Lifeboat Foundation

Never ceases to amaze me what DARPA is up to these days.

Drones are everywhere these days – from using them to take elaborate selfies to launching missiles at military targets, delivering aid to war torn areas to imaging the deadly environment around lava lakes, they appear to be the multipurpose tool of the moment. Perhaps slightly strangely, then, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants drones to vanish into thin air. Specifically, they want drones that are biodegradable, able to fade away after completing their mission.

Flower Power!

As you well know, bullets are designed to kill people. So far, so bad, but the metallic compounds in them also tend to leach into the environment and kill off plants and wildlife too.

At training facilities the world over, the US Army uses live ammunition to gear up their soldiers for combat. These bullets just remain in the wild, and do their damage. Deciding that enough is enough, officials are now asking for proposals to design biodegradable bullets that shall harm the environment no more.

Continue reading “The US Army wants to create biodegradable bullets that plant flowers where they fall” »

The limitless applications of 3D data visualization will enable a more efficient approach to many of life’s problems. Each day, developers exploring this technology are finding new ways to solve these problems in mixed reality; 3D modeling, easier house management, spinal surgery, and forest fire management are just a few recent examples of ways 3D data visualization can benefit us all.

The military, on the other hand, has quite a different set of problems to manage.

From a logistics standpoint, there are a lot of moving parts in the military to consider such as personnel, deployment, training, resources, and supply lines, to name just a few things that have to be managed constantly. Here we are talking big-picture ideas that could utilize 3D data visualization from a top-down view. If we scale down to real-time operations for individual missions, there’s recon, intel, tracking, and response, and this list could keep going.

Continue reading “Royal Australian Air Force Using HoloLens to Experiment with Augmented Reality” »

More smart bullet news; and this is not a fake news flash.

THE MIL & AERO COMMENTARY, 17 Jan. 2017. Military machine guns, with minor modifications, have remained essentially the same since World War I. They’re designed to spray out a hail of metal bullets in one general direction to shred people, supplies, command centers, and lightly armored vehicles. Smart bullets rarely have been envisioned. Machine guns strictly represent a curtain of firepower in one direction; it doesn’t much matter that most of the bullets miss their targets, as long as a few manage to hit home.

Within the next fifty years, scientists at BAE Systems believe that battlefield commanders could deploy a new type of directed energy laser and lens system, called a Laser Developed Atmospheric Lens which is capable of enhancing commanders’ ability to observe adversaries’ activities over much greater distances than existing sensors.

At the same time, the lens could be used as a form of ‘deflector shield’ to protect friendly aircraft, ships, land vehicles and troops from incoming attacks by high power laser weapons that could also become a reality in the same time period.

Continue reading “Directed energy atmospheric lens could revolutionise future battlefields” »

That’s been the plan for a while.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA), the agency responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military, has facilitated the development of a robotic system to take over flying duties from military pilots. According to DARPA, the program, known as Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) was to produce “a tailorable, drop-in, removable kit that would promote the addition of high levels of automation into existing aircraft, enabling operation with reduced onboard crew.”

Continue reading “DARPA’s Latest Tech May Make Human Pilots a Thing of the Past” »

Tomorrow’s conflicts won’t look much like today’s. That’s where science fiction comes in.

In Brief

• Just a few micrometers in diameter, this quasicrystal is the third to be found in this particular meteorite, but it differs from the other two in both structure and chemical composition.
• While many applications have been discovered for synthetic quasicrystals, the rarity of naturally occurring ones has made them difficult to study.

A team led by Luca Bindi, a geologist from the University of Florence, has found an ultra-rare quasicrystal just a few micrometres wide in a meteorite that landed in Russia five years ago. The discovery has been detailed in Scientific Reports.

Two other quasicrystals have already been discovered in this particular meteorite, but the latest is different from its predecessors in both structure and chemical composition. This new quasicrystal is composed of aluminum, copper, and iron atoms structured in an arrangement very similar to the pentagon-based pattern of a soccer ball, a first of its kind in nature.

Continue reading “An Ultra-Rare Crystal Is Found in a Meteorite, Revealing a Bizarre Form of Matter” »

Navy test #scifi drone swarm attack horde — video of sci-fi come to life once more!