Canada every year.

“It’s an extremely important problem,” says Dr. Andrew Simor of Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, to the National Post. “There is no question that so-called superbugs, antibiotic-resistant organisms, are increasing around the world, despite our best efforts.”

With AsepticSure, all of the removable objects are left in the room. The apparatus is put in the middle, the door sealed off and the vapour turned on.
The major barrier to entry may be the cost – which runs about $129,000. But Shannon says the cost of the machine is covered by the avoidance of eight cases. Cleaner rooms also mean shorter stays in hospitals and lower rates of readmission, which further saves the system money. This machine can also clean a room in a matter of hours as opposed to a matter of days.

He says there is a moral and medical imperative to deal with this problem. “You can’t afford not to do this.”

Read more: http://knlive.ctvnews.ca/canadian-invention-to-clean-hospital-rooms-may-save-10-000-lives-a-year-1.1728286#ixzz2wHZ5Mil0

 

[a_majoor]

Another potential medical breakthrough, using cold and replacing blood with a saline solution to give doctors more time to treat trauma victims. Cooling patients down has been done before with surgery, but not for emergency medicine as far as I know. This sort of technology would be handy at a Role 3, for example:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623.000-gunshot-victims-to-be-suspended-between-life-and-death.html?full=true#.UzTaLdziTLQ

Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death

26 March 2014 by Helen Thomson
Magazine issue 2962.
Doctors will try to save the lives of 10 patients with knife or gunshot wounds by placing them in suspended animation, buying time to fix their injuries

NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time.

Surgeons are now on call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to perform the operation, which will buy doctors time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal.

"We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction," says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. "So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation."

The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. "If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed," says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.

The benefits of cooling, or induced hypothermia, have been known for decades. At normal body temperature – around 37 °C – cells need a regular oxygen supply to produce energy. When the heart stops beating, blood no longer carries oxygen to cells. Without oxygen the brain can only survive for about 5 minutes before the damage is irreversible.

However, at lower temperatures, cells need less oxygen because all chemical reactions slow down. This explains why people who fall into icy lakes can sometimes be revived more than half an hour after they have stopped breathing.

Just before heart and brain surgery, doctors sometimes lower body temperature using ice packs, and by circulating the blood through an external cooling system. This can give them up to 45 minutes in which to stop blood flow and perform surgery. However, the cooling process takes time and can only be done with careful planning and preparation.

When someone reaches an emergency department with a traumatic gunshot injury or stab wound, slow cooling isn't an option. Often their heart has stopped beating due to extreme blood loss, giving doctors only minutes to stop the bleeding and restart the heart. Even if the bleeding can be stopped, it's not like filling up an empty gas tank. Resuscitation exposes the body to a sudden onslaught of oxygen, which can cause tissues to release chemicals that damage cells and cause fatal "reperfusion" injuries.

Finding ways to cool the body until it reaches a state of suspended animation – where people are not alive but not yet dead – could give doctors more time in an emergency.

The technique was first demonstrated in pigs in 2002 by Hasan Alam at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues. The animals were sedated and a massive haemorrhage induced, to mimic the effect of multiple gunshot wounds. Their blood was drained and replaced by either a cold potassium or saline solution, rapidly cooling the body to around 10 °C. After the injuries were treated, the animals were gradually warmed up as the solution was replaced with blood.

Vital signs

The pig's heart usually started beating again by itself, although some pigs needed a jump-start. There was no effect on physical or cognitive function (Surgery, doi.org/dvhdzs).

"After we did those experiments, the definition of 'dead' changed," says Rhee. "Every day at work I declare people dead. They have no signs of life, no heartbeat, no brain activity. I sign a piece of paper knowing in my heart that they are not actually dead. I could, right then and there, suspend them. But I have to put them in a body bag. It's frustrating to know there's a solution."

That solution will be put to the test in humans for the first time. A final meeting this week will ensure that a team of doctors is fully prepared to try it. Then all they have to do is wait for the right patient to arrive.

That person will have suffered a cardiac arrest after a traumatic injury, and will not have responded to attempts to start their heart. When this happens, every member of Tisherman's team will be paged. "The patient will probably have already lost about 50 per cent of their blood and their chest will be open," he says. The team sees one of these cases each month. Their chance of survival is less than 7 per cent.

The first step is to flush cold saline through the heart and up to the brain – the areas most vulnerable to low oxygen. To do this, the lower region of their heart must be clamped and a catheter placed into the aorta – the largest artery in the body – to carry the saline. The clamp is later removed so the saline can be artificially pumped around the whole body. It takes about 15 minutes for the patient's temperature to drop to 10 °C. At this point they will have no blood in their body, no breathing, and no brain activity. They will be clinically dead.

In this state, almost no metabolic reactions happen in the body, so cells can survive without oxygen. Instead, they may be producing energy through what's called anaerobic glycolysis. At normal body temperatures this can sustain cells for about 2 minutes. At low temperatures, however, glycolysis rates are so low that cells can survive for hours. The patient will be disconnected from all machinery and taken to an operating room where surgeons have up to 2 hours to fix the injury. The saline is then replaced with blood. If the heart does not restart by itself, as it did in the pig trial, the patient is resuscitated. The new blood will heat the body slowly, which should help prevent any reperfusion injuries.

The technique will be tested on 10 people, and the outcome compared with another 10 who met the criteria but who weren't treated this way because the team wasn't on hand. The technique will be refined then tested on another 10, says Tisherman, until there are enough results to analyse.

"We've always assumed that you can't bring back the dead. But it's a matter of when you pickle the cells," says Rhee.

Getting this technique into hospitals hasn't been easy. Because the trial will happen during a medical emergency, neither the patient nor their family can give consent. The trial can only go ahead because the US Food and Drug Administration considers it to be exempt from informed consent. That's because it will involve people whose injuries are likely to be fatal and there is no alternative treatment. The team had to have discussions with groups in the community and place adverts in newspapers describing the trial. People can opt out online. So far, nobody has.

Tisherman says he eventually hopes to extend the technique to other conditions.

For now, suspended animation is limited to a few hours. But that's not to say that more lengthy suspension isn't possible (see "Will human hibernation ever happen").

"We're trying to save lives, not pack people off to Mars," says Tisherman. "Can we go longer than a few hours with no blood flow? I don't know. Maybe years from now someone will have figured out how to do it, but it will certainly take time."

Leader: "Medical experiments need consent – even in emergency"

This article will appear in print under the headline "Suspended between life and death"

Will human hibernation ever happen?
Is long-term suspended animation possible? Humans may soon be held at death's door for a few hours (see main story), but what about more lengthy "human hibernation"?

Clues could be found in our genes. The fat-tailed dwarf lemur is the only primate known to hibernate. Its brain might hold clues to the genetic mechanisms behind such metabolic flexibility. Kathrin Dausmann at the University of Hamburg, Germany, who made the discovery with her colleagues in 2004, reckons that humans may have the genes to hibernate, but we just don't switch them on (New Scientist, 21 January 2006, p 28).

Chemicals could also help slow metabolism. Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, and his colleagues have used hydrogen sulphide to put mice into suspended animation for 6 hours. The gas slows the metabolism by limiting oxygen uptake by cells. They are now studying a metabolism-decreasing chemical found naturally in the body.

It may all be down to economics, says Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona. "When I was in medical school, 5 minutes of brain death and you were dead. Now we can increase that to hours. With the time and money, maybe we could start to think about extending [suspended animation] to months and years."

 

[a_majoor]

Crowdsourcing intelligence? A seemingly strange idea seems to work:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent

So You Think You're Smarter Than A CIA Agent
   
by Alix Spiegel
 
April 02, 2014 3:55 AM ET

The morning I met Elaine Rich, she was sitting at the kitchen table of her small town home in suburban Maryland trying to estimate refugee flows in Syria.

It wasn't the only question she was considering; there were others:

Will North Korea launch a new multistage missile before May 10, 2014?

Will Russian armed forces enter Kharkiv, Ukraine, by May 10? Rich's answers to these questions would eventually be evaluated by the intelligence community, but she didn't feel much pressure because this wasn't her full-time gig.

"I'm just a pharmacist," she said. "Nobody cares about me, nobody knows my name, I don't have a professional reputation at stake. And it's this anonymity which actually gives me freedom to make true forecasts."

Rich does make true forecasts; she is curiously good at predicting future world events.

Better Than The Pros

For the past three years, Rich and 3,000 other average people have been quietly making probability estimates about everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics as part of the Good Judgment Project, an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community.

According to one report, the predictions made by the Good Judgment Project are often better even than intelligence analysts with access to classified information, and many of the people involved in the project have been astonished by its success at making accurate predictions.

When Rich, who is in her 60s, first heard about the experiment, she didn't think she would be especially good at predicting world events. She didn't know a lot about international affairs, and she hadn't taken much math in school.

But she signed up, got a little training in how to estimate probabilities from the people running the program, and then was given access to a website that listed dozens of carefully worded questions on events of interest to the intelligence community, along with a place for her to enter her numerical estimate of their likelihood.

"The first two years I did this, all you do is choose numbers," she told me. "You don't have to say anything about what you're thinking, you don't have to justify your numbers. You just choose numbers and then see how your numbers work out."

Rich's numbers worked out incredibly well.

She's in the top 1 percent of the 3,000 forecasters now involved in the experiment, which means she has been classified as a superforecaster, someone who is extremely accurate when predicting stuff like:

Will there be a significant attack on Israeli territory before May 10, 2014?

The Superforecasters

In fact, she's so good she's been put on a special team with other superforecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.

Rich and her teammates are that good even though all the information they use to make their predictions is available to anyone with access to the Internet.

When I asked if she goes to obscure Internet sources, she shook her head no.

"Usually I just do a Google search," she said.

And that raises this question:

How is it possible that a group of average citizens doing Google searches in their suburban town homes can outpredict members of the United States intelligence community with access to classified information?

How can that be?

Lessons From A Dead Ox

"Everyone has been surprised by these outcomes," said Philip Tetlock, one of the three psychologists who came up with the idea for the Good Judgment Project. The other two are Barbara Mellers and Don Moore.

For most of his professional career, Tetlock studied the problems associated with expert decision making. His book Expert Political Judgment is considered a classic, and almost everyone in the business of thinking about judgment speaks of it with unqualified awe.

All of his studies brought Tetlock to at least two important conclusions.

First, if you want people to get better at making predictions, you need to keep score of how accurate their predictions turn out to be, so they have concrete feedback.

But also, if you take a large crowd of different people with access to different information and pool their predictions, you will be in much better shape than if you rely on a single very smart person, or even a small group of very smart people.

"The wisdom of crowds is a very important part of this project, and it's an important driver of accuracy," Tetlock said.

The wisdom of crowds is a concept first discovered by the British statistician Francis Galton in 1906.

Galton was at a fair where about 800 people had tried to guess the weight of a dead ox in a competition. After the prize was awarded, Galton collected all the guesses so he could figure out how far off the mark the average guess was.

It turned out that most of the guesses were really bad — way too high or way too low. But when Galton averaged them together, he was shocked:

The dead ox weighed 1,198 pounds. The crowd's average: 1,197.

Finding The True Signal

"There's a lot of noise, a lot of statistical random variation," Tetlock said. "But it's random variation around a signal, a true signal, and when you add all of the random variation on each side of the true signal together, you get closer to the true signal."

In other words, there are errors on every side of the mark, but there is a truth at the center that people are responding to, and if you average a large number of predictions together, the errors will end up canceling each other out, and you are left with a more accurate guess.

That is the wisdom of the crowd.

The point of the Good Judgment Project was to figure out if what was true for the dead ox is true for world events as well.

It is.

In fact, Tetlock and his team have even engineered ways to significantly improve the wisdom of the crowd — all of which greatly surprised Jason Matheny, one of the people in the intelligence community who got the experiment started.

"They've shown that you can significantly improve the accuracy of geopolitical forecasts, compared to methods that had been the state of the art before this project started," he said.

What's so challenging about all of this is the idea that you can get very accurate predictions about geopolitical events without access to secret information. In addition, access to classified information doesn't automatically and necessarily give you an edge over a smart group of average citizens doing Google searches from their kitchen tables.

How Will It Be Used?

Matheny doesn't think there's any risk that it will replace intelligence services as they exist.

"I think it's a complement to methods rather than a substitute," he said.

Matheny said that though Good Judgment predictions have been extremely accurate on the questions they've asked so far, it's not clear that this process will work in every situation.

"There are likely to be other types of questions for which open source information isn't likely to be enough," he added.

In a couple of weeks, the Good Judgment Project will start recruiting more forecasters for its experiment, and Elaine Rich, the suburban Maryland pharmacist, thinks more people like her should give it a shot.

"Health care people are not likely to be involved in international forecasting," she said. "But I have a feeling that many of them would be good at it."

 

[a_majoor]

Google looks to modular smart phone chassis. This sort of technology should also be imported for military use, next generation devices "should" have similar form factors as smart phones or "Phablets" (Think Samsung Galaxy series phones) both for portability and to make use familier and easy for the users. A Smartphone like device in a militarized case would still be miles ahead of a 522 radio in versatility and ease of use.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/04/googles-modular-smartphone-will-be-like.html#more

Google's Modular smartphone will be like an update to the motherboard and addin card model of IBM PCs

Google thinks modularity may succeed now thanks to the shrinking cost and size of the underlying electronics and because innovation in conventional mobile hardware is slowing down. Also, by fostering open hardware innovation in smartphones and other mobile devices, Google believes it could gain footholds for its software and services in fresh markets and fresh industries.

“We believe that the smartphone hardware ecosystem should be, and can be, a lot more like the Android app ecosystem: with a low barrier to entry, lots and lots of developers, and faster, richer innovation,” says Paul Eremenko, a former office head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency who leads the project.

The hardware ecosystem Eremenko envisions would be entirely open. Google would provide the endoskeleton, which has eight rear slots for modules, two front-facing slots for components such as a screen and a button panel, and onboard power and data transmission. Parts could be replaced or upgraded without discarding the rest of the phone, and the finished device could be adapted to serve any number of special functions—professional photography, environmental sensing, medical monitoring—depending on what hardware emerges.

Phone backbone: Google’s Project Ara modular smartphone project starts with an aluminum endoskeleton, roughly the size of an average smartphone, with eight slots for hardware modules. The endoskeleton can send or receive data or power through an onboard network. Google is also working on a larger “phablet” size and a smaller one, roughly the size of typical music players.

The size, power, and weight penalty that comes with making something modular is now under 25 percent, a level that is an acceptable tradeoff for the benefits that flexibility will bring

In January the Chinese smartphone giant ZTE proposed design concepts of quasi-modular phones, called Eco-Mobius. ZTE’s concept is more limited. It allows users to change only four types of components—screen, battery, camera, and a combination of processor and memory—but not to add new kinds of components.

Update from MIT Technology Review:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/525386/why-googles-modular-smartphone-might-actually-succeed/

Why Google’s Modular Smartphone Might Actually Succeed

Google believes open hardware innovation could help it find industries and markets for its software and services.
By David Talbot on April 7, 2014

Phone backbone: Google’s Project Ara modular smartphone project starts with an aluminum endoskeleton, roughly the size of an average smartphone, with eight slots for hardware modules. The endoskeleton can send or receive data or power through an onboard network.  Google is also working on a larger “phablet” size and a smaller one, roughly the size of typical music players.

Why It Matters

The way smartphones are currently designed limits their usefulness and leads to environmental waste.

In a two-story building in an industrial district of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ara Knaian shows off prototypes of what could be the industry’s first completely modular smartphone.

On workbenches sit prototypes of memory modules, battery modules, and processor modules, all designed to slide easily in and out of an aluminum smartphone “endoskeleton.” A prototype infrared imaging lens module for night photography would protrude about a half-inch from the device. Another module would let you read your blood oxygen levels with a swipe of your finger.

Knaian runs a small electrical engineering company called NK Labs, one of the main contractors working on “Project Ara” (which is named after him). By now, though, more than 100 people at a dozen companies are involved in this modular smartphone venture from Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, a division Google retained when it agreed to sell the handset maker to Lenovo earlier this year (see “Why Google Kept Motorola’s Research Lab”).

Hardware modularity has been tried in the phone market before, but the awkward, bulky results fell well short of displacing sleek all-in-one devices that need frequent replacement. In 2007, Modu, an Israeli startup, developed smartphones that fit into electronic jackets to become cameras, fitness trackers, or music players. The idea failed in part because of the proprietary interface but also because of a clunky design and the limited number of available modules. The company folded soon after launching (though Google bought its intellectual property a few years later).

Google thinks modularity may succeed now thanks to the shrinking cost and size of the underlying electronics and because innovation in conventional mobile hardware is slowing down (see “The New Smartphone Incrementalism”). Also, by fostering open hardware innovation in smartphones and other mobile devices, Google believes it could gain footholds for its software and services in fresh markets and fresh industries.

“We believe that the smartphone hardware ecosystem should be, and can be, a lot more like the Android app ecosystem: with a low barrier to entry, lots and lots of developers, and faster, richer innovation,” says Paul Eremenko, a former office head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency who leads the project (his boss, Regina Dugan, was DARPA’s director and now runs ATAP for Google).

The hardware ecosystem Eremenko envisions would be entirely open. Google would provide the endoskeleton, which has eight rear slots for modules, two front-facing slots for components such as a screen and a button panel, and onboard power and data transmission. Parts could be replaced or upgraded without discarding the rest of the phone, and the finished device could be adapted to serve any number of special functions—professional photography, environmental sensing, medical monitoring—depending on what hardware emerges. Though the project is still in the research and development stage, a working prototype is expected to be ready this month.

It’s an alluring idea, but Google will have to persuade both customers and hardware makers to think different.

At least now smartphone components are much smaller and cheaper than they once were. The electropermanent magnets that connect the modules without snaps or hinges and the simple wireless interfaces “help us make modules with as little added complexity, cost, and weight as possible,” Knaian says.

In fact, the size, power, and weight penalty that comes with making something modular is now under 25 percent, a level that is an acceptable tradeoff for the benefits that flexibility will bring, Eremenko argues. “Modular things tend to be brick-like,” he says. “We think we’re at an inflection point where the penalty is down to something that can comport with things that would be beautiful.”

At least one other smartphone maker seems to agree that modularity’s time has come. In January the Chinese smartphone giant ZTE proposed design concepts of quasi-modular phones, called Eco-Mobius. ZTE’s concept is more limited. It allows users to change only four types of components—screen, battery, camera, and a combination of processor and memory—but not to add new kinds of components.

Google may have an easier time convincing buyers to try a modular device if they aren’t yet accustomed to trading in their smartphone every few years. Customers in poorer parts of the world represent the next huge wave of smartphone adopters, and by next year Google hopes to conduct a pilot test of Ara devices with a Wi-Fi module, basic processor and memory, battery, and screen. These are projected to cost $50 apiece to make (the retail price has yet to be determined). Google expects to conduct the test in a South or Central American country where cellular minutes are expensive but Wi-Fi hotspots are common.

For customers to embrace modular hardware, Google will need to convince hardware companies to build a sufficient variety of Ara modules to make the idea of a hardware ecosystem credible and satisfying. Without a proven market, that may prove difficult, but there’s evidence the concept is gaining traction. Some 3,328 registrants—from companies that make medical diagnostics and imaging sensors to those making displays and batteries—have signed up for the first Ara Developers Conference, scheduled for April 15 and 16 in Mountain View, California, says Eremenko.

Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, a San Francisco–based developer of hardware and software modules, says outside hardware makers will be important. “You have to drive enough sales to the third parties” who make the hardware, he says. “They aren’t going to make an investment without that. But Google, being Google, might be able to break through that because of their size.”

Even before Google got into the game, some people were agitating for longer-lasting mobile devices. David Hakkens, a 25-year-old industrial designer based in the Netherlands, leads a community of enthusiasts who want the smartphone industry to change its ways and come up with common designs and interchangeable parts (see “Where Cell Phones Go to Die”). Hakkens and his comrades are actively championing Project Ara. “My main goal is I just want to have a modular phone—and I don’t care who makes it,” he says.

As modular hardware becomes more sophisticated, it could perhaps include custom manufactured components. Google has partnered with the manufacturer 3D Systems in Andover, Massachusetts, to develop high-speed-3-D-printed plastic cases. This customization will allow cases to be manufactured in a wide range of colors and designs chosen by consumers. As the technology advances, the plastic casings could include some electronic components such as printed antennas or batteries.

 

[a_majoor]

Microrobotics demonstrates some of its potential. Swarms of tiny robots could do a huge number of military and para military tasks:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/526601/microrobots-working-together-build-with-metal-glass-and-electronics/

Microrobots, Working Together, Build with Metal, Glass, and Electronics
Tiny robots that work together like ants could lead to a new way to manufacture complex structures and electronics.
By Tom Simonite on April 16, 2014

Why It Matters

Existing mass production technology is inflexible and still relies on humans for many tasks.

Building big: A team of three small, magnetically steered robots worked together to build this structure from toothpick-sized carbon rods.

Someone glancing through the door of Annjoe Wong-Foy’s lab at SRI International might think his equipment is infested by ants. Dark shapes about a centimeter across move to and fro over elevated walkways: they weave around obstacles and carry small sticks.

A closer look makes it clear that these busy critters are in fact man-made. Wong-Foy, a senior research engineer at SRI, has built an army of magnetically steered workers to test the idea that “microrobots” could be a better way to assemble electronics components, or to build other small structures.

Wong-Foy’s robotic workers have already proved capable of building towers 30 centimeters long from carbon rods, and other platforms able to support a kilogram of weight. The robots can work with glass, metal, wood, and electronic components. In one demonstration, they made a carbon truss structure with wires and colored LEDs mixed in to serve as the lab’s Christmas tree.

“We can scale to many more robots at low cost,” says Wong-Foy, who thinks his system could develop into a new approach to manufacturing. Many electronic components are the right size to be handled by his microrobots, he says, and teams of them might prove a good way to lay them out onto circuit boards.

SRI wants to create a version of the microrobot system that could be sold to other research labs and companies to experiment with. “We’ve demonstrated the basic platform and are now looking at how we can transfer out of the lab as a research platform,” says Rich Mahoney, director of robotics at SRI. “You should be able to buy this on the shelf.”

SRI’s microworkers are simple: just small magnetic platforms with simple wire arms on top. They can move only when placed on a surface with a specific pattern of electrical circuits inside. Sending current through the coils beneath exerts a force on the magnets and steers the robots around. Wong-Foy has written software to do that, and used it to choreograph the movement of over 1,000 tiny robots in a complex circulating pattern. That shows it should be possible to have them work in large teams, he says.

The robots’ wire arms are unable to move independently. But creating teams of robots with different types of arms makes it possible to do complex work.

Building a truss structure requires three types of workers. One operates a kind of toothpick dispenser, pushing a lever to release a toothpick-sized carbon rod. Another robot dips its arms into a water trough to put droplets on the ends of its arms, and then uses surface tension to pick up the rod. A third robot visits a glue station, dipping its arms and then applying the glue to the structure under construction. Finally, the robot that picked up the rod presses it into place and waits for an ultraviolet light to switch on to cure the glue. Then it can withdraw to pick up a new rod.

The software controlling the robots can also move the platform they are sitting on. It moves the platform each time a new layer is complete so the robots’ working space stays the same as the structure they’re building grows.

Much like 3-D printing technology, microrobots promise to be a more efficient way to make complex objects in small quantities than conventional mass-production technology, says Mahoney. That’s partly because the microrobots can be reprogrammed to do completely new tasks, and partly because they’re inexpensive. “We sometimes call this megahertz manipulation,” he says. “We can think of manipulation at rates we’re used to seeing in information processing.”

Helping to make circuit boards in small batches for prototyping new electronic devices is one possible application. Hobbyists and small companies working on electronics hardware today make few prototype circuit boards due to the time it takes to assemble them by hand, and the expense and delay of paying for small runs at dedicated plants.

Wong-Foy also thinks his approach might be useful for assembling devices that combine electronic and optical components, for example to interface with fiber optic cables. Because silicon and optical components can’t be processed in the same step, that industry often uses manual assembly to put them together. “In the field of optical electronics people have not found a good way to integrate indium phosphide lasers with silicon components,” says Wong-Foy. “The scale of those things is the size of carbon rods we’re using here.”

 

[acen]

Norwegian army tests virtual-reality headset in tanks

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27292447

Wearing a virtual-reality headset is a new experience for soldiers

The virtual-reality Oculus Rift headset has been put to a novel use by the Norwegian army - helping soldiers to drive tanks.
By mounting cameras on the outside of the tank, soldiers were able to create a 360-degree feed to the Oculus headset, worn by the driver.
The device - still just a prototype - is much cheaper than conventional military camera systems.
But the picture quality is not yet good enough for operational use.
The army began testing the headset in 2013 and in April of this year tried out the latest iteration of the hardware.
"It is a partial success," project leader Maj Ola Petter Odden told the BBC.
"The concept is sound, but the technology isn't quite there yet. The picture quality is good for 10-15m [30-50ft] - but after that it is difficult to distinguish details, for example whether an opponent is carrying a weapon."

Now he plans to wait until next year for further tests.
"There will be better hardware and we can test it again then," he said.
The virtual-reality headset hit the headlines when Facebook bought the company behind it - Oculus VR - for $2bn (£1.1bn) in March.
To date neither has said much about what they plan to do together, but this week Oculus VR chief executive Brendan Iribe talked about hopes "to build a one billion player MMO".
Massively multi-player online games (MMO) using virtual reality (VR) would be the "holy grail" for the technology, he told delegates at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.
Facebook's large audience would help make such a platform possible although such an enormous player base would require a much larger network than existed currently, he said.
And while Oculus is starting off with a big focus in gaming he said that a lot of where VR would go in the next decade would be about "face-to-face communication and social".

 

[a_majoor]

Operators climbing walls like lizards...

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/06/darpa-has-demonstrated-gekko-like-wall.html#more

DARPA has demonstrated Gekko-like wall crawling

  DARPA’s Z-Man program has demonstrated the first known human climbing of a glass wall using climbing devices inspired by geckos. The historic ascent involved a 218-pound climber ascending and descending 25 feet of glass, while also carrying an additional 50-pound load in one trial, with no climbing equipment other than a pair of hand-held, gecko-inspired paddles. The novel polymer microstructure technology used in those paddles was developed for DARPA by Draper Laboratory of Cambridge, Mass.

Historically, gaining the high ground has always been an operational advantage for warfighters, but the climbing instruments on which they’re frequently forced to rely—tools such as ropes and ladders—have not advanced significantly for millennia. Not only can the use of such tools be overt and labor intensive, they also only allow for sequential climbing whereby the first climber often takes on the highest risk.

The goal of the program is to develop biologically inspired climbing aids to enable warfighters carrying a full combat load to scale vertical walls constructed from typical building materials.

“The gecko is one of the champion climbers in the Animal Kingdom, so it was natural for DARPA to look to it for inspiration in overcoming some of the maneuver challenges that U.S. forces face in urban environments,” said Dr. Matt Goodman, the DARPA program manager for Z-Man. “Like many of the capabilities that the Department of Defense pursues, we saw with vertical climbing that nature had long since evolved the means to efficiently achieve it. The challenge to our performer team was to understand the biology and physics in play when geckos climb and then reverse-engineer those dynamics into an artificial system for use by humans.”

Geckos can climb on a wide variety of surfaces, including smooth surfaces like glass, with adhesive pressures of 15-30 pounds per square inch for each limb, meaning that a gecko can hang its entire body by one toe. The anatomy of a gecko toe consists of a microscopic hierarchical structure composed of stalk-like setae (100 microns in length, 2 microns in radius). From individual setae, a bundle of hundreds of terminal tips called spatulae (approximately 200 nanometers in diameter at their widest) branch out and contact the climbing surface.

A gecko is able to climb on glass by using physical bond interactions—specifically van der Waals intermolecular forces—between the spatulae and a surface to adhere reversibly, resulting in easy attachment and removal of the gecko’s toes from the surface. The van der Waals mechanism implied that it is the size and shape of the spatulae tips that affect adhesive performance, not specific surface chemistry. This suggested that there were design principles and physical models derived from nature that might enable scientists to fabricate an adhesive inspired by gecko toes.

Humans, of course, have much more weight to carry than a gecko. One of the initial challenges in developing a device to support human climbing was the issue of scaling: a typical Tokay gecko weighs 200 grams, while an average human male weighs 75 kilograms. To enable dynamic climbing like a gecko at this larger scale required that the engineers create climbing paddles capable of balancing sufficient adhesive forces in both the shear (parallel to the vertical surface) and normal (perpendicular to the vertical surface) directions. That feature is necessary for a climber to remain adhered on a surface without falling off while in the act of attaching and detaching the paddles with each movement.

The Draper Laboratory team was also challenged to create novel micro- and nanofabrication technologies to produce the high-aspect-ratio microstructures found in the gecko toe. In the process of achieving that capability, the Z-Man performers transformed the fundamental design and development of reversible adhesives for potential biomedical, industrial, and consumer applications.

DARPA first demoed the ZMan in 2012.

In 2006, there was a Gekkkomat product but it required suction.

 

[a_majoor]

Creating super strong materials that are 99% air. The logistical effects through massively reduced fuel and energy consumption would be enormous (not just in vehicles, but assembling buildings built out of these materials and virtually anything else that has to be moved, or the reduction in basic material use since there is a 99% reduction in material used to create the structure).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dahz8wYWvos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fRuHGPdDoE

 

[a_majoor]

HP bets the farm on a series of experimental technologies. While the odds are not really in their favour (and HP is also a company in difficulty, so may not be able to sustain this experimental program anyway), it is interesting to see what the predicted performance of these devices is supposed to be.

With massive amounts of memory and processing power embedded in devices the size of today's smartphones, who knows what advanced apps will be possible, or what the effects of having that much processing power in the hands of an ordinary line troop might be?

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/06/hp-will-bet-company-on-combination-of.html#more

HP will bet the company on a combination of memristors and silicon photonics

Hewlett-Packard has kicked off an ambitious project that aims at nothing less than reinventing the basic architecture of computers. It looks like servers are its initial target, but HP is also working on an Android version that it says could lead to smartphones with 100TB of storage.

HP said Wednesday it was working on a new computer architecture, dubbed The Machine, based on memristors and silicon photonics.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports up to 75% of HP’s once fairly illustrious R&D division — HP Labs – are working on The Machine.

In the words of HP Labs, The Machine will be a complete replacement for current computer system architectures. There will be a new operating system, a new type of memory (memristors), and super-fast buses/peripheral interconnects (photonics). Speaking to Bloomberg, HP says it will commercialize The Machine within a few years, “or fall on its face trying.”

The Machine isn’t on HP’s official roadmap. Fink says it could arrive as early as 2017 or take until the end of the decade. Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism given that HP has been hyping the memristor technology for years and failed to meet earlier self-imposed deadlines. “Memristors have been vaporware for a long time,” says David Kanter, a chip analyst and editor of the semiconductor publication Real World Tech.

“Memristors will be fast, dense and cheap enough to play both the ‘soon’ and ‘later’ roles at once, and thereby speed up throughput by eliminating most of the to and fro,” it said.

How dense? “We want you to be able to store your entire life; think of 100 terabytes on your smartphone,” Fink said. That’s more than a thousand times the storage an iPhone 5S has today.

HP is also designing new, application-specific processors for its architecture. It envisions pools of processors and memory chips interconnected with photonic cables, which Fink said will carry data at up to 6TB per second.

Managing the new architecture will require new operating systems. HP is building a Machine OS from scratch, but it’s also developing a version based on Linux and another with Google’s mobile OS.

He didn’t say more about the mobile plans and HP’s near-term focus is likely to be servers. But Paul Teich, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said memristors could potentially replace DRAM and flash in smartphones, reducing their cost and improving performance and battery life.

More than that, with a single memory type, smartphones and tablets could access data in the cloud as easily as if it were on the device itself.

“After The Machine architecture and OS are in place, at some point in the future, the theory is that when you connect a memristor based Android device to a network with high enough bandwidth, it will become a node in a cloud with immediate access to the rest of that cloud,” Teich said. “It’s a different model of looking at device capabilities. Nothing will need to be ‘downloaded’ unless you plan to be disconnected from the larger network.”

“There is a lot of work for HP to marshal for the next few years to make this happen,” he added.