Glad that the author is highlighting the need for investment; however, the US government has had a quantum network since 1991. Wall Street, various overseas banks, ISPs, etc. well over a year to 2 years ago. And, tech has invested in QC for a decade or longer. So, the article raises the need for investing in QC; however, the investing is no longer experimental as it is now about the daily usage of this technology as well as planning for technical transformation that is coming in the next 5 to 7 years.
Researchers led by Lockheed Martin and IBM are pushing quantum computing prototypes and military applications.
John Glenn, who captured the nation’s attention in 1962 as the first American to orbit the Earth during a tense time when the United States sought supremacy over the Soviet Union in the space race, and who rocketed back into space 36 years later, becoming the oldest astronaut in history, died Dec. 8 at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Mr. Glenn, who in his post-NASA career served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio, was 95.
The death was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. Mr. Glenn had a stroke after heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014, but the immediate cause was not announced.
Mr. Glenn was one of the seven original astronauts in NASA’s Mercury program, which was a conspicuous symbol of the country’s military and technological might at the height of the Cold War. He was not the first American in space — two of his fellow astronauts preceded him — but his three-orbit circumnavigation of the globe captured the imagination of his countrymen like few events before or since. Mr. Glenn was the last survivor of the Mercury Seven.
One of the oddest military drones aborning reinvents a stillborn technology from 1951. That’s because the unmanned aircraft revolution is resurrecting configurations that were tried more than a half century ago but proved impractical with a human pilot inside. The case in point: Northrop Grumman’s new Tern, a drone designed to do everything armed MQ-1 Predators or MQ-9 Reapers can, but to do it flying from small ships or rugged scraps of land – i.e., no runway needed.
“No one has flown a large, unmanned tailsitter before,” Brad Tousley, director of the Tactical Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Tern’s primary funder, said in a news release. The key word there is “unmanned.”
Back in 1951, when all sorts of vertical takeoff and landing aircraft ideas were being tried, Convair and Lockheed built experimental manned tailsitters for the Navy. Convair’s XFY-1 and Lockheed’s XFV-1, nicknamed “Pogo” and “Pogo Stick,” each had two counter-rotating propellers on its nose and was to take off and land pointing straight up. Convair’s Pogo had a delta wing and, at right angles to the wing, large fins. Lockheed’s Pogo Stick had an X-shaped tail whose trailing tips, like Convair’s wing and fins, sported landing gear.
Sam Gussman arrived four years ago at Stanford University hoping to eventually parlay an engineering degree into a product manager job at Google or Facebook.
Working for the National Security Agency or other intelligence bureaus never crossed his mind. For Gussman, the government didn’t seem like the place for the most exciting, cutting-edge research in human computer interaction — his area of interest. Plus, it did no on-campus recruiting, unlike the many tech startups that e-mailed him daily about job opportunities and happy hours.
That career plan changed dramatically after Gussman took a new graduate class at Stanford’s engineering school called Hacking for Defense, or H4D, where he got to tackle real-life national security challenges. There he met with U.S. military officers and studied the mental duress soldiers face during combat and then worked on software that distinguishes insurgents from civilians in video feeds from drones. Suddenly government work was “super cool.”
The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) are at an advanced stage of with their synthetic biology research. The work could see bacteria being used to send signals and sense in a way similar to computers, the advantage being that it could potentially provide a more intuitive sensory experience to a piece of tech, and bypass some of the pitfalls unique to electrical structures. The research also has application for new 3D printing materials.
What all these techniques and technologies have in common is that they’re recent neuroscientific breakthroughs propelled by military research within a broader context of rapid neuroscientific development, driven by massive government-funded projects in both America and the European Union. Even while much about the brain remains mysterious, this research has contributed to the rapid and startling development of neuroscientific technology.
And while we might marvel at these developments, it is also undeniably true that this state of affairs raises significant ethical questions. What is the proper role – if any – of neuroscience in national defense or war efforts? My research addresses these questions in the broader context of looking at how international relations, and specifically warfare, are shaped by scientific and medical expertise and technology.
Nanyang Technological University (NTU) researchers in Singapore have embedded electronics into a 3D printed drone. Using Stratasys’ 3D printers and the advanced ULTEM 9085 material Phillip Keane produced the device as part of the Singapore Center for 3D Printing (SC3DP) at NTU. The quadcopter, it has four propellers, with its impressive construction and embedded electronics is impressive, but still has some way to go to catch up with TERN, DARPA’s military drone currently under development.
Since man first explored space, it has been a largely peaceful environment. But now US adversaries are deploying weapons beyond Earth’s atmosphere, leading the US military to prepare for the frightening prospect of war in space.
“As humans go out there, there has always been conflict. Conflict in the Wild West as we move in the West … conflict twice in Europe for its horrible world wars,” Gen. John Hyten, head of US Strategic Command, told CNN. “So, every time humans actually physically move into that, there’s conflict, and in that case, we’ll have to be prepared for that.”
