The U.S. Army has successfully tested a hypersonic aircraft that can travel five times the speed of sound and reach anywhere on Earth in under an hour.
Described by the Pentagon as a "glide vehicle, designed to fly within the earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speed and long range," the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) was launched aboard a rocket from the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii.
It hit a target at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 2,300 miles away, in less than 30 minutes, according to Department of Defense and AP reports.
Love brainteasers? Brainiacs from a California university hope you can help decipher a mind-draining 10,000-piece puzzle through their collaborative Web site.
The DARPA Shredder Challenge aims to discover new ways the U.S. military can process and decode shredded documents confiscated in war zones, as well as test vulnerabilities in the shredding methods used by the U.S. national security community.
The Shredder Challenge is made up of five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the documents' subject matter, and the shredding methods vary to present challenges of increasing difficulty. To complete each problem, participants must provide the answer to a puzzle embedded in the content of the reconstructed document.
Three out of the five puzzles are still available to be solved before the contest ends December 4 and DARPA awards $50,000 as the prize. Manuel Cebrian, a research scientist at the University of California at San Diego, and a team from UCSD have created a way to solve the remaining enigmas by "combining advanced computer vision methods with shared tasking and referral-based crowdsourcing," says the USCD Web site.
Defense contractor ITT Exelis has a nifty new line of night-vision goggles that let you see thermal imagery in the dark.
The Spiral Enhanced Night Vision Goggles (SENVG), part of the i-Aware line, overlay thermal images on the usual green display in night-vision goggles. They're sensitive enough to pick up recently moved soil on a dirt path, and can also be used to spot people hiding behind bushes.
Soldiers can use them to see clearly at night an in all weather conditions--SENVG comes with an image intensification function.
The goggles can also be used to import or export images, video, and data such as UAV pictures of terrain or map files.
Ph.D. student Chris Seaton, who studies computer science at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, witnessed firsthand the horrors of serious burns while deployed in Afghanistan, Kenya, and elsewhere during his four years as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
So with the help of plastic surgeons at the University of Liverpool, Seaton developed Mersey Burns, an app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch that helps reduce errors when treating burn victims.
Science fact often follows science fiction. Hence, the U.S. Army is funding development of a Terminator-style robot soldier.
Boston Dynamics has released new video of its Petman robot and its resemblance to the T-800 is uncanny.
The vid below shows the anthropomorphic bot (aka the Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin) walking on a treadmill, doing squats, and pumping out push-ups without breaking a sweat. All it needs is a metal skull head and a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range.
The maker of the notorious BigDog and AlphaDog quadruped bots says Petman is just "an anthropomorphic robot for testing chemical protection clothing used by the U.S. Army."
The droid, scheduled for delivery next year, is supposed to go through various maneuvers wearing a suit and taking heavy doses of chemical warfare agents. Roughly 6 feet tall, it will also mimic human physiology, generating heat and sweating for added realism.
China asserts it was not behind a series of hacks against U.S. environment-monitoring satellites a few years ago.
Speaking at a news briefing today, China Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said claims that China was behind the hacks, which occurred in 2007 and 2008, are "untrue." The spokesman added, according to Reuters, which attended the briefing, that China is "also a victim of hacking attacks and will oppose any form of cybercrime, including hacking."
Northrop Grumman's X-47B unmanned stealth plane achieved cruise mode flight for the first time recently, a major step toward using the bomber aboard aircraft carriers.
During a flight at Edwards Air Force Base on September 30, the robo-plane retracted its landing gear and flew in cruise configuration for the first time. The test helped prove its navigation hardware and software.
The flight was part of the X-47B's "envelope expansion" under the Navy's Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier Demonstration (UCAS-D) program. Northrop has produced two X-47Bs for the Navy and the aircraft is slated to begin carrier trials in 2013.
This is our first glimpse of the brother of Boston Dynamics' robotic beast of burden, BigDog.
The vid below shows a lab prototype of the quadruped war robot, aka the Legged Squad Support System, or LS3, funded by DARPA and the Marine Corps.
The donkey-sized machine is designed to carry up to 400 pounds of gear and follow troops over rough terrain on missions of 20 miles and up to 24 hours.
That's more than BigDog's payload of 340 pounds and 12 miles; as a general rule, horses can comfortably carry up to 240 pounds. AlphaDog will have some degree of autonomy like animals, using computer vision to follow a leader or automatically trotting to GPS way points.
Technology development firm Cambridge Consultants has created a military targeting system that can track 5-inch shells traveling more than 1,000 mph, allowing gunners to improve their shooting.
The system, which the company calls the first of its kind, is based on a 3D holographic radar known as the Land and Surface Target Scorer (LSTS). It can track highly mobile targets in a cluttered radar field.
In recent trials at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, the radar system was mounted on a tethered pontoon to track projectiles in a 360-degree, 1,000-foot coverage zone.
The LSTS tracked the trajectory and burst points of inert projectiles fired by a naval gun at a rate of one per three seconds. A laptop showed the results in near real time.
The S-911 Vest from Laipac Technology is chest armor with brains. Just as phones have evolved to handle a gazillion different functions, this bulletproof vest has sprouted a GPS system.
Law enforcement, military, security personnel, and VIPs are the target market for the high-tech vest. Built-in GPS provides real-time tracking with location, heading, and speed.
The vest's most important function is to stop bullets, of course. Kevlar and optional armor plates handle that task. The basic Kevlar model has enough stopping power to protect against most handguns, including a shot from a .44 Magnum.
The vest works over a GSM/GPRS network and will record waypoints when out of GSM range. Set up a virtual geo-fence and get alerts when the vest moves in or out of a certain area.
You could do all that with a regular GPS tracking system, but the S-911 also has a built-in G sensor that sends alerts when it registers an impact or a man down. All this extra equipment means the vest comes with its own battery charger. You might want to pick up a car charger adapter for your bulletproof Mercedes.
The military establishment's ever-increasing reliance on technology and whiz-bang gadgetry impacts us as consumers, investors, taxpayers and, ultimately, as the "defended." Our mission here is to bring some of these products and concepts to your attention based on carefully selected criteria, such as importance to national security, originality, collateral damage to the treasury, and adaptability to yard maintenance--but not necessarily in that order.
