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Category: military – Page 71

“Off Switch” Makes Explosives Safer

An explosive material fabricated with a highly porous structure is inactive but is easily “switched on” when filled with water.

Despite great effort, researchers have failed to find ways to make explosives entirely safe during storage yet still easily usable when needed. Now a research team has demonstrated an explosive with these properties by creating a highly porous structure for their explosive material [1]. The voids prevent the structure from supporting a sustained propagating wave of detonation, but filling the voids with water can quickly restore the explosive capacity. The researchers hope this technique can provide safer explosives for use in areas such as mining and oil exploration.

Storing highly explosive materials is inherently risky—in the military world, for example, over 500 accidental explosions occurred at munitions sites between 1979 and 2013, according to a survey [2]. These materials could be safer if they could be easily switched between an explosive-ready state and a “safe” state. “A switchable explosive is the holy grail of explosives research,” says chemist Alexander Mueller of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He and his colleagues believe that they are the first to achieve it.

DARPA created a hypersonic aircraft capable of Mach 20 speeds

While the world’s major powers are locked in an arms race to develop the best and most advanced hypersonic weapons, missiles capable of flying faster than Mach 5 and are thus able to defeat missile defense systems and radars, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been flying at these speeds for more than a decade.

The history of hypersonics go back much, much further than the 21st century. Nazi Germany’s V-2 rockets were able to reach speeds of Mach 4.3 after takeoff, but when they struck targets, they were often exceeding Mach 5. By 1949, the United States had adopted German rocket technology, which allowed rockets to exceed Mach 5 on takeoff for the first time.

Through this development, the U.S. was able to build its intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal, all of which were capable of speeds above Mach 5 upon reentry. It wasn’t until 1980 that hypersonic research began to focus on glide maneuvering and carrying people. This led to the creation of the X-15 rocket plane, a manned craft that could reach those speeds but was launched from a B-52 “mother ship.” An X-15 holds the official world record for the highest speed ever recorded by a crewed, powered aircraft when it reached Mach 6.7 in 1967.

How electric eels inspired the first battery two centuries ago

But as I describe in my book “Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life,” even before humanmade batteries started generating electric current, electric fishes, such as the saltwater torpedo fish (Torpedo torpedo) of the Mediterranean and especially the various freshwater electric eel species of South America (order Gymnotiformes) were well known to produce electrical outputs of stunning proportions. In fact, electric fishes inspired Volta to conduct the original research that ultimately led to his battery, and today’s battery scientists still look to these electrifying animals for ideas.

Prior to Volta’s battery, the only way for people to generate electricity was to rub various materials together, typically silk on glass, and to capture the resulting static electricity. This was neither an easy nor practical way to generate useful electrical power.

Volta knew electric fishes had an internal organ specifically devoted to generating electricity. He reasoned that if he could mimic its workings, he might be able to find a novel way to generate electricity.

CDR Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien — DARPA BTO — Regeneration, Resuscitation And Biothreat Countermeasures

Regeneration, Resuscitation & Biothreat Countermeasures — Commander Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien, MD, Ph.D., Program Manager, Biological Technology Office, DARPA

Commander Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien, MD, Ph.D. (https://www.darpa.mil/staff/cdr-jean-paul-chretien) is a Program Manager in the Biological Technology Office at DARPA, where his research interests include disease and injury prevention, operational medicine, and biothreat countermeasures. He is also responsible for running the DARPA Triage Challenge (https://triagechallenge.darpa.mil/).

Prior to coming to DARPA, CDR Dr. Chretien led the Pandemic Warning Team at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence, and as a naval medical officer, his previous assignments include senior policy advisor for biodefense in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; team lead for Innovation & Evaluation at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch; and director of force health protection for U.S. and NATO forces in southwestern Afghanistan.

A proud mentor to nine graduate students and Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) fellows, CDR Dr. Chretien received the Rising Star Award from the American College of Preventive Medicine, Best Publication of the Year Award from the International Society for Disease Surveillance, and Skelton Award for Public Service from the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and 10 book chapters.

CDR Dr. Chretien earned a Bachelor of Science degree in political science from the United States Naval Academy, Master of Health Science in biostatistics and Doctor of Philosophy in genetic epidemiology degrees from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed his residency in general preventive medicine at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and fellowship in health sciences informatics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

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SPACE FORCE: The Secret Orbit — Arms Race in Space | SpaceTime — WELT Documentary

In December 2019, the United States established its new space force: the United States Space Force. A logical step in a globalized and digitized world whose infrastructure depends on satellites in space. This infrastructure is under threat. Also by a resurgence of conflict between East and West. This episode of Spacetime describes how the military conquered space and why the world is in a new arms race in Earth orbit.

#documentary #spacetime #usa.

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Fired engineer who called Google AI ‘sentient,’ warns Microsoft Bing a ‘train wreck’

Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer fired for violating the company’s confidentiality policy, has now expressed concerns about the risks associated with AI-driven chatbots like Microsoft’s Bing AI.

The latest AI models, according to him, are the most potent technological advancement since the atomic bomb and can alter the course of history fundamentally.

Hackers could try to take over a military aircraft; can a cyber shuffle stop them?

A cybersecurity technique that shuffles network addresses like a blackjack dealer shuffles playing cards could effectively befuddle hackers gambling for control of a military jet, commercial airliner or spacecraft, according to new research. However, the research also shows these defenses must be designed to counter increasingly sophisticated algorithms used to break them.

Many aircraft, spacecraft and weapons systems have an onboard computer network known as military standard 1,553, commonly referred to as MIL-STD-1553, or even just 1553. The network is a tried-and-true protocol for letting systems like radar, flight controls and the heads-up display talk to each other.

Securing these networks against a is a national security imperative, said Chris Jenkins, a Sandia cybersecurity scientist. If a hacker were to take over 1,553 midflight, he said, the pilot could lose control of critical aircraft systems, and the impact could be devastating.

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