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Category: military

The U.S. army will have pocket sized drones.

Nano drones have become a major military tool over the past few years, and the most recent announcement of FLIR Systems being awarded an additional $20.6 million contract for their Black Hornet 3 Personal Reconnaissance Systems (PRS) by the U.S. Army is one big example of that.

While the contract is huge, the FLIR Systems Black Hornet 3 is only the size of a cellphone. This extremely light and nearly silent drone can fly up to 25 minutes, and provide many military advantages in combat.

With this second contract, FLIR Systems will be providing the service with additional miniature reconnaissance drones as part of the ongoing soldier-borne sensor program, National Defense reports.

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General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) and Boeing have entered into a partnership to develop a scalable 100 kW to 250 kW-class High Energy Laser (HEL) weapon system for air and missile defenses.

Laser weapons have been high on the wish lists of major military powers ever since the first laser was invented by Theodore Maiman at the Hughes Research Lab, Malibu, California in 1960. With enough concentrated power to burn through steel, enough range to cover literally astronomical distances, an operating cost of a dollar a shot, and an unlimited number of shots so long as there’s power available, the laser looked like the so-called ultimate weapon – if it could be made practical.

Of the problems that have hampered laser weapon development over the past six decades, one of the biggest is how to properly cool a laser generator. This is important because weapon-grade lasers have an efficiency between 50 and 70 percent, with the leftover percentages being lost as heat that could shut down or damage the device.

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Well, considering current events…

The Tesla HEPA Filter and Bioweapon Defense Mode have repeatedly proven their usefulness and even vital necessity. At the moment, only Model S and Model X have the air-cleaning feature, however, there is a high probability that the HEPA filter will be installed in Model Y.

Hacker @greentheonly/Twitter has once again noticed several updates that should be made available to Model Y. He claims that the car will receive a HEPA filter and the corresponding Bioweapon Defense Mode. He also clarified that Model 3 most likely won’t receive it at this point.

ModelY gets the 3rd row “flat fold”. It also got HEPA filter and corresponding biohazard mode — this apparently is not planned for model3 at this time. Standard/Adaptive air suspension made reappearance on 3/Y so it’s also certainly in the works.— green (@greentheonly) October 22, 2020

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Ivan Smirnov, Leading Research Fellow of the Laboratory of Computational Social Sciences at the Institute of Education of HSE University, has created a computer model that can distinguish high academic achievers from lower ones based on their social media posts. The prediction model uses a mathematical textual analysis that registers users’ vocabulary (its range and the semantic fields from which concepts are taken), characters and symbols, post length, and word length.

Every word has its own rating (a kind of IQ). Scientific and cultural topics, English words, and words and posts that are longer in length rank highly and serve as indicators of good academic performance. An abundance of emojis, words or whole phrases written in capital letters, and vocabulary related to horoscopes, driving, and military service indicate lower grades in school. At the same time, posts can be quite short—even tweets are quite informative. The study was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), and an article detailing the study’s results was published in EPJ Data Science.

Foreign studies have long shown that users’ social media behavior—their posts, comments, likes, profile features, user pics, and photos—can be used to paint a comprehensive portrait of them. A person’s social media behavior can be analyzed to determine their lifestyle, personal qualities, individual characteristics, and even their mental health status. It is also very easy to determine a person’s socio-demographic characteristics, including their age, gender, race, and income. This is where profile pictures, Twitter hashtags, and Facebook posts come in.

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Great new episode with the Smithsonian’s Jeremy R. Kinney. We discuss all aspects of how the seemingly mundane propeller drove the 20th Century’s revolution in aerospace and helped usher in an era of global warfare, travel, and trade.

Without the lowly propeller, global trade and commerce and freedom of movement as we knew it prior to Covid would have never had the opportunity to flourish. Special guest Jeremy R. Kinney, Chair of the Aeronautics Department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., provides a fascinating narrative to how and why advances in aircraft propeller technology enabled aerospace to revolutionize global warfare, travel, and trade. Author of “Reinventing the Propeller,” Kinney and I discuss many underappreciated aspects of this aeronautical workhorse.

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A new Tesla software leak revealed that the automaker is planning to bring a HEPA filter, enabling Tesla’s Bioweapon Defense Mode, to Model Y.

With the Model X and later the Model S, Tesla has started to put massive HEPA-rated air filters inside its vehicles.

The idea is for Tesla to put efforts into developing a more powerful air filtering system in order to not only contribute to the reduction of local air pollution with electric vehicles but also to reduce the direct impact of air pollution on the occupants of its vehicles.

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“The SPEAR flight demonstrator will provide the F/A-18 Super Hornet and carrier strike group with significant improvements in range and survivability against advanced threat defensive systems,” Mercer, the firm’s SPEAR program manager, added.

Very-long-range, high-speed strike weapons could be very valuable for the Navy’s carrier air wings, especially as potential near-peer adversaries, such as China and Russia, continue to develop and field increasingly longer-range and otherwise more capable surface-to-air missile systems and associated radars and other sensors. Aircraft carriers and their associated strike groups and air wings are also increasingly at risk from various anti-access and area-denial capabilities, further underscoring the need for weapons with greater range and that are able to prosecute targets faster to help ensure their survival.

At present, the primary air-launched stand-off anti-ship and land-attack missiles available to them are the AGM-84D Harpoon anti-ship cruise missile, the AGM-84H/K Standoff Land Attack Missile-Expanded Response (SLAM-ER), and the AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), all of which are subsonic.

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F-22 Raptors from the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, intercepted a group of Russian aircraft in international airspace near Alaska Monday night.

In a series of tweets early Tuesday morning, NORAD said the Raptors intercepted a pair of Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bombers escorted by Su-35 fighters. NORAD said it also identified a Russian A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft supporting the other Russian planes that “loitered” in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone and came within 30 nautical miles of Alaska’s shore.

NORAD said that all Russian aircraft remained in international airspace and at no time entered U.S. or Canadian airspace.

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