Click on photo to start video.
The military just unveiled a device that turns soldiers into Spider-Men.
Read more
Category: military
US Navy paying D-Wave to train them on QC.
A division of the U.S. Navy intends to pay Canadian company D-Wave $11 million to learn how to use its quantum computing infrastructure, according to a federal filing posted online on Monday.
The unit seeking this training is the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, known as SPAWAR or SSC-PAC for short, which is headquartered in San Diego and has previously researched amphibious throwable robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, virtual reality, and many other technologies. The filing does not actually cover the cost of quantum computing hardware. But NASA has been allowing SPAWAR scientists to learn how to use the D-Wave machine that it operates with Google at the NASA Ames Research Center, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last month.
Quantum computers employ quantum bits, or qubits, each of which can be zero or one or both, unlike the regular bits in classical computers. The superposition of qubits lets machines perform great numbers of computations at once, making a quantum computer highly desirable for certain types of processes. Google recently found that quantum annealing with D-Wave hardware is 100 times faster than simulated annealing on a classic computer chip.
Read more
Pressure is on DARPA by US Military to speed up on completing the soft Exosuit.
The clothing-like Soft Exosuit has been described as a “Wearable Robot” by the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) that’s commissioning universities and research institutions to advance this military technology. The DARPA Soft Exosuit is part of the agency’s Warrior Web program.
A prototype Soft Exosuit had a series of webbing straps around the lower half of the body with a low-power microprocessor and a network of flexible strain sensors. These electronics act as the “brain” and “nervous system” of the Soft Exosuit. They continuously monitor data signals, including suit tension, wearer position (walking, running, crouched) and more.
In 2014, DARPA awarded $2.9 million to The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University to further develop its Soft Exosuit, other versions of which might eventually help persons (military and civilian) with limited mobility.
Read more
So, the US Military has developed a way to eliminate bad memories/ PTSD and another method to restore memories. Wish the US Government would make their minds up on this one — LOL.
A scientist in DARPA’s biological technologies offices explains how the agency is developing implants that could bring back memories.
Read more
US Government may have discovered a new method of safely getting rid of old chemical and other old stockpile weapons.
Getting rid of chemical weapons is one of the military’s most unpleasant duties. But in the future, it may be no more difficult than incinerating garbage, thanks to a team of DARPA-funded scientists who think they can turn some of the world’s deadliest poisons into harmless dirt.
Chemical weapons, including nerve agents and mustards, have been banned under international law since the 1990s, but many countries still harbor large stockpiles. In 2013, a horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria—called the Ghouta attack —claimed hundreds of civilian lives, prompting the international community to intervene and eliminate the country’s chemical weapons reserves. By August 2014, 600 metric tons of deadly weapons had been destroyed (in the military parlance, “demilitarized”) aboard the US Navy vessel MV Cape Ray.
The Ghouta attack highlighted two things: one, that the world would be a better place if we could annihilate all chemical weapons. Two, that we really don’t have a safe method of doing so. “The Cape Ray did a great job achieving its objective, which was to demilitarize Syria’s chemical weapons,” said Dr. Tyler McQuade, a chemist and program manager at DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “The downside is, the weapons had to be transported a long distance, and we did the demilitarization on the Mediterranean. If anything had gone wrong, it could have been really horrible for the local environment.”
Read more
Excellent read about future Commerce in Space — could we see an Amazon or a HomeDepot in space?
In space there are no service stations to pull into and get replacement parts for your satellite. Nor is there a towing service if a satellite is in the wrong orbit, a construction contractor to help you build structures, or a “Space Depot” for those who wish to “do-it-themselves” on orbit. In other words, we still operate within a first-generation space industrial enterprise, i.e. all commerce is on Earth, and we only focus on bits (data) coming from monolithic things that go up (i.e., satellites), which eventually die or just come down with no chance of repair or reuse.
Today the commercial space industry focuses exclusively on applications that support launching science, exploration, military, or established earth-bound data communication or delivery services, focusing data to/from space. The lack of technology to support or “markets” to enter has resulted in nebulous, unconsolidated and without-a-critical-mass investment in space-based infrastructure, industrialization, space resources (survey and process maturation) and global utility creation and delivery applications in space. However, all that may finally be changing.
Space applications that are not solely data driven are becoming real. Asteroid mining, fuel depots and commercial space stations are all being actively pursued by companies around the world, as examples of different types of revenue-generating endeavors outside of data-driven end use. These missions and their spacecraft will require greater upkeep, maintenance, repair, and consumable restoration. Consequently, “services” are now being talked about and pursued, executed from one space platform to another. The most talked-about “service” event is providing either consumables (fuel) or failure remediation to satellites on orbit, referred to as “servicing”. However, a handful of companies are seeking to break the shackles that today’s satellites are stuck with at launch, and go well beyond “servicing” into modifying and even constructing new space platforms, on orbit.
Read more
Coming clean on the story around the XS-1 Spaceplane. Hmmm; US Government coming clean; really?
ORLANDO, Fla. – Here’s a phrase that’s not repeated everyday in the space community:
“You’ve heard Elon’s comments … we want to go beyond that,” Brad Tousley, the head of the tactical technology office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said May 15.
Elon, of course, is Elon Musk, the optimistic, and some say visionary, founder of SpaceX with plans of eventually colonizing Mars. After landing three first-stage rockets, Musk has said SpaceX would inspect the rockets with plans to later re-fly most of them. [DARPA’s XS-1 Military Space Plane Concept in Pictures].
Read more
