Recent Warfare Technologies

[a_majoor]

New developments in military robotics:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/02/squad-mission-support-systems-in.html

Squad mission support systems in Afghanistan and reviewing all war robots and considering future warbots

1. This is a follow up on the Lockheed Martin’s (LM) Squad Mission Support System (SMSS). The system, which turns a six-wheeled amphibious ATV into a robotic packhorse and charging station, has been subjected to a variety of simulated warzone environments in both remote controlled and fully autonomous modes"

Defensetech.org - Army is sent four of the Lockheed’s Squad Mission Support System (SMSS) robot jeeps to Afghanistan where they’ll haul supplies for troops.

The 11-foot long trucks can carry a half a ton of supplies for up to 125 miles after being delivered to the field in a CH-47 or CH-53 helo.

2. DARPA is developing a highly mobile, semi-autonomous legged robot, the Legged Squad Support System (LS3), to integrate with a squad of Marines or Soldiers.

The LS3 program will design and develop prototypes capable of carrying 400 lbs of payload for 20 miles in 24 hours, negotiating terrain at endurance levels expected of typical squad maneuvers.

3. Executives at the three major suppliers of military robots — iRobot, QinetiQ North America and Remotec — believe that there are still opportunities out there despite the anticipated drawdown, a lack of permanent programs and a Defense Department budget outlook that many have called “grim.”

“There continues to be worldwide demand for this capability,” said Ed Godere, senior vice president for unmanned systems at QinetiQ. “As we see things winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of IEDs as the weapon of choice by insurgents around the world is becoming more prevalent.”

The Navy, the executive agent in charge of developing and procuring bomb disposal robots for all four services, prior to the Iraq War had fielded one large EOD robot: the remote ordnance neutralization system or RONS, which was developed in the 1990s by Remotec, now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. These are 700-pound-plus machines that were mostly envisioned for base security and needed to be towed by a vehicle. The Navy had acquired 270 of them, and upgrades were made during the Iraq war. Their size made them ideal for removing large objects such as artillery shells from the field.

One of the most important developments of the Iraq war was that ground robots eventually proved themselves to be “robust pieces of military equipment with reliability,” he said. That wasn’t the case at the outset. But as the following iterations made their way into the field, they became more durable. Manufacturers also made improvements to controllers, communications links, chassis and other facets.

Another watershed moment came when the infantry adapted them for reconnaissance missions, Dyer said. Soldiers want robots to look around the corners of buildings or inside them before they stick out their heads. As these EOD robots were being fielded, the now defunct Army modernization program, the Future Combat Systems, was working on a ground recon robot. It is one of the few technologies that survived that program’s cancellation, Dyer said.

So-called robotic mules are one such need. The Army is currently fielding unmanned logistics vehicles that can help dismounted troops traveling in Afghanistan’s rough terrain.

A Lockheed Martin-built squad mission support system, a six-wheeled semi-autonomous vehicle weighing 3,800 pounds, has been sent to the field to help troops haul loads in that nation. Other manufacturers such as John Deere, Remotec and QinetiQ are offering logistics robots.

Whether these make the transition to programs of record once that conflict wraps up remains to be seen.

The Iraq War also marked a first when a M249 light machine gun was married to a Talon. In 2007, the Army — responding to urgent requests from battlefield commanders — sent a handful of the armed robots to Iraq. The Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center developed the Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS. Despite the fanfare surrounding this historic event, SWORDS’ 15-minutes of fame came to an end quickly. Senior military leaders were nervous about sending armed robots into war zones, even though a human operator was always in the decision-making loop of when to fire or not fire. It was reported that they were used sparingly in fixed positions, and did not shoot on the move as envisioned.

The Marines so far have shown the most interest in moving armed ground robot programs forward, according to executives. But there are still tactics, techniques and procedures to work out, and perhaps the biggest hurdle of all: cultural acceptance.

Remotec is building the chassis for the Navy’s next-generation bomb disposal robot program, the advanced EOD robot system.

The family of robots is broken into three increments. Increment one, a backpackable robot, will be fielded beginning in 2014. It will replace the iRobot 310 small unmanned ground vehicle. Increment two, the manual transportable robot intended to replace the iRobot MK 1 PackBot and QinetiQ MK 2 Talon, will start deliveries in 2017. Increment three, the largest robot, will replace the 700-pound RONS robots.

“There are countless other security and civilian roles for robots,” Godere said.

QinetiQ has outfitted Bobcat bulldozers with robotic kits for route clearance missions in Afghanistan. That has other applications as well.

“You can start to see the day where a Bobcat could be used to cut a fire break in a forest fire,” he said.

But expanding into the first responder market is tough-going, as the market leader Remotec can attest. Unlike with the military, which buys in large quantities, robots must be sold to local and state first responders one jurisdiction at a time. The agencies mostly rely on federal grants, which can take up to two years to procure.

Dyer warned that U.S. companies are not the only player in the military and first responder robotics world. South Korea, Israel, Singapore, and China are just some of the nations investing heavily in the technology.

 

[a_majoor]

Making swarms of micro robots (or small, intricate mechanisms like sensors and fuses) could be a lot faster and cheaper with this technology:

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/pop-up-flying-robots

In new mass-production technique, robotic insects spring to life
February 15, 2012

Production method inspired by children's pop-up books enables rapid fabrication of tiny, complex devices

CONTACT: Caroline Perry, (617) 496-1351

Cambridge, Mass. - February 15, 2012 - A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet.

Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just microrobots, but a broad range of electromechanical devices.

In prototypes, 18 layers of carbon fiber, Kapton (a plastic film), titanium, brass, ceramic, and adhesive sheets have been laminated together in a complex, laser-cut design. The structure incorporates flexible hinges that allow the three-dimensional product—just 2.4 millimeters tall—to assemble in one movement, like a pop-up book.

The entire product is approximately the size of a U.S. quarter, and dozens of these microrobots could be fabricated in parallel on a single sheet.

"This takes what is a craft, an artisanal process, and transforms it for automated mass production," says Pratheev Sreetharan (A.B. '06, S.M. '10), who co-developed the technique with J. Peter Whitney. Both are doctoral candidates at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Sreetharan, Whitney, and their colleagues in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory at SEAS have been working for years to build bio-inspired, bee-sized robots that can fly and behave autonomously as a colony. Appropriate materials, hardware, control systems, and fabrication techniques did not exist prior to the RoboBees project, so each must be invented, developed, and integrated by a diverse team of researchers.

Less than a year ago, the group was using a painstaking and error-prone method to fold, align, and secure each of the minuscule parts and joints.

"You'd take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue," explains Sreetharan. "Then, with that tiny ball of glue, you'd go in under a microscope like an arthroscopic surgeon and try to stick it in the right place."

"Until recently, the manual assembly process was the state of the art in this field," Sreetharan adds.

By the numbers
Folding joints: 22
Assembly scaffold folding joints: 115
Total device folding joints: 137
Number of brass pads for "glue" points: 52
Total number of "glue" points: 24
Mass: 90 mg
By mass, one U.S. quarter = 63 Harvard Monolithic Bees

The same result can now be achieved—without human error—through locking mechanisms and dip soldering. The new process also enables the use of cured carbon fiber, which is rigid and easy to align, rather than uncured carbon fiber, which Sreetharan compares to "wet tissue paper."

"Our new techniques allow us to use any material including polymers, metals, ceramics, and composites," says principal investigator Rob Wood, an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at SEAS and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

"The ability to incorporate any type and number of material layers, along with integrated electronics, means that we can generate full systems in any three-dimensional shape," Wood says. "We've also demonstrated that we can create self-assembling devices by including pre-stressed materials."

The implications of this novel fabrication strategy go far beyond these micro-air vehicles. The same mass-production technique could be used for high-power switching, optical systems, and other tightly integrated electromechanical devices that have parts on the scale of micrometers to centimeters.

Moreover, the layering process builds on the manufacturing process currently used to make printed circuit boards, which means that the tools for creating large sheets of pop-up devices are common and abundant. It also means that the integration of electrical components is a natural extension of the fabrication process—particularly important for the size- and weight-constrained RoboBees project.

"In a larger device, you can take a robot leg, for example, open it up, and just bolt in circuit boards. We're so small that we don't get to do that. I can't put a structural mechanism in here and have it serve no electrical function."

Pointing to the carbon-fiber box truss that constitutes the pop-up bee's body frame, Sreetharan says, "Now, I can put chips all over that. I can build in sensors and control actuators."

A small portion of the CAD design for the Harvard Monolithic Bee illustrates the complexity of folds and joints necessary for its assembly. Using the old, manual process, every one of those parts would have to be cut, folded, assembled, and glued by hand. The bottom image illustrates the 18 layers of laser-cut materials that create the pop-up structure. Images courtesy of Pratheev Sreetharan.

Essentially, tiny robots can now be built by slightly bigger robots. Designing how all of the layers will fit together and fold, however, is still a very human task, requiring creativity and expertise. Standard computer-aided design (CAD) tools, typically intended for either flat, layered circuit boards or 3D objects, do not yet support devices that combine both.

Once the design is complete, though, fabrication can be fully automated, with accuracy and precision limited only by the machining tools and materials.

"The alignment is now better than we can currently measure," says Sreetharan. "I've verified it to better than 5 microns everywhere, and we've gone from a 15% yield to—well, I don't think I've ever had a failure."

The full fabrication process will be described in the March issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering. Co-authors and collaborators, beside Whitney, Sreetharan, and Wood, include Kevin Ma, a graduate student at SEAS; and Marc Strauss, a research assistant in Wood's lab.

The Harvard Office of Technology Development is now developing a strategy to commercialize this technology. As part of this effort, they have filed patent applications on this work and are engaging with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and companies to identify disruptive applications in a range of industries.

The work was supported by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the National Science Foundation (through the Expeditions in Computing program), and the Wyss Institute.

 

[a_majoor]

BAE develops a means of using carbon fiber composites as a battery. This would make structural components part of the electrical system and eleiminate the need for separate batteries (imagine the radio case is also the battery and you get the idea). The press release does not go into much detail, and issues like how the user is insulated from the electrical charge or what happens when the item breaks are left to the imagination of the reader:

http://www.baesystems.com/Newsroom/NewsReleases/autoGen_1121139240.html

Frontline Military Technology Promises Battery Revolution

13 Feb 2012 | Ref. 025/2012

Afghan National Army and UK Forces (copyright UK MOD)
Bristol, UK – Scientists at BAE Systems have successfully demonstrated the most radical method of storing electricity since the invention of batteries over 200 years ago. The technological breakthrough, called ‘structural batteries’ may lead to a redesign of all electrical technology and could provide a crucial advantage to soldiers on the frontline.

BAE Systems developed the patented technology to lighten the load of soldiers carrying rucksacks, which can weigh up to 76kg and be filled with numerous electrical items. The structural batteries store the electrical energy within the physical structure of a device and thus helping to reduce or eliminate the need for traditional batteries, which create weight and bulk, as well as the burden and cost of carrying spares.

The potential scope for this technology is limitless, while the benefits for the defence sector have already been demonstrated in a high tech micro unmanned air vehicle, as well as a rudimentary torch.

To demonstrate the technology’s application beyond the battlefield, BAE Systems have also applied the technology through a partnership with leading race car manufacturer Lola. The Lola-Drayson B12/69EV, zero emission 850 horsepower Le Mans Prototype car will incorporate structural batteries to power some of the on-board electronic systems. Upon completion, the Lola-Drayson B12/69EV aims to become the world’s fastest electric racing car.

Alex Parfitt, Capability Technology Leader for Materials at BAE Systems said: “Structural batteries can be used in virtually anything that requires electricity from small gadgets to entire vehicles. It can not only support our soldiers on the frontline, but also revolutionise technology in the consumer market by allowing more efficient, elegant and lighter designs.”

To develop this technology, scientists at BAE Systems merged battery chemistries into composite materials that can be moulded into complex 3D shapes and so form the structure of the device itself. It can then be plugged in when it needs recharging or utilise renewable power sources, such as solar energy.

The process makes use of nickel-based battery chemistries, which are commonly used in defence technology and future developments will allow integration of Li-ion and Li-Polymer chemistries found in consumer electronic products such as mobile phones, MP3 players, laptops, tablets and portable games. This will not only lead to improved product designs, but eliminating the need to buy batteries will reduce the lifetime cost to the consumer, as well as having environmental benefits.

Current development has demonstrated the ability to store useful energy in composites such as carbon fibre and glass reinforced plastic, but in the future it could also be incorporated into fabric for a wide range of lightweight applications, from tents with their own power supply to making electric blankets a literal reality.

Image caption:
Image shows soldiers from the Afghan National Army and 3rd Battalion (The Black Watch) The Royal Regiment of Scotland (3 Scots) search compounds and destroy drug caches and narcotic manufacturing facilities in a joint operation after insertion by Chinook helicopters into the Upper Sangin Valley.

For more information, please contact:
Adam Rang, Mischief PR
Mob: +44 (0) 777 333 4797
adam.rang@mischiefpr.com

Nick Haigh, BAE Systems
Mob: +44 (0) 7525 390982
nick.haigh@baesystems.com

Issued by:
BAE Systems, Farnborough, Hampshire GU14 6YU, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1252 384719 Media Hotline: + 44 (0) 7801 717739
www.baesystems.com

 

[a_majoor]

This would make water treatment and providing water much easier, as well as lowering the logistical overhead compared to a ROWPU:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_12/b4220041560310.htm

Innovator: Robert McGinnis of Oasys Water
The former Navy diver was dismayed by how much energy it takes to desalinate seawater. So he developed a more efficient process
By Caroline Winter

Floating on a tiny rubber boat on his way to defuse underwater mines during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Robert McGinnis spotted a towering desalination plant on the shores of the Persian Gulf. It was the first he'd ever seen. "I was appalled that you'd burn fuel in order to produce pure water," he says.

Four years later, after leaving the U.S. Navy, McGinnis flipped open his first college chemistry textbook and saw a photo of what looked like the same plant. The next day he drove to the ocean, took a water sample, and started experimenting in his kitchen. By the time he'd graduated, McGinnis had filed three patents.

Commercial desalination is usually done in one of two ways. The first, known as thermal desalination, involves boiling seawater above 212F, then distilling the vapors. The second, called reverse osmosis, uses hydraulic pressure to force water through a membrane that filters out salt. Both require enormous amounts of energy. McGinnis says he's found a method that's at least 10 times more fuel-efficient.

Water molecules naturally want to flow from fresher solutions to saltier ones. Hence the "reverse" in reverse osmosis: It forces water molecules to go against their tendency. McGinnis's method makes use of forward osmosis. He's developed a "draw solution" that's saltier than seawater. Without need for any energy, the water molecules in seawater flow across a porous membrane and into the draw solution, leaving the sea salt behind. McGinnis's solution is as undrinkable as ocean water, but its salt compounds—"essentially just ammonium, carbon dioxide, and some other secret stuff," he says—vaporize at lower temperatures. McGinnis's solution needs only 122F to burn off salts and leave behind pure water, instead of the much higher temperatures required for thermal desalination.

After graduating from Yale with a PhD in environmental engineering in 2009, McGinnis co-founded Boston-based Oasys Water and raised $10 million from three venture capital firms to commercialize the technology, including developing a thin membrane suitable for forward osmosis. Oasys plans to start taking orders in late 2011. "Forward osmosis is on the verge of becoming a buzzword," says Tom Pankratz, director of the International Desalination Assn. "Oasys has a clever approach. ... It could potentially be used not only for seawater desalination but also treating wastewater."

McGinnis didn't plan to dedicate his career to desalination. As an undergraduate he majored in theater and wrote "sci-fi coming-of-age think-piece mini-epics," he says. Even then, he spent three nights a week working on desalination experiments, often after late-night play rehearsals. "I just couldn't accept the idea of trading fuel for water," he says.

SERVICE
Defused mines for the U.S. Navy during the first Gulf War

INVENTION
A desalination method 10 times more efficient than alternatives

EDUCATION
Majored in theater and wrote sci-fi "think-piece mini-epics"

Winter is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.

 

[a_majoor]

Italian scientists have discovered a way to bypass the bandwidth limit. Nets with multiple informations streams on the same channel are now possible in theory, it will be an interesting task for the signalers to create radio and data nets that can use these properties and for the rest of us not to be overwhelmed in a flood of data and trivial talk:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120302083011.htm

Pasta-Shaped Radio Waves Beamed Across Venice

ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2012) — A group of Italian and Swedish researchers appears to have solved the problem of radio congestion by cleverly twisting radio waves into the shape of fusilli pasta, allowing a potentially infinite number of channels to be broadcast and received.

Furthermore, the researchers have demonstrated this in real-life conditions by beaming two twisted radio waves across the waters of Venice.
Their results have been reported on March 2, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics.
As the world continues to adapt in the digital age, the introduction of new mobile smartphones, wireless internet and digital TVs means the number of radio frequency bands available to broadcast information gets smaller and smaller.

"You just have to try sending a text message at midnight on New Year's Eve to realise how congested the bands are," said lead author Dr Fabrizio Tamburini. The researchers, from the University of Padova, Italy, and the Angstrom Laboratory, Sweden, devised a solution to this by manipulating waves so that they can hold more than one channel of information.

A wave can twist about its axis a certain number of times in either a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction, meaning there are several configurations that it can adopt.

"In a three-dimensional perspective, this phase twist looks like a fusilli-pasta-shaped beam. Each of these twisted beams can be independently generated, propagated and detected even in the very same frequency band, behaving as independent communication channels," Tamburini continued.
To demonstrate this, the researchers transmitted two twisted radio waves, in the 2.4 GHz band, over a distance of 442 metres from a lighthouse on San Georgio Island to a satellite dish on a balcony of Palazzo Ducale on the mainland of Venice, where it was able to pick up the two separate channels.
"Within reasonable economic boundaries, one can think about using five orbital angular momentum states, from -5 (counter-clockwise) up to 5 (clockwise), including untwisted waves. In this instance, we can have 11 channels in one frequency band.

"It is possible to use multiplexing, like in digital TV, on each of these to implement even more channels on the same states, which means one could obtain 55 channels in the same frequency band," said Tamburini.

In addition to increasing the quantity of information being passed around our planet, this new discovery could also help lend an insight into objects far out in our galaxy. Black holes, for example, are constantly rotating and as waves pass them, they are forced to twist in line with the black hole.
According to Tamburini, analysing the incoming waves from the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A, could help astronomers obtain crucial information about the rotation of this "million-solar mass monster."

 

[Pieman]

Wow, very smart!...and actually surprising it has not been done before. I suspect that the emitter would emit each signal at a different phase and simply pass each signal through a polarizing filter a different angle for each signal. The same thing on the receiving end. Turn the polarizing filter to the correct position and you will only get the desired signal....gotta read up on this concept.

 

[a_majoor]

And of course, you need really cool glasses to receive all this data:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27600/?nlid=nldly&nld=2012-02-24

Google's Terminator Glasses

They're real?!

David Zax 02/23/2012
   
Nick Bilton at the Times’s Bits Blog, hardly a site for speculation on vaporware, tells us to expect something remarkable from Google by the year’s end: heads-up display glasses “that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.”

That’s right. Google’s going to turn us all into the Terminator. Minus the wanton killing, of course.

The Times post builds on the reporting of Seth Weintraub, who blogs at 9 to 5 Google. He had written about the glasses project in December, as well as this month. Weintraub had one tipster, who told him the glasses would look something like Oakley Thumps. Bilton cites “several Google employees familiar with the project,” who said the devices would cost between $250 and $600. The device is reportedly being built in Google’s “X offices,” a top-secret lab that is nonetheless not-top-secret-enough that you and I and other readers of the Times know about it. (X is favored letter for Google of late, when it comes to blue sky projects.)

A few other details about the glasses, that have emerged from either Bilton or Weintraub: they would be Andoid-based and feature a small screen that sits inches from the eye. They’d have access to a 3G or 4G network, and would have motion and GPS sensors. And, in wild, Terminator style, the glasses would even have a low-res camera “that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby,” per Bilton. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is reportedly serving as a leader on the project, along with Steve Lee, who made Latitude, Google’s mapping software.

Though reportedly arriving for sale in 2012, the glasses may never reach a mass market. Google is said to be exploring ways to monetize the glasses should consumers take a liking to them. “If consumers take to the glasses when they are released later this year, then Google will explore possible revenue streams,” writes Bilton.

Google isn’t the first to dabble in the idea of heads-up display glasses. Way back in 2002, in fact, we wrote about how electronics could enable augmented reality glasses for soldiers.  Though its ambitions are much more modest--hardly anything to hold a candle to The Terminator--a company called 4iiii Innovations has made some basic heads-up display glasses for athletes wanting to monitor their progress. And two years ago, TR took a pair of $2,000 augmented reality glasses from Vuzix for a spin, declaring them “dazzling”--but still wondering, “who’ll wear them?”

I’ve written before that smartwatches could represent a frontier of smartness-on-your-person. “They stand to transform your wrist into something akin to (if a wee bit short of) a heads-up display,” was how I put it. If the information Bilton and Weintraub have on Google is sound, I may have to dial back my enthusiasm on smartwatches--or at least stop likening them to heads-up displays, once the real thing exists.

Then again, smartwatches may still occupy a middle ground between utility and style. On the one hand, Oakley Thump-style smartglasses would be extraordinarily useful, for some. On the other hand, they would also be--let's face it--irredeemably geeky. As Bilton writes, “The glasses are not designed to be worn constantly — although Google expects some of the nerdiest users will wear them a lot.”

If you thought your smartwatch-sporting friend was a geek, just wait till he's flanked by people playing cyborg with Google’s forthcoming technology. 

Actually, if this can be integrated into something like the BEW's, it will provide a fairly natural and easy to use interface for the troops on the ground. The trick is more on how to control/filter the input in an intuative, hands free way.

 

[a_majoor]

I think the real problem with this idea is the limited line of sight, hence limited reaction time for these sorts of systems. The real solution may be to consider this as some sort of "area defense" system and mount high resolution sensors and weapons on aircraft or UCAV orbiting overhead. To be really ideal, you would probably need a layered system: medium-high altitude system to provide wide area coverage, a low altitude system for each platoon/troop and probably still need a (simple, low cost) point system to catch "leakers" or deal with saturation attacks:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/anti-rocket-raytheon/

Pentagon Tries (Again) to Shoot Down Rockets

    By Katie Drummond
      March 9, 2012 |
    6:30 am |
   
Right now, soldiers can’t do much once a rocket careens their way besides maneuvering and hoping for the best. But the Pentagon is trying — yet again — to give them something to shoot the thing right out of the sky.

Counter-rocket technologies have vexed the military in recent years, despite myriad efforts at developing an effective system. But the Pentagon’s giving yet another rocket-destroying system a try. This one’s called the Accelerated Improved Intercept System, or AI3. Earlier this week, the Army awarded manufacturer Raytheon a $79.2 million contract to develop the apparatus. And the Pentagon wants the job done fast: They’re hoping to test the device in a mere 18 months.

To hasten the process, Raytheon will rely mostly on preexisting technology, including a launcher and a control system being provided by the military. There’s no indication it’s doing anything super-ambitious, like incorporating rival Artis’ white-knuckle Iron Curtain system, which waits until the last moment before a rocket hits a truck to fire a missile downward at a 90-degree angle. Raytheon will basically develop a new interceptor missile for AI3.

Using an interceptor missile is a bit of a surprising choice, as missiles have often been dismissed as too expensive for the job. At least one company, Saab, has already developed a rocket-stopping system that relies on a Mongoose missile interceptor. But because each missile runs $50,000, the systems are outrageously expensive. That might render the finished product, expected in 2014, prohibitively pricy for a cash-squeezed military.

Maybe Raytheon can come up with a cheaper alternative — though the company has yet to offer any specifics on its development plan. It’s closer to Saab’s approach than some other counter-rocket technologies the U.S. has recently used. The Phalanx Centurion, used in Iraq, uses bullets to shoot down rockets and mortars — specifically, a 20mm Gatling gun. But the Centurion, a modified Navy gun, is hampered by a limited range and magazine capacity.

No matter what Raytheon comes up with, the award indicates that the false starts haven’t shaken the Pentagon off its desire to protect trucks from armor-puncturing rockets. And it’s not just the United States. Israel’s remarkable Trophy system is essentially a tank outfitted with sensors that can detect an incoming projectile, and then unleash rounds of explosively formed penetrators that shred the missile up before it detonates. Whether Raytheon’s can compare to Trophy — or to other counter-rocket systems like Iron Curtain or Crosshairs — remains up in the air, heading for impact.

 

[a_majoor]

While this is about James Cameron's personal hobby of oceanic exploration, it is interesting to note the speed and relative cost of his developing and adopting high technology. As well, the material used to make his sub (an epoxy resin filled with glass microspheres) could make for a great, lightweight structural material for other things as well:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/news/james-cameron-on-his-deep-ocean-quest-7189937?click=pm_latest

James Cameron's Deep-Ocean Quest

Late last summer, PM spoke with James Cameron, winner of the magazine’s 2011 Breakthrough Leadership Award, about his enthusiasm for filmmaking, engineering, and, most of all, exploration. Today, he announced that in the coming weeks he’ll try to dive to the deepest point in the world’s ocean—the 36,201-foot Challenger Deep. Cameron talked about his ambitious diving goals during his 2011 interview, but some of the details did not make the final edition of PM. So, on the cusp of his dive attempt, we’re publishing the rest of the interview here.
By Anne Thompson

James Cameron and his submersible, the Deepsea Challenger.

March 8, 2012 4:20 PM

In short, why do this? Why dive to the Mariana Trench?

Two of the deepest places in the world’s oceans exist in the Mariana Trench system. But also of interest are the Kermadec Trench and the Tonga Trench, which has possibly the second deepest spot in the world’s oceans—close to 36,000 feet. So there are a number of targets around the Southwestern Pacific that need to be explored. And there are other deep trenches in the world as well. They’re the last great frontier for exploration on this planet.

You pioneered the use of syntactic foam as a structural material. What are the benefits of making the sub’s structure double as the flotation system?

Syntactic foam is an epoxy matrix containing glass microspheres that are hollow. It’s been the standard of deep-ocean construction for about the last 20 years. It had always been used as passive flotation. We thought it was silly to build a vehicle out of negatively buoyant substances, like aluminum or steel, and then have to add all this flotation to get it neutrally buoyant so it could operate at the bottom of the ocean.

Did you have to reengineer the foam to make that possible?

We had to up our game. We had to make it stronger, and we had to make it a more uniform, more consistent material. So we spent the last couple of years working in, essentially, the materials science of creating the ultimate deep-ocean syntactic foam. We’ve now done that and mass-produced it, at least for our own internal use, to build this vehicle. That’s one example of a kind of heritage of ideas that started 12 years ago and had a continuous through line in all of our technical development.

Was that idea considered radical?

Well, it was so radical no one else was doing it. There were actually several more, [such as] creating lithium-polymer batteries that would operate at ambient pressure, in an oil bath, and also spooling fiber-optic technology, which was our data connection, or our data tether, to the vehicle. These are all common practices now; at that time they were radical and hadn’t been done. And we had to build the vehicle ourselves, operate it, and demonstrate that these ideas worked, and then other people adopted them.

Engineering for the incredible pressures at depth is obviously a challenge.

Anything you design—whether it’s a view port, or an optical front port for a camera system, or a penetrator that allows electrical signals or power to move back and forth across the pressure boundary—has to be designed to withstand 16,000 psi. We have six different pressure chambers all in operation around the clock pressure-testing every single component that goes into the sub.

Including cameras?

We are building full-ocean-depth-rated 3D cameras right now, and we’ll be testing them in a pressure chamber later this fall. We are going to have cameras inside the sub; we’re going to have cameras outside the sub; we’re taking a huge lighting array. We’ll light up the place. We’ll do the same thing we did at abyssal depths, we’ll just do it at Hadal depths.

You’ve had incredible successes pushing the bounds of 3D for recent feature films. What can 3D do for exploration?

I think the lessons, the takeaway, for the lay public are deeper and more meaningful when they see it in 3D. You feel engaged. You feel like you are bearing witness to what’s happening, as opposed to watching, and I think these are subtle differences, but they are very real. And I think it has to do with our brain wiring. There’s neuroscience that now shows the regions of the brain that process parallax. They relate it to other parts of the brain that are doing image analysis . . . and giving you all kinds of depth cues that have nothing to do with parallax. But when you add parallax—or stereoscopy, or stereospis as it’s called medically—into it, all of a sudden it all clicks and it becomes very real.

There have been rumors that you’re interested in deep-ocean footage for Avatar 2.

I don’t know where that originated, but that’s crazy. There’s nothing I’m going to learn at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that’s going to in any way impact Avatar. I’m perfectly capable of imagining all the underwater creatures I need without seeing any more than I’ve seen in 40 years of diving.

The media has also characterized this dive as part of a "race to the bottom."

This is a project that I started six years ago with some engineers that worked with me on my [previous dives]. I’ve already done seven deep-ocean expeditions. We just decided to build a sub that had the capability to go to those depths, which does not exist in the world right now.

Who’s going to pay for it?

I am. If it was being done by a major oceanographic institute or by the government it would be [expensive], sure. But we’re doing it super cheap because we have good engineers and good ideas and we cut away all the fat, and we work with a very small team. So we think we are going to get a lot of bang for the buck.

Do you know how much it’s going to cost?

I know exactly how much it’s going to cost—not to the penny, because we’re not done yet, but it’s going to be in the zone of $8 million. I spent two and a half million dollars building the ROVs that we used to explore the inside of the Titanic and the Bismarck, and then we took them to the hydrothermal vents in 2003, and then we took them to the Titanic again in 2005. Those things eventually paid for themselves twice over, so there’s no reason to assume that I can’t make money with this vehicle as well, or at least pay for it.

When you go down in the sub, how would you describe your state of mind?

I think there’s a sense of heightened alertness in the weeks and then days and then hours leading up to any given dive. You’ve planned, you’ve thought of everything, you’ve worked through all your contingencies, you’ve double- and triple-checked all of the hardware. You’re pretty certain of success or you won’t be diving. You will have called a hold and worked the problem and fixed it. There’s always a slight apprehension, but for me the moment I’ve gone through the hatch and sealed it, it’s just the excitement of the dive itself—of looking forward to what we are going to see, what we are going to record, and what we are going to discover. And that wipes away any sense of apprehension from that moment on.

And what is it that keeps pulling you back to ocean exploration?

I love the ocean. It’s still a very mysterious and enigmatic place. And I love exploration in all its forms. For me, the question is what keeps pulling me back to Hollywood. I’m much more at home in exploration and scientific investigation. That just suits me better than the crazy, glossy, fickle world of Hollywood. You make a movie and you’re judged by a bunch of bozo critics; you do a piece of engineering and . . . the laws of thermodynamics are not an opinion. They’re an immutable set of rules; you play within those rules when you do engineering, and your stuff either works or it doesn’t.

That passion for engineering certainly comes through in your movies.

I guess there’s an overlap between those worlds in two ways. One, I like doing movies about the impact of technology on our lives, and even Titanic can be lumped into that category. The other is we use the most advanced technology we can lay our hands on at the time we make the movie. To me, that makes it more fun.

Read more: James Cameron on his Deep-Ocean Quest - Challenger Deep - Popular Mechanics

 

[a_majoor]

Considering the amount of time it often takes to field new gear, sails may be an appropriate choice for this type of experiment. Still, robotized creatures roaming the battlefield make for an even greater layer of complexity:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/science/the-snails-of-war-and-other-robotics-experiments.html?_r=1&ref=science

The Snails of War
By JAMES GORMAN
Published: March 20, 2012

The electric snail is here. There’s an electric cockroach too.

Enlarge This Image

Journal of the American Chemical Society
A snail with implanted biocatalytic electrodes connected with crocodile clips to the external circuitry.

Both are early experimental forays in a new line of research aimed at creating tiny, self-powered animal/machine hybrids as an alternative to tiny robots.

Instead of starting from scratch and having to solve all those pesky movement problems that plague roboticists, some researchers have asked, why not start out with living creatures that already know how to walk and fly?

Then all we have to do is make them robotlike, outfitting them with the right technology so that we can enslave them and make them do our bidding — in search-and-rescue work, spying or attacking enemies with bug phobias.

The snail is not an obvious military choice, except perhaps in a biowarfare attack on some nation’s lettuce sector, but this whole area of research is just beginning, and snails are easy to catch and keep track of in the lab.

A major challenge in roboticizing living creatures is that they don’t come with batteries, but electricity is needed to power the sensors and transmitters and that would enable remote control. But no problems are insurmountable — certainly not for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the Alice-in-Wonderland government agency that supports all sorts of “what if” research, like mind-reading technology and insect/machine hybrids.

Darpa, naturally, has a research program into Hybrid Insect Micro Electromechanical Systems, one goal of which is to uncover new ways “to harness the natural sensors and power generation of insects.”

Power generation is where the electric snail comes in. Evgeny Katz, a professor of chemistry at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., who, with colleagues, reported on the electric snail in The Journal of the American Chemical Society this month, is not supported by Darpa, yet, but sees his work as having importance for just the sort of thing Darpa is working on.

Eventually, he said, an animal would provide its own power for sensors or receivers, or any other device that had been implanted. But, he said, the field is very new. “At the moment we are just working at the step of generating power,” Dr. Katz said.

What he and his colleagues did was to poke two electrodes coated with enzymes through the shell of a snail into a space between the shell and the body, where glucose is present, produced by the snail for its own biological purposes. The enzymes promote chemical reactions that produce a flow of electrons — electricity — drawn from glucose molecules.

This kind of process had been worked out by others, like Adam Heller at the University of Texas at Austin, with the idea that it could be used in living, moving animals, Dr. Katz said, but that step had not been taken yet. The snail moved around for several months, going about typical snail business, while producing pulses of electricity in tiny amounts.

In January, Daniel Scherson at Case Western Reserve University reported in the same journal that he and his colleagues had used a similar method to draw electricity from a cockroach, and then, just as an added twist, a mushroom. They targeted trehalose molecules, double molecules of glucose, which are present in greater quantity than glucose, Dr. Scherson said. Enzymes split the trehalose and then used the glucose as an electron source.

The cockroach was immobilized while it was serving as a mini power plant, but after the experiment, it was fine, he said. “After we remove the implants, they can run around,” Dr. Scherson said.

There is a long way to go before insect cyborgs for peace and war will go into action, and even longer before they reach the toy market. But it seems inevitable, the great trickle-down effect of military research — great toys. After all, what middle school prankster would not give a year’s allowance for a remote-controlled living water bug?

The possibilities boggle the imagination. The only question will be whether they are sold at pet stores or RadioShack.

 

[GnyHwy]

I wonder who will be the first to complain about this practice.  Greenpeace, or French gourmets?

 

[GAP]

There is a long way to go before insect cyborgs for peace and war will go into action, and even longer before they reach the toy market. But it seems inevitable, the great trickle-down effect of military research — great toys. After all, what middle school prankster would not give a year’s allowance for a remote-controlled living water bug?

The possibilities boggle the imagination. The only question will be whether they are sold at pet stores or RadioShack.

probably jr high/highschool teachers......oh, the fun that could be had in a classroom or .........  ;D

 

[a_majoor]

Data mining may be the next frontier for intelligence and related activities (ISTAR, IA, HUMINT, etc.). While this is a humorous example of what might be done, extend the idea to data mining entire information directories to identify clusters of data (for anomalies or other indicators depending on the commander's requirements and intent). While the example seems pretty straight forward and something anyone can do without a computer, what if you were looking at tens of thousands of items in a data set?

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27667/?p1=blogs

Twitter Data Scientist Takes on McDonald's Entire Menu, Survives

Mining thousands of calories of food isn't so different from parsing terabytes of tweets.

Christopher Mims 03/22/2012

Edwin Chen is a data scientist at Twitter who is into sharing the arcane secrets of his dark art, which is a good thing considering that it's probably the fastest growing field in the U.S.

(Below, I've included the whole of an email interview I conducted with Chen, which you might want to skip to if you're looking for a general overview of his work. He reveals, among other things, that he's considered mining Twitter data to see whether or not people eat fast food when they're sad.)

Data science is so new that there are no textbooks on the subject, and no university curricula designed to turn out data scientists. Yet it's integral to everything from quantitative trading on Wall Street to ad targeting on the web and the optimization of real-world supply chains.

Before he was mining terabytes of tweets for insights that could be turned into interactive visualizations, Chen honed his skills studying linguistics and pure mathematics at MIT. That's typically atypical for a data scientist, who have backgrounds in mathematically rigorous disciplines, whatever they are. (At Twitter, for example, all data scientists must have at least a Master's in a related field.)

Here's one of the wackier examples of the versatility of data science, from Chen's own blog. In a post with the rousing title Infinite Mixture Models with Nonparametric Bayes and the Dirichlet Process, Chen delves into the problem of clustering. That is, how do you take a mass of data and sort it into groups of related items? It's a tough problem -- how many groups should there be? what are the criteria for sorting them? -- and the details of how he tackles it are beyond those who don't have a background in this kind of analysis.

For the rest of us, Chen provides a concrete and accessible example: McDonald's

By dumping the entire menu of McDonald's into his mathemagical sorting box, Chen discovers, for example, that not all McDonald's sauces are created equal. Hot Mustard and Spicy Buffalo do not fall into the same cluster as Creamy Ranch, which has more in common with McDonald's Iced Coffee with Sugar Free Vanilla Syrup than it does with Newman’s Own Low Fat Balsamic Vinaigrette.

Other clusters appear, including all the burger-y items, breakfast foods and sugar drinks. So far, not so surprising, until you get to the one cluster on McDonald's menu that contains only one item.

What's so special about McDonald's Fruit & Maple Oatmeal? It's probably its fiber content, relatively (I stress relatively) high levels of nutrients and lower levels of sugar, trans fat and cholesterol.

In other words, when one of Twitter's newest data scientists applies his craft to McDonald's menu, his algorithm automatically extracts the only food on it that any of us should probably even consider eating. Oatmeal: at McDonald's it's truly in a class of its own.

Here's the full interview with Chen:

1. How long have you been a data scientist at Twitter?

I've been at Twitter for about four months.

2. What does a data scientist at Twitter do?

We work on everything from building machine learning models and improving our large-scale data processing frameworks, to creating data visualizations, running statistical analyses, and finding better ways to understand our users and the Twitter graph. There's a lot of variety, and it really depends on each person's skills and interests.

At any given time, for example, I'm likely to be experimenting with new ad targeting algorithms, writing MapReduce jobs to mine terabytes of tweets (using Scalding, our in-house MapReduce language), building interactive visualizations to surface insights in all the data we gather, writing a report to explain some new findings, running an experiment on Mechanical Turk, and lots more.

3. Was your latest post (on clustering) inspired by something you're working on at Twitter (that you can discuss)?

I've been doing some work on clustering our users and advertisers, automatically inferring topic categories in text, and thinking about what we can learn from food on Twitter (for example, do men and women, or San Franciscans and New Yorkers, differ in what they eat? is there any relationship between what people eat and what they tweet, e.g., are people more likely to eat junk food when they're sad?). So while the post wasn't directly inspired by what I'm working on at Twitter, it's definitely related.

4. Data science is a thing now, but (I've been told) the field is "so new" that there are no textbooks or university courses specific to it. Do you agree / disagree?

I agree -- but it depends on your definition of data science (which many people disagree on!). For me, data science is a mix of three things: quantitative analysis (for the rigor necessary to understand your data), programming (so that you can process your data and act on your insights), and storytelling (to help others understand what the data means). So useful skills for a data scientist to have could include:

* Statistics, machine learning (on the quantitative analysis side). For example, it's impossible to extract meaning from your data if you don't know how to distinguish your signals from noise. (I'll stress, though, that I believe any kind of strong quantitative ability is fine -- my own background was originally in pure math and linguistics, and many of the other folks here come from fields like physics and chemistry. You can always pick up the specific tools you'll need.)

* General programming ability, plus knowledge of specific areas like MapReduce/Hadoop and databases. For example, a common pattern for me is that I'll code a MapReduce job in Scala, do some simple command-line munging on the results, pass the data into Python or R for further analysis, pull from a database to grab some extra fields, and so on, often integrating what I find into some machine learning models in the end. (Interpolation; anyone conversent in Sanskrit please decipher this)

* Web programming, data visualization (on the storytelling side). For example, I find it extremely useful to be able to throw up a quick web app or dashboard that allows other people (myself included!) to interact with data -- when communicating with both technical and non-technical folks, a good data visualization is often a lot more helpful and insightful than an abstract number.

While there aren't many textbooks or courses that cover all three areas (one exception may be Jeff Hammerbacher and Mike Franklin's course at Berkeley: http://datascienc.es/), there are of course resources that cover each skill alone. (Data visualization seems to continue to be an underappreciated skill, though, so classes in that area are more rare.)

 

[a_majoor]

IKEA is the logical company to develop this. Low cost, flat packed shelters would be a great way to save on shipping space when setting up encampments and operating bases, as well as humanitarian operations for housing refugees etc. (The IKEA furniture would probably be replaced by CORCAN for CF use... >):

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/04/prefab-home-with-ikea-decor.html

Prefab home with Ikea decor

Ikea has partnered with Oregon architectural firm Ideabox to launch a line of prefabricated homes. Dubbed “aktiv,” the one-bedroom home will be decked out entirely in hip Ikea decor. Expected to sell at $86,500

Ideabox has worked with Portland branch of Ikea

This is not a flat packed house, like what India's Tata is developing for $720 for a 215 square foot house

 

[a_majoor]

A pretty exciting discovery. More detailed understanding of the brain structure could lead to better treatment of concussions and other brain trauma. More futuristic stuff like brain augmentation or having "mind control" over devices might also derive from this sort of research as well:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/04/your-brain-its-organized-like-woven.html

Your Brain--It's Organized Like a Woven Cloth in Uniform Grids and Not Spaghetti

NSF - It was previously thought the inside of the brain resembled the assembly of a bowl of spaghetti noodles. Researchers and scientists, funded by the National Science Foundation, have now discovered that a more uniformed grid-like pattern makes up the connections of the brain. Knowledge gained from the study helped shape design specifications for the most powerful brain scanner of its kind, which was installed at MGH's Martinos Center last fall. The new Connectom diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner can visualize the networks of crisscrossing fibers – by which different parts of the brain communicate with each other – in 10-fold higher detail than conventional scanners, said Wedeen.

They are optimizing MRI technology to more accurately to image the pathways. In diffusion imaging, the scanner detects movement of water inside the fibers to reveal their locations. A high resolution technique called diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) makes it possible to see the different orientations of multiple fibers that cross at a single location – the key to seeing the grid structure.

The technology used in the current study was able to see only about 25 percent of the grid structure in human brain. It was only apparent in large central circuitry, not in outlying areas where the folding obscures it. But lessons learned were incorporated into the design of the newly installed Connectom scanner, which can see 75 percent of it

Van Wedeen and team discovered that the pathways in the top of the brain are all organized like woven sheets with the fibers running in two directions in the sheets and in a third direction perpendicular to the sheets. These sheets all stack together so that the entire connectivity of the brain follows three precisely defined directions.

The directions of the pathways of the brain were previously difficult to determine because in embryological life the pathways run in simple directions but become very bent and folded as the brain matures into an adult and more information and skills are learned. The surface of the adult brain appears more folded and the three directions become increasingly curved and thus difficult to view definitively.



Path neighborhood in rat left ventricular myocardium (stereo pair), comprised circumferential fibers

Science - The Geometric Structure of the Brain Fiber Pathways

The structure of the brain as a product of morphogenesis is difficult to reconcile with the observed complexity of cerebral connectivity. We therefore analyzed relationships of adjacency and crossing between cerebral fiber pathways in four nonhuman primate species and in humans by using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging. The cerebral fiber pathways formed a rectilinear three-dimensional grid continuous with the three principal axes of development. Cortico-cortical pathways formed parallel sheets of interwoven paths in the longitudinal and medio-lateral axes, in which major pathways were local condensations. Cross-species homology was strong and showed emergence of complex gyral connectivity by continuous elaboration of this grid structure. This architecture naturally supports functional spatio-temporal coherence, developmental path-finding, and incremental rewiring with correlated adaptation of structure and function in cerebral plasticity and evolution.

 

[Antoine]

Highlights - Lightweight helmets for Canadian soldiers, developed by National Research Council Canada. Good use of our tax !

March 1, 2012 — Ottawa, Ontario
A new generation of lightweight helmets developed for Canadian soldiers could reduce the risk of head injuries sustained when military vehicles are struck by improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
In Afghanistan, roadside IEDs have claimed many casualties, but not always from the fragments generated during an explosion: the actual force of the explosion on the vehicle can result in impact injuries and concussions for the occupants. A combat helmet provides a certain level of protection against these impacts, so the Department of National Defence (DND) requires soldiers to wear helmets when travelling. However, the coverage and weight of the helmet pose a burden on soldiers, particularly in extremely hot environments.  Reducing the weight and increasing the protection offered by combat helmets are top priorities for DND. ...

More at :
www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/news/nrc/2012/03/01/drdc-nrc.html

 

[a_majoor]

Fuel cells directly convert high energy density hydrocarbon fuels into electrical energy with reasonably high efficiency. Small fuel cells like this could dramatically reduce the number of battereis that soldiers have to pack, either by having units powering devices for far longer than any battery can, or perhaps by hooking multiple devices to a single fuel cell:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/05/pocket-sized-fuel-cell-charges-phones.html

Pocket-sized fuel cell charges phones for two weeks

Brookstone will be the first retail launch partner for Lilliputian Systems Inc. (LSI’s) portable charging system. Brookstone will be responsible for the marketing, promotion, distribution and sale of the product through their various distribution channels such as catalog, Brookstone.com, and retail stores including airport and mall locations. Lilliputian will be responsible for the product design, development, and manufacturing. The product will be branded and sold under the Brookstone® brand.

CNET - Fuel cell maker Lilliputian Systems today announced that Brookstone will be the first retailer to carry its portable USB power source, which will be sold under Brookstone's brand. The fuel cell device is about the size of a thick smartphone, and the lighter fluid-filled cartridges are about the same size as a cigarette lighter.

Lilliputian’s patented Silicon Power Cell™ technology, originally developed at the world renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”) Microsystems Technology Laboratory (“MTL”), includes a chip based power generator and is fueled by recyclable high energy fuel cartridges. The technology is reliable, safe (approved for use on aircraft) and environmentally friendly (6x more efficient/lower carbon footprint than using a wall charger). When compared to Lithium-Ion battery alternatives, Lilliputian’s solution provides a 5—10x improvement in volumetric energy density (energy density by volume) and 20—40x improvement in gravimetric energy density (energy density by weight) at a fraction of the cost.

Juice in a box. Lilliputian's portable fuel cell can deliver between 10 to 14 full charges for an iPhone with one replaceable cartridge. (Credit: Lilliputian Systems)

People will be able to buy refills and fuel cells online, through Brookstone catalogs, or at stores. When the fuel cartridges are empty, they can be recycled through municipal recycling programs, Ramani said.

Lilliputian expects the first customers will be early technology adopters but then the appeal of portable power will attract more people, such as travelers, college students, and even teenagers who spend a lot of time with portable gaming machines. "Anyone who wants to be liberated from sticking a phone into a wall outlet," he said.

Unique technology inside the fuel cell allows for longer charge time than previous portable fuel cells give, Ramani said.

The company is the first to deposit a solid oxide fuel cell membrane onto a silicon wafer, he explained. Investor Intel has retrofitted a fab in Hudson, Massachusetts, to make specially structured silicon chips with Lilliputian's membrane imprinted on them.

"The problem of all the other (previous) devices, which usually used methanol or sodium borohydride, is that when they actually built the product, it was not any better than carrying a lithium ion battery around," he said.

Lilliputian's fuel cell will be able to fully charge, for example, an iPhone 4 between 10 and 14 times with one cartridge, Ramani said. That can mean a couple weeks of use for many people, he noted.

 

[a_majoor]

Not exactly Star Trek, but being able to teleport packets of data would be about the most secure network possible (among other potentials). The line at the end sums up the situation quite sadly:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27864/?p1=blogs

European Physicists Smash Chinese Teleportation Record

The battle over distance records sets up a fascinating race to be the first to teleport to an orbiting satellite

kfc 05/21/2012

Just a couple of weeks ago, we discussed a Chinese experiment in which physicists teleported photons over a distance of almost 100 kilometres. That's almost an order of magnitude more than previous records.

Today, European physicists say they've broken the record again, this time by teleporting photons between the two Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife off the Atlantic coast of north Africa, a distance of almost 150 kilometres. 

That's sets the scene for a fascinating prize. Both teams say the next step is to teleport to an orbiting satellite and that the technology is ripe to make this happen. 

The Canary islands experiment was no easy ride. In ordinary circumstances, the quantum information that photons carry cannot survive the battering it gets in passing through the atmosphere. It simply leaks away.

Indeed, the European team say that unusually bad weather including wind, rain, rapid temperature changes and even sand storms all badly affected the experiment. "These severe conditions delayed our experimental realizations of quantum teleportation for nearly one year," say Anton Zeilinger at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna and a few pals.

(However, they are quick to point out that satellite-based quantum communication shouldn't be as susceptible since there is less weather to pass through if you fire photons straight up.)

To perform this experiment, Zeilinger and co had to perfect a number of new techniques to dramatically reduce noise, which would otherwise overwhelm the quantum signal.

Perhaps the most significant of these is a way of using entangled photons to synchronise clocks on both islands. That's important because it allows the team to send photons and then look for them at the receiver at the exact instant they are due to arrive.

This significantly reduces the number of extraneous photons that could swamp the signal. The GPS system allows clocks to be synchronised in a way that allows a 10 nanosecond coincidence window. But entanglement-enhanced synchronisation allowed Zeilinger and co to use coincidence windows just 3 nanoseconds long. 

The results sets up an interesting race between east and west. These experiments are proof-of-principle runs for a much more ambitious idea--quantum teleportation to orbiting satellites.

Since teleportation is the basis of more-or-less perfectly secure communication, the prize here is a global communications network that cannot be hacked, even in principle. 

"The technology implemented in our experiment thus certainly reached the required maturity both for satellite and for long-distance ground communication," say Zeilinger and co.

The questions, of course, is who will be first to orbit. The Europeans have a space agency that could be persuaded to test this idea but they won't be in a hurry. China is currently showing great ambition in space and will want to show off its technological prowess. Both have the wherewithall to pull off this next step.

The contrast with the US couldn't be clearer.

 

[a_majoor]

Motion activated devices are now cheap and accurate (although I doubt that any person could have this much accuracy when pointing or moving). Imagine entirely new types of interfaces for the various devices we carry and use based on gestures or body motions. This could include medical devices cued to unnatural body motions (falls, sudden violent shocks from accidents or weapons strikes), or alarm devices cued by subtle movements that might not be noticed by the target. Other ideas are left to your imagination (point and shoot devices would take on a whole new meaning):

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27868/?p1=blogs

Leap 3D Out-Kinects Kinect (Video)

It's 200 times more accurate, tracking even your fingers.

David Zax 05/21/2012
 
It’s something that pretty much has to be seen to be believed. So check out this video first, and then let’s continue the conversation below.

This week, Leap Motion, a San Francisco-based startup, unveils its Leap 3D motion control system. Leap Motion appears to so outrank Kinect in terms of its capability that it’s almost a category error to compare them. The technology, reports CNET, can detect motion with up to a hundredth of a millimeter accuracy; it’s nuanced enough to detect fingers, for instance, enabling the possibility of touch-free pinch-to-zoom. (Say goodbye to the question of whether touch screens hurt you.)

Leap, which was founded in 2010, has had investors excited for at least a little while--the company announced $12.75 million in Series A funding a few weeks ago--but it’s only now that they’re letting the rest of us in on the fun. When the device is available for commercial release, it’s expected to retail for around $70, reportedly. The device itself is fairly simple--a USB input device (plus an advanced software platform).

It might seem as though with a technology with such transformative potential, a hardware breakthrough must have made it fundamentally possible. But Leap’s CEO Michael Buckwald tells CNET otherwise: the product is the fruits of tedious years of careful mathematical research. His CTO (and childhood friend) David Holz is apparently something of a math genius. “It's not as if we're using lots of processing power or some new hardware that just came on to the market," Buckwald said. "This is really about a fundamental scientific breakthrough, many eureka moments” that Holz accrued over a half-decade of painstaking work. Holz has clearly put much thought into the technology and its implications; “subtle motions are immediately occurring on the screen, so that there’s no distance between thought and response,” he said.

Buckwald is not risking under-selling his technology (to wit, a section heading in his FAQ: “We are changing the world”). But to be fair, it appears as though he has a right to speak in just about whatever terms he pleases. He states Leap’s aim as nothing less than “to fundamentally transform how people interact with computers--and to do so in the same way that the mouse did.” (For an interview with Buckwald and some cool hands-on footage with Holz, do be sure to head over to CNET for a look at the video near the top of their post.)

Holz lists a range of possibilities for the technology: consumers might use it to browse the web; engineers could mould virtual clay; designers could draw precisely in 2-D or 3-D; and new gaming possibilities could evolve. One is hard-pressed to name a profession that might not be changed by this technology: surgeons and pilots, architects and painters, cops and robbers alike will probably have their uses for it.

Holz and Buckwald are wise in this: they are the first to admit that they don’t yet understand the full ramifications of the device. Whereas Kinect hacks started as a rogue and semi-tolerated thing that Microsoft finally brought into the fold, Leap wants openness to be in its product’s DNA. “We want to create as vibrant a developer ecosystem as possible, and we're reaching out to developers” in many different fields, said Buckwald. They’re looking for a “few hundred” developers to get involved with their tech, and soon intend to send out as many as 20,000 free developer kits. When it’s officially released--in 2013, according to reports--will the Leap Effect quickly eclipse the Kinect Effect?

As Leap puts it, “This is like day one of the mouse. Except, no one needs an instruction manual for their hands.”

 

[a_majoor]

Using new high tech devices to get around. The Exoskeleton and robotic vehicles have been in the works for quite a while (the late 1950's if you count "Starship Troopers"), and the rope climbing gadget would be quite handy in urban settings. I don't think the flying car is quite as practical, but we shall see...

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/05/hulc-exoskeleton-options-and-tactics.html

HULC Exoskeleton a Revolution in Rapid Deployment Forces and Mobile Mechanized Infantry

Lockheed appears to be on track for deploying combat versions of the HULC exoskeleton into Afghanistan in early 2013 or even late in 2012.

The Deployment of exoskeletons in commercial sectors will probably remain quite limited for another decade or so, due to their high cost (more than $25,000 per suit). There should be about 11,000 exoskeletons by 2020.

The HULC can assist speed marching at up to 7 mph reduces this somewhat; a battery-draining "burst" at 10mph is the maximum speed

A soldier with a pack would normally go at 3 mph maximum and cover 10-12 miles in a day. Exoskeleton Soldiers could also carry lightweight foldable electric scooters on their exoskeleton that would enable 60-100 mph on roads. If the bike had motocross like capabilities it could still go about 30-60 mph on rougher terrain.


* Lockheed Martin’s (LM) Squad Mission Support System (SMSS) has passed a final round of tests at Fort Riley, Kansas, before scheduled deployment to Afghanistan in 2011. The system, which turns a six-wheeled amphibious ATV into a robotic packhorse and charging station, has been subjected to a variety of simulated warzone environments in both remote controlled and fully autonomous modes"

The SMSS can carry a squad's food supplies, water, batteries, heavy weapons, ammunition, survival gear and can even accommodate casualties. Besides transporting up to 600lbs (272 kg) of gear, the SMSS also provides two to four kilowatts of power, and is capable of charging 146 batteries within ten hours.


The HULC exoskeletoned soldiers can carry foldable dirtbikes to enable speeds of 80mph. They would be better served with squad mission systems that could operate up to 80 mph and with several times the cargo capacity. The exoskeleton soldiers could swap out different mission modules for their 200 pound capacity from a faster and larger exo-squad SMSS.


Exoskeleton Rapid Deployment Forces

The C5-B transport plane can transport 120 tons.

This would be enough for one or two tanks.

One transport plane could deliver 500 exoskeleton equipped soldiers with folded motocross bikes.

One transport plane could deliver 200 exoskeleton soldiers with 20 support vehicles.

The exoskeleton strike force should also be supplemented with UAVs armed with missiles.

Fast lightly armored and armed robotic vehicles would make for an interesting mix.

A mechanized rapid response force could more than match traditional tank forces and would over-match lighter infantry.

I think the tactical focus should be on a new level of light (compared to tanks) mechanized speed without sacrificing as much firepower especially when combined with UAVs and light missiles. UAVs will be able to provide constant close air support.


DARPA could begin fielding prototype flying hummers by 2015. DARPA aiming for around $1 million a copy for the flying Hummer compared with $400,000 for a Humvee and $4 million for light helicopter.

You would be able to fit more flying hummers into a C5B to deliver as part of a strike force instead of helicopters.

Transformer (flying hummer) is not simply a roadable aircraft - it is a four-seat vehicle that must be able to drive off-road, survive small-arms fire, and rapidly reconfigure into an aircraft that can take off and land vertically and be flown without pilot training.

Concept: Lockheed Martin and Piasecki Aircraft


Exoskeleton soldiers with Power Climbers

Atlas Devices has a new Powered Rope Ascender can climb can hold a target load capacity up to 600 pounds at a 6-feet per second rate of ascension. The lightweight ATLAS Ascender can pull a fully-loaded soldier or firefighter up a rappelling line at up to 10 ft/sec. The powerful rope not only lifts and lowers, but can tow vehicles and remotely move equipment and casualties as well, making it a valuable tool for VBSS teams. Its high-power, high-density lithium battery will allow a load to ascend 375 feet without recharging.

It is also able to recapture 10 to 15 percent of its potential energy as it descends, which can be used to recharge the battery

Previous versions of climbers had a 3 ft/sec speed and were limited to 300 pounds of lift

The ATLAS Ascender, originally designed for use in urban combat and cave exploration by the US Army, offers unparalleled benefits in many different scenarios. Its powerful lifting capacity can directly hoist fully-loaded soldiers or firefighters at unprecedented speeds. Utilizing the ATLAS with standard rescue equipment can magnify its capacity even more, enabling effective lifting and towing capacities in excess of 1,000 lbs.