Recent Warfare Technologies

[Antoine]

Sniffing out explosives

Timothy Swager often finds his mind drifting back to the 7 July 2005 bombings. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) chemist was on sabbatical in London at the time. 'There's one thing I think about a lot. Those guys with the backpacks would have been easily detected with some chemical sensors,' he says. 'Starting back at Luton when they went through a door into the train station wearing backpacks giving off vapours, you could have had some very small, inexpensive sensors over the top of the doors that would have said: there are people to watch here.' One sensor could give too many false alarms but a series of sensors at different spots in the train station would be able to pick up the same people again and again, he adds.

Swager is famed for creating polymer technology to sniff out explosives vapours in the field, commercialised as Fido explosives detectors. The arrays of unobtrusive sensors that he envisages may not be that far from reality. Researchers can already detect single molecules of explosives using sensing systems that have the potential to be cheap, low-power and very, very small - thanks to some clever chemistry and consumer-driven miniaturisation of electronics. Most of these vapour detection systems are designed to identify molecules of high explosives such as TNT (2,4,6-trinitrotoluene).....

This article is a bit technical and I didn't want to take too much space on this website by quoting all of it. If you are interested to read more about this article, you'll find it at:

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2012/04/sniffing-out-explosives

 

[a_majoor]

Plastics that are lighter and strong as steel. Moulding them into parts should also be eaisier. Once this technology is commercialized we can go on a "diet" by replacing things like strike plates and hatches with superstrong plastic substitutes; a 30% weight reduction will go a long way to reducing other logistical burdens and improving the soldier's stamina:

http://www.aftau.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=16757

Steel-Strength Plastics -- and Green, Too!
Thursday, June 7, 2012

TAU researcher develops durable plastic that may replace metals


As landfills overflow with discarded plastics, scientists have been working to produce a biodegradable alternative that will reduce pollution. Now a Tel Aviv University researcher is giving the quest for environmentally friendly plastics an entirely new dimension — by making them tougher than ever before.

Prof. Moshe Kol of TAU's School of Chemistry is developing a super-strength polypropylene — one of the world's most commonly used plastics — that has the potential to replace steel and other materials used in everyday products. This could have a long-term impact on many industries, including car manufacturing, in which plastic parts could replace metallic car parts.

Durable plastics consume less energy during the production process, explains Prof. Kol. And there are additional benefits as well. If polypropylene car parts replaced traditional steel, cars would be lighter overall and consume less fuel, for example. And because the material is cheap, plastic could provide a much more affordable manufacturing alternative.

His research has been published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Better building blocks

Although a promising field of research, biodegradable plastics have not yet been able to mimic the durability and resilience of common, non-biodegradable plastics like polypropylene. Prof. Kol believes that the answer could lie in the catalysts, the chemicals that enable their production.

Plastics consist of very long chains called polymers, made of simple building blocks assembled in a repeating pattern. Polymerization catalysts are responsible for connecting these building blocks and create a polymer chain. The better the catalyst, the more orderly and well-defined the chain — leading to a plastic with a higher melting point and greater strength and durability. This is why the catalyst is a crucial part of the plastic production process.

Prof. Kol and his team of researchers have succeeded in developing a new catalyst for the polypropylene production process, ultimately producing the strongest version of the plastic that has been created to date. "Everyone is using the same building blocks, so the key is to use different machinery," he explains. With their catalyst, the researchers have produced the most accurate or "regular" polypropylene ever made, reaching the highest melting point to date.

Using resources more efficiently

By 2020, the consumption of plastics is estimated to reach 200 million tons a year. Prof. Kol says that because traditional plastics aren't considered green, it's important to think creatively to develop this material, which has become a staple of daily life, with the least amount of harm to the environment. Cheaper and more efficient to produce in terms of energy consumption, as well as non-toxic, Prof. Kol's polypropylene is good news for green manufacturing and could revolutionize the industry. The durability of the plastic results in products that require less maintenance — and a much longer life for parts made from the plastic.

Beyond car parts, Prof. Kol envisions a number of uses for this and related plastics, including water pipes, which he says could ultimately conserve water use. Drinking water for the home has been traditionally carried by steel and cement pipes. These pipes are susceptible to leakage, leading to waste and therefore higher water bills. But they are also very heavy, so replacing them can be a major, expensive operation.

"Plastic pipes require far fewer raw materials, weighing ten times less than steel and a hundred times less than cement. Reduced leaking means more efficient water use and better water quality," Prof. Kol explains. The replacement of steel water pipes by those made of plastic is becoming more common, and the production of plastics with even greater strength and durability will make this transition even more environmentally-friendly.

Prof. Kol holds the Bruno Landesberg Chair in Green Chemistry at TAU.

For more environment and ecology news from Tel Aviv University, click here.

Keep up with the latest AFTAU news on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/AFTAUnews.

 

[a_majoor]

The USAF continues to look at hypersonic missiles. Shrinking them to fit fighter jets makes sense and provides far more platforms to carry the weapons. The sheer kinetic energy of a missile moving at Mach 6 makes it a potent bunker buster and anti ship missiles as well as AAMs, a CF-35 or even CF-18 carrying these sort of missiles makes them true multi role platforms.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/hypersonic-missiles/

Air Force Wants Hypersonic Missiles for Stealth Jets
By Robert BeckhusenEmail Author June 7, 2012 |  6:00 pm |  Categories: Missiles

An X-51 Waverider hypersonic missile attached to the wing of a B-52 bomber. The Air Force seeks to build a smaller variant for its stealth fighters. Photo: Boeing

For decades, the military has tried — with little success — to build missiles capable of traveling at breakneck, hypersonic speeds. Missile tests, however, have been uneven, with repeated failures punctuated by the occasional stunning success. Now the Air Force is taking a bigger role by seeking to build another hypersonic missile, this time for its stealth fighter jets.

The Air Force’s desired “High Speed Strike Weapon” would travel at five times the speed of sound or faster, theoretically launching from a stealthy F-22 Raptor jet or a future F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and traveling so fast and at such long distances as to render an enemy’s anti-aircraft systems defunct. The Air Force’s Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate is gathering possible design partners later this month at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida before any solicitation. According to an Air Force notice, whatever prototype gets built will ultimately need to strike “time-critical” targets — on the move, possibly — from “tactically relevant standoff distances.”

If it can be done, the weapon will “be representative of an air-breathing hypersonic missile system” that can tough it out in “the most stringent environments presented to us in the next decade,” said Steven Walker, the Air Force’s deputy assistant secretary for science, technology and engineering, in written testimony to the House Armed Services Committee in February.

That’s the hope, at least. The U.S. military has a mixed record with hypersonics. Last August, the Pentagon’s pizza-shaped Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 failed for a second (and likely final) time, crashing into the Pacific during a test flight. But the Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon did much better during a test in November. Two years ago, the Air Force successfully flew its X-51 WaveRider scramjet missile at speeds of Mach 5 for 200 seconds after launching it off a B-52 bomber. A later test, though, ended with engine failure.

Unlike those weapons, though, the High Speed Strike Weapon isn’t a so-called “Global Strike” weapon. Those weapons are supposed to hit anywhere on Planet Earth at any time. The former Falcon missile, for instance, was designed to launch with a rocket into space, before screaming back down to Earth and obliterating its target. But those weapons are indistinguishable from a nuclear weapon when seen on radar — which could inadvertently trigger nuclear Armageddon once a surprised nuclear power like Russia sees one in the air.

A fighter-launched missile resembles any other smaller, non-nuclear missile. It’s just traveling super-fast. Armageddon averted.

There are other technical challenges in launching a scramjet missile from a fighter jet instead of a sub-orbital rocket or a B-52, though. It’ll still need to have air-breathing engines that compresses the air around the missile into a supersonic mixture of oxygen and fuel — absent a turbine. But it will also need to be small enough to be carried by a jet fighter while carrying the necessary advanced navigation controls, precision guidance tools and sophisticated sensors, plus the warhead. The service will also still have to find the right mixture of composite materials like titanium and tungsten (among others) to hold up under the enormous heat generated by Mach 5, Mach 6 and even faster flight.

The Air Force is requesting a whopping 150 percent increase in funding for the program, from $6.2 million now to $15.4 million in 2013 in one “thrust” of weapons development, according to subscription-required InsideDefense. That’s a lot of money for a missile that may not work.

 

[Panzer Grenadier]

Plastics that are lighter and strong as steel. Moulding them into parts should also be eaisier. Once this technology is commercialized we can go on a "diet" by replacing things like strike plates and hatches with superstrong plastic substitutes; a 30% weight reduction will go a long way to reducing other logistical burdens and improving the soldier's stamina:

http://www.aftau.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=16757

I'm keeping my hopes high on being able to reduce the soldiers burden.  I fear however that the higher ups will simply add more to the standard load requirements to offset any weight reductions gained.

 

[a_majoor]

Small, low cost gigapixel camera. Imagine something like this on the mast of a surveillance vehicle or the pod of a UAV. Another possible use would be for all sky surveillance looking for satellites. The imagination boggles:

http://www.nature.com/news/gigapixel-camera-catches-the-smallest-details-1.10853

Gigapixel camera catches the smallest details
One-billion-pixel snapshots offer researchers high-resolution view of dynamic processes.

Katherine Bourzac
20 June 2012

A one-gigapixel image (top) shows minute details (bottom) of the skyline in Seattle, Washington.

A camera made from off-the-shelf electronics can take snapshots of one billion pixels each — about one thousand times larger than images taken by conventional cameras.

David Brady, an engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues are developing the AWARE-2 camera with funding from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The camera’s earliest use will probably be in automated military surveillance systems, but its creators hope eventually to make the technology available to researchers, media companies and consumers.

The camera is described today in Nature1, in a paper that includes some of its images. One snapshot shows a wide view of Pungo Lake, part of the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. In a compressed version of the entire image, no animals are visible. But zooming in reveals a group of swans; going in closer still makes it possible to count every bird on and above the lake.

Researchers including wildlife biologists and archaeologists already use image-stitching software to create similar images from lots of lower-resolution files. But the ability to take the entire picture in one instant rather than taking individual shots over a period of minutes to an hour — during which time those swans might all have flown away — will be useful for capturing dynamic processes.

With such technology, “when you’re in the field, you don’t have to decide what you’re going to study — you can capture as much information as possible and look at it for five years”, says Illah Nourbakhsh, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who developed image-stitching software called Gigapan. “That really changes your mindset.”

Bigger and better

In general, taking high-resolution images demands a large lens. Very rapidly, the optics become “the size of a bus”, says Brady. And high-resolution cameras usually have a limited field of view, meaning that they can see only a small slice of the total scene at a time. For example, each of the four 1.4-gigapixel cameras being used in the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, which will scan the night sky for potentially dangerous near-Earth objects such as asteroids, focuses on a view of the sky only three degrees wide. And each uses a 1.8-metre mirror and a large array of light-sensing chips to accomplish the feat.#

Billion-pixel pictures

AWARE-2 sidesteps the size issue by using 98 microcameras, each with a 14-megapixel sensor, grouped around a shared spherical lens. Together, they take in a field of view 120 degrees wide and 50 degrees tall. With all the packaging, data-processing electronics and cooling systems, the entire camera is about 0.75 by 0.75 by 0.5 metres in volume.

The current version of the camera can take images of about one gigapixel; by adding more microcameras, the researchers expect eventually to reach about 50 gigapixels. Each microcamera runs autofocus and exposure algorithms independently, so that every part of the image — near or far, bright or dark — is visible in the final result. Image processing is used to stitch together the 98 sub-images into a single large one at the rate of three frames per minute.

“With this design, they’re changing the game,” says Nourbakhsh.

Super video

The Duke group is now building a gigapixel camera with more sophisticated electronics, which takes ten images per second — close to video rate. It should be finished by the end of the year. The cameras can currently be made for about US$100,000 each, and large-scale manufacturing should bring costs down to about $1,000. The researchers are talking to media companies about the technology, which could for example be used to film sports: fans watching gigapixel video of a football game could follow their own interests rather than the camera operator’s.

The challenge, says Michael Cohen, head of the Interactive Visual Media group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, is dealing with the huge amount of data that these cameras will produce.

The gigapixel camera that takes ten frames per second will generate ten gigabytes of data every second — too much to store in conventional file formats, post on YouTube or e-mail to a friend. Not everything in these huge images is worth displaying or even recording, and researchers will have to write software to determine which data are worth storing and displaying, and create better interfaces for viewing and sharing gigapixel images. “The technology for capturing the world is outpacing our ability to deal with the data,” says Nourbakhsh.

 

[cupper]

“The technology for capturing the world is outpacing our ability to deal with the data,”

This is going to be the bigger problem to overcome if it is to become commercially viable, let alone militarily functional.

The storage problem will be one thing, but also the processing power needed to even handle that much data in one shot would be prohibitive. And let's not even think about transmitting the data between users in a field environment.

Michio Kaku has posited that Moore's Law will collapse in the next ten years, and is currently showing signs of slowing down.

http://techland.time.com/2012/05/01/the-collapse-of-moores-law-physicist-says-its-already-happening/

 

[a_majoor]

Granted the file storage and transmission problems will be difficult to overcome, but this sort of thing generates its own momentum; the potential advantages of gigapixel cameras are so great that lots of work will be done to attempt to overcome these issues generated by having gigapixel cameras in the first place.

The potential spinoffs of that will be mind boggeling: you would need a ruggedized laptop with similar performance to a modern supercomputer to process images, and mass produced ultra high capacity storage devices which would act as "film" for these cameras. If these items are mass produced for running cameras, they will also be available for other things as well...Dealing with huge bandwidth pipes is way over my pay grade, although some of the material upthread touches on these issues.

For those of you with interest in this technology (or even building your own gigapixel cameras out of commodity parts) this website is interesting:

http://disp.duke.edu/projects/AWARE/
http://disp.duke.edu/projects/mosaic/cam001.html
http://disp.duke.edu/projects/mosaic/cam002.html

 

[cupper]

Here's some more info on the Gigapixel Camera, complete with photos and technical sketches

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/06/22/Gigapixel-camera-suggests-ways-to-offer-high-pixel-counts

 

[a_majoor]

And it seems there is another way to vastly increase the bandwith of the various network pipes. Gigapixel cameras may not be so far fetched after all:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/131640-infinite-capacity-wireless-vortex-beams-carry-2-5-terabits-per-second

Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second
By Sebastian Anthony on June 25, 2012 at 7:41 am
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American and Israeli researchers have used twisted, vortex beams to transmit data at 2.5 terabits per second. As far as we can discern, this is the fastest wireless network ever created — by some margin. This technique is likely to be used in the next few years to vastly increase the throughput of both wireless and fiber-optic networks.

These twisted signals use orbital angular momentum (OAM) to cram much more data into a single stream. In current state-of-the-art transmission protocols (WiFi, LTE, COFDM), we only modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) of radio waves, not the OAM. If you picture the Earth, SAM is our planet spinning on its axis, while OAM is our movement around the Sun. Basically, the breakthrough here is that researchers have created a wireless network protocol that uses both OAM and SAM.

In this case, Alan Willner and fellow researchers from the University of Southern California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, twisted together eight ~300Gbps visible light data streams using OAM. Each of the eight beams has a different level of OAM twist. The beams are bundled into two groups of four, which are passed through different polarization filters. One bundle of four is transmitted as a thin stream, like a screw thread, while the other four are transmitted around the outside, like a sheathe. The beam is then transmitted over open space (just one meter in this case), and untwisted and processed by the receiving end. 2.5 terabits per second is equivalent to 320 gigabytes per second, or around seven full Blu-ray movies per second.

This huge achievement comes just a few months after Bo Thide finally proved that OAM is actually possible. In Thide’s case, his team transmitted an OAM radio signal over 442 meters (1450ft).

According to Thide, OAM should allow us to twist together an “infinite number” of conventional transmission protocols without using any more spectrum. In theory, we should be able to take 10 (or 100 or 1000 or…) WiFi or LTE signals and twist them into a single beam, increasing throughput by 10 (or 100 or 1000 or…) times. For fiber networks, where we still have a lot of spare capacity, this isn’t all that exciting — but for wireless networks, where we’ve virtually run out of useful spectrum, twisted radio waves could provide an instant, future-proof solution. For the networking nerds, Willner’s OAM link has a spectral efficiency of 95.7 bits per hertz; LTE maxes out at 16.32 bits/Hz; 802.11n is 2.4 bits/Hz. Digital TV (DVB-T) is just 0.55 bits/Hz.

The next task for Willner’s team will be to increase the OAM network’s paltry one-meter transmission distance to something a little more usable. “For situations that require high capacity… over relatively short distances of less than 1km, this approach could be appealing. Of course, there are also opportunities for long-distance satellite-to-satellite communications in space, where turbulence is not an issue,” Willner tells the BBC. In reality, the main limiting factor is that we simply don’t have the hardware or software to manipulate OAM. The future of wireless networking is very bright indeed, however.

 

[GAP]

Here's another innovation that is likely to have a huge impact on the size of systems....

The fanless heatsink: Silent, dust-immune, and almost ready for prime time
By Sebastian Anthony on June 25, 2012
Article Link

The fanless, almost-silent, dust-immune, 30-times-more-efficient Sandia Cooler heatsink is almost ready for prime time. Sandia National Laboratories has announced that two companies — one computer heatsink maker, and one LED light maker — have licensed the technology.

In the Sandia Cooler, the heatsink itself is the fan. It is a cast metal impeller that floats on a hydrodynamic air bearing just a thousandth of an inch (0.03 millimeters) above a metal heat pipe spreader, powered by a brushless motor in the middle. The end result is a cooler that is very quiet and 30 times more efficient than a fan-and-heatsink solutions. The prototype (shown above and in the video below) is 10 times smaller than a commercial state-of-the-art cooler, but has the same cooling performance.

The Sandia Cooler’s silent operation is due to the fact that a fanless design has a lot more flexibility, whereas the fan in a standard air cooler just needs to drive as much air as possible. The Sandia Cooler’s impeller blades can have a geometry that perfectly splits the air at the impeller entrance (in the middle) and rejoins the air flow at the exit (the edges). Fast forward to 3:30 in the video if you want to hear just how quiet it is.
More on link

 

[a_majoor]

Moving from information age technologies back to moving brute matter around, DARPA has completed a series of tests involving ways to deploy direct to shore from standard container ships; making the idea of the Big Honking Ship somewhat moot (for the same cost of one BHS, you could conceivably get dozens of converted container ships. Soldiers have lived in modified ISO containers, so even personnel could be transported this way in theory):

http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/06/26.aspx

DARPA DEVELOPS TECHNOLOGIES FOR AIDING DISASTER RELIEF

    June 26, 2012

    New sea and air delivery systems to enable direct support to disaster zones from offshore container ships

    During natural or man-made disasters, the U.S. armed forces’ rapidly deployable airlift, sealift, communication, and medical evacuation and care capabilities can supplement lead relief agencies in providing aid to victims. The Department of Defense’s 2012 strategic guidance document includes humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations as one of the missions for 21st Century defense.

    DARPA’s Tactically Expandable Maritime Platform (TEMP) program has completed the design of innovative technologies to transform commercial container ships into self-contained floating supply bases during disaster relief operations, without needing port infrastructure. The program envisions a container ship anchoring offshore of a disaster area, and the ship’s crew delivering supplies ashore using DARPA-developed, modular on-board cranes and air- and sea-delivery vehicles.

    “To allow military ships and aircraft to focus on unique military missions they alone can fulfill, it makes sense to develop technologies to leverage standard commercial container ships, used around the world daily, as a surge capacity for extended humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations,” said Scott Littlefield, DARPA program manager.

    DARPA recently completed the first phase of the program, which developed four key modular systems, all of which are transportable using standard 20-foot or 40-foot commercial shipping containers. The elements include:

        Core support modules—container-sized units that provide electrical power, berthing, water and other life-support requirements for an augmented crew aboard the container ship.

        Motion-stabilized cranes—modular on-board cranes to allow transfer of cargo containers at sea from the ship deck over the side and onto a sea-delivery vehicle.

        Sea-delivery vehicles—Captive Air Amphibious Transporters (CAAT) have air-filled pontoons on a tank tread-like design, enabling them to carry containers over water and directly onto shore.

        Parafoil unmanned air-delivery system—a low-cost, propeller-driven air vehicle that uses a parachute for lift and carries urgent supplies from the container ship to stricken areas on shore.

    While DARPA’s investment in demonstrating the technology has completed, the information obtained should reduce risk for efforts of the military Services or other government organizations with a humanitarian assistance and disaster relief mission.

 

[cupper]

This looks like it could have some interesting potential, if at the very least  lightening the load for portable electronic devices.


Scientists demonstrate 'paint-on' batteries

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/06/30/paint-on-batteries-demonstrated

Scientists in Texas have demonstrated a way of 'painting' rechargeable lithium-ion batteries onto surfaces, greatly expanding the potential for future development of portable electronics. The team, from Rice University, has succeeded in painting batteries onto a range of different surfaces, including common household objects, with 'no surface conditioning'. The batteries are made up of five layers measuring just 0.5mm thick in total and, according to the scientists that developed the technology, can be fabricated using conventional spray-painting equipment and techniques.

 

[a_majoor]

This sort of monitoring SW would have a lot of utility in IA and COIN scenarios, changing the input parameters to the things *we* are interested in (although criminal activity is an indication of where Government has less control over a neighbourhood):

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428354/la-cops-embrace-crime-predicting-algorithm/?ref=rss

L.A. Cops Embrace Crime-Predicting Algorithm
Burglary reports dropped after officers began taking patrol orders from computers.

David Talbot

Monday, July 2, 2012

On patrol: A computer-generated “heat map,” left, shows predicted crime activity. This is translated into patrol instructions in the form of the red boxes on the map, right.
PredPol

A recent study suggests that computers could be better than seasoned police analysts at predicting when and where crime will strike next in a busy city.

Software tested in Los Angeles was twice as good as human analysts at predicting where burglaries and car break-ins might happen, according to a company deploying the technology.

When police in an L.A. precinct called Foothill division followed the computer's advice—and focused their patrols within the areas identified—those areas experienced a 25 percent drop in reported burglaries, an anomaly compared to neighboring areas.

"We are seeing a tipping point—they are out there preventing the crime. The suspect is showing up in the area where he likes to go. They see black-and-white [police cruisers] talking to citizens—and that's enough to disrupt the activity," Sean Malinowski, a police captain in the Foothill division, said in a press webinar last week. The division has nearly 200,000 residents in a 46-square-mile area of the San Fernando Valley.

The software is built by a startup company, PredPol, based in Santa Cruz, California, and builds on computer science and anthropological research carried out at Santa Clara University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

The inputs are straightforward: previous crime reports, which include the time and location of a crime. The software is informed by sociological studies of criminal behavior, which include the insight that burglars often ply the same area.

The system produces, for each patrol shift, printed maps speckled with red boxes, 500 feet on each side, suggesting where property crimes—specifically, burglaries and car break-ins and thefts—are statistically more likely to happen. Patterns detected over a period of several years—as well as recent clusters—figure in the algorithm, and the boxes are recalibrated for each patrol shift based on the timeliest data.

"The challenge, and what is really hard from the point of view of the crime analyst, is how do you balance crime patterns on different time scales. That's where the algorithm has the edge, sifting through years of data," says Jeff Brantingham, a company cofounder and UCLA anthropologist.

Proving that the algorithm really helped reduce property crime by 25 percent in Foothill is a difficult task. Police officers could, for example, know that stopping burglaries is a management priority, and shift resources and their attentions accordingly, regardless of the red boxes.

The company tested on previous data whether crimes occurred more frequently in the areas identified by the software, compared to boxes sketched by crime analysts. Between November 2011 and April 2012, in the crime-plagued Foothill district, the software predicted crime six times better than randomly placed boxes. Human crime analysts' boxes were only three times better than the random boxes, according to Brantingham.

But whether the algorithm is right or wrong, it tends to reduce bureaucratic procedures and thus keep officers on the street, which by itself helps. Where police used to sit in daily meetings to plan where to patrol, they can now spend more time actually out on patrol, since the computer's doing the planning. And if they do spook a would-be burglar into abandoning his plan, it means even more time on patrol, because the officer doesn't have to leave his beat to process the suspect. "I don't have them back writing a burglary report. I can have them have more minutes out on the mission. It is what we see happening," Malinowski said.

The technology was previously tested in Santa Cruz, California. It has now been expanded to six Los Angeles areas inhabited by 1.1 million people, and is being expanded to other cities.

 

[a_majoor]

Lots of amazing stuff coming down the pike. Making desalination several orders of magnitude easier is not just a small improvement; it means things like a ROWPU sized unit could provide water for a city, or a deployed unit (or the DART) could provide masses of drinking water from a unit the size of a portable generator...

http://www.geekosystem.com/graphene-desalination/

Graphene Can Improve Desalination Efficiency by Several Orders of Magnitude, Can Do Pretty Much Anything

Desalination Graphene MIT

by Eric Limer | 1:35 pm, June 29th, 2012

Graphene. It can be stronger than steel and thinner than paper. It can generate electricity when struck by light. It can be used in thin, flexible supercapacitors that are up to 20 times more powerful than the ones we use right now and can be made in a DVD burner. It’s already got an impressive track record, but does it have any more tricks up its sleeve? Apparently, yes. According to researchers at MIT, graphene could also increase the efficicency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude. Seriously, what can’t this stuff do?

Desalination might sound boring, but it’s super important. Around 97% of the planet’s water is saltwater and therefore unpotable, and while you can remove the salt from the water, the current methods of doing so are laborious and expensive. Graphene stands to change all that by essentially serving as the world’s most awesomely efficient filter. If you can increase the efficiency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude (that is to say, make it 100 to 1,000 times more efficient) desalination suddenly becomes way more attractive as a way to obtain drinking water.

Desalination works exactly as you might expect; you run water through a filter with pores small enough to block the salt and not the water. It’s a process called reverse osmosis. The issue is that the thicker your filter is, the less efficient the process is going to be. If you know anything about graphene, you know where this is going. Graphene sheets are one atom thick. It’s sort of a best case scenario. Because it’s nanoporous and so insanely thin, it can let water (but not salt) through it without requiring the comparatively high levels of pressure that current filters do.

That said, there are a couple of roadblocks to using graphene for desalination. First of all, if you want to use a graphene filter, it’s important to have a lot of control of the size of the holes in the filter, or more accurately, the variation of the sizes of the holes. Put simply, you need to make sure that all the holes are small enough to keep the salt out if you want to achieve true desalination. When it comes to that level of accuracy, we aren’t quite there on the production side. We are, however, pretty close and getting closer every day. Second, you’ve got to make sure that the filter stays stable under pressure; if it breaches you’re going to lose a lot of process. The standard methods of reinforcing traditional filters should translate pretty easily to graphene though, so all in all it’s looking pretty promising.

We may not have jetpacks or flying cars yet, but graphene is looking like it may prove to be the sort of infinitely useful space age material that always gets such stupid names in sci-fi movies. And if the past is any indication, this isn’t the end of graphene’s application potential. Any bets on what’s next?

 

[a_majoor]

Exoskeletons become more versatile; a powered hand provides more strength and dexterity than previous designs (and being able to lift huge weights with a powered exoskeleton would be pointless if you can't hang on to the item in question anyway:

http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/12713.htm

ExoHand – human-machine interaction

Description
Animation
Film

New scope for interaction
between humans and machines
The ExoHand from Festo is an exoskeleton that can be worn like a glove.

The fingers can be actively moved and their strength amplified; the operator’s hand movements are registered and transmitted to the robotic hand in real time. The objectives are to enhance the strength and endurance of the human hand, to extend humans’ scope of action and to secure them an independent lifestyle even at an advanced age.

From assembly to medical therapy
The ExoHand could provide assistance in the form of force amplification in connection with monotonous and strenuous activities in industrial assembly, for example, or in remote manipulation in hazardous environments: with force feedback, the human operator feels what the robot grasps and can thus grip and manipulate objects from a safe distance without having to touch them.

Due to the yielding capacity of its pneumatic components, the ExoHand also offers potential in the field of service robotics. In the rehabilitation of stroke patients, it could already be used today as an active manual orthosis.

A strong hand with sensitive fingers
The exoskeleton supports the human hand from the outside and reproduces the physiological degrees of freedom – the scope of movement resulting from the geometry of the joints.

Eight double-acting pneumatic actuators move the fingers so that they can be opened and closed. For this purpose, non-linear control algorithms are implemented on a CoDeSys-compliant controller, which thus allows precise orientation of the individual finger joints. The forces, angles and positions of the fingers are tracked by sensors.

 

[a_majoor]

DARPA goes for smart underwear. Think of this as a stealth suit for preventing injuries and you get the idea:

http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/DSO/Programs/Warrior_Web.aspx

WARRIOR WEB

The amount of equipment and gear carried by today’s dismounted warfighter can exceed 100 pounds, as troops conduct patrols for extended periods over rugged and hilly terrain. The added weight while bending, running, squatting, jumping and crawling in a tactical environment increases the risk of musculoskeletal injury, particularly on vulnerable areas such as ankles, knees and lumbar spine. Increased load weight also causes increase in physical fatigue, which further decreases the body’s ability to perform warfighter tasks and protect against both acute and chronic injury.

The Warrior Web program seeks to develop the technologies required to prevent and reduce musculoskeletal injuries caused by dynamic events typically found in the warfighter’s environment.  The ultimate program goal is a lightweight, conformal under-suit that is transparent to the user (like a diver’s wetsuit). The suit seeks to employ a system (or web) of closed-loop controlled actuation, transmission, and functional structures that protect injury prone areas, focusing on the soft tissues that connect and interface with the skeletal system. Other novel technologies that prevent, reduce, ambulate, and assist with healing of acute and chronic musculoskeletal injuries are also being sought.

In addition to direct injury mitigation, Warrior Web will have the capacity to augment positive work done by the muscles, to reduce the physical burden, by leveraging the web structure to impart joint torque at the ankle, knee, and hip joints. The suit seeks to reduce the metabolic cost of carrying a typical assault load, as well as compensate for the weight of the suit itself, while consuming no more than 100 Watts of electric power from the battery source. 

While injury mitigation is a primary goal, a Warrior Web suit system is not intended to interfere with current warfighter “soldier systems,” such as external body armor, rather it aims to augment them to improve warfighter effectiveness.

The Warrior Web program will consist of two separate but related program tasks.  Task A, called Warrior Web Alpha, seeks to develop a mix of core technologies critical to the realization of a Warrior Web capability.  The Warrior Web Alpha effort examines five key Technology Areas: core injury mitigation technologies; comprehensive analytical representations; regenerative actuation; adaptive sensing and control; and suit human-to-wearer interface.

Part way through the Warrior Web program, Warrior Web Bravo, or Task B, is expected to develop an integrated suit capability by leveraging the technology developed by Task A efforts and incorporating the most appropriate breakthroughs into a suit that shows the best performance. The final suit is expected to be tested in appropriate mission profiles under realistic loads to evaluate performance.

 

[GnyHwy]

India's newest howitzer.  It's currently getting slammed on Facebook by my fellow gunners.  I'm also going to post in the Arty threads to see what kind of reaction it gets; likely negative.

It's an interesting concept, but to me it looks like it was designed by a crapload of extremely smart engineers, and very few actual Artilleryman.

http://www.military.com/video/guns/howitzers/indian-armys-new-155mm-howitzer/1737980611001/

 

[a_majoor]

Isn't this a reworking or rebuild of the Bofors FH-77 (B-02 or B-05 depending on the source you read)?

The Swedes are pretty big on finding non standard solutions to problems (think of the Striv 103 "S" tank or various SAAB jet fighters), and most of their stuff does work, even if not in the same way that we might expect. Reading an article in Defense Industry Daily it seems the Indian Army is having a difficult time getting a new artillery piece through the normal procurement process, so rebuilding the FH-77 may be their only viable solution until the procurment process gets fixed. (see http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/murky-competition-for-2b-india-howitzer-order-may-end-soon-0805/)

 

[OldSolduer]

India's newest howitzer.  It's currently getting slammed on Facebook by my fellow gunners.  I'm also going to post in the Arty threads to see what kind of reaction it gets; likely negative.

It's an interesting concept, but to me it looks like it was designed by a crapload of extremely smart engineers, and very few actual Artilleryman.

http://www.military.com/video/guns/howitzers/indian-armys-new-155mm-howitzer/1737980611001/

I am not a gunner however I can see this piece of kit in the maintenance bay rather than on the gun line. Too complicated and too many moving parts. Plus what is the accuracy like? I recall once we bedded our 81s in we didn't like to move them until we had to leave.
That transformer rotating round and round under its own power.....radical yes....

 

[GnyHwy]

I am not a gunner however I can see this piece of kit in the maintenance bay rather than on the gun line. Too complicated and too many moving parts. Plus what is the accuracy like? I recall once we bedded our 81s in we didn't like to move them until we had to leave.
That transformer rotating round and round under its own power.....radical yes....

We leave the 81s bedded in as long as possible as well.  Or at least until they are so far bedded in that you can't see your aiming points with your sight. 

Here is the link that everyone is commenting on the Indian gun.
http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/106746.0.html