Lifeboat Foundation

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Scientists recently broke their own laser-fusion record! But they must replicate their success soon to preserve research in thermonuclear weapons.

China has been building the JF-22 hypervelocity wind tunnel in Huairou, an industrial district of Beijing, since 2018. Wind tunnels are large tubes that move air around stationary objects to simulate flying, allowing researchers to learn more about how the object will fly.

The JF-22 will be capable of simulating flying conditions at about 30 times the speed of sound when it is completed in 2022.

A P-8I maritime patrol aircraft of the Indian Navy was spotted flying over the Philippines, close to the South China Sea, almost all of which is claimed by China. The submarine-hunting aircraft is in the region to participate in the Malabar Exercise, featuring the navies of all four Quad countries.

This edition of the Malabar naval exercise is being hosted by the United States Navy in the Western Pacific, off the coast of Guam. The area is not far from the South China Sea, where China has built a large number of artificial islands and militarized them to strengthen its territorial claims over these waters, which host some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

China opposes the deployment of foreign military vessels in the region, including the Freedom of Navigation Patrols conducted by the US to assert its right to use the waterways in the South China Sea.

Housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the US$3.5-billion facility wasn’t designed to serve as a power-plant prototype, however, but rather to probe fusion reactions at the heart of thermonuclear weapons. After the United States banned underground nuclear testing at the end of the cold war in 1,992 the energy department proposed the NIF as part of a larger science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program, designed to verify the reliability of the country’s nuclear weapons without detonating any of them.

With this month’s laser-fusion breakthrough, scientists are cautiously optimistic that the NIF might live up to its promise, helping physicists to better understand the initiation of nuclear fusion — and thus the detonation of nuclear weapons. “That’s really the scientific question for us at the moment,” says Mark Herrmann, Livermore’s deputy director for fundamental weapons physics. “Where can we go? How much further can we go?”

Here Nature looks at the NIF’s long journey, what the advance means for the energy department’s stewardship programme and what lies ahead.

A Chinese military satellite appears to have gotten smashed by a disintegrating Russian rocket, Space.com reports, in what’s likely the worst orbital collision since 2009.

The collision illustrates the growing danger of derelict spacecraft parts and other jetsam in Earth’s orbit, where they can smash functional equipment — as well as the extraordinary difficulty in figuring out what’s going on in Earth’s orbit.

According to an investigation by Harvard astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, Chinese satellite Yunhai 1–02 likely crashed into a piece of space junk earlier this year.

‘’Baykar says the Akinci, Turkish for “raider,” can attack targets in the air and on the ground, and operate alongside fighter jets, flying higher and staying in the air longer than Turkey’s existing pilotless planes. The drones will carry a range of missiles developed by Turkey’s Roketsan.’’

Hospitals in U.S. South Run Low on Oxygen Amid Covid, Storm.

Continue reading “Turkey to Add More Advanced Drone to Fleet That Has Swung Wars” »

Can this be true?

An unmanned aircraft was brought down by a powerful electromagnetic pulse in what could be the first reported test of an advanced new weapon in China.

A paper published in the Chinese journal Electronic Information Warfare Technology did not give details of the timing and location of the experiment, which are classified but it may be the country’s first openly reported field test of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon.

Continue reading “Did Chinese scientists just bring down an unmanned plane with an electromagnetic pulse weapon?” »

Oh, the ways armed forces around the world are working to blast uncrewed aerial vehicles they don’t like. Now the US Army is at that again, putting the finishing touches on a laser weapon that can not only destroy the innards of drones as they fly, but also drop incoming artillery as well.

The Army says it will be mounting the first four field versions of the DE M-SHORAD system on armored vehicles sometime next year, and has added the program to its expanding range of weapons against uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) being developed.

A blockchain-based initiative from the United States Air Force will employ Constellation’s Hypergraph Network to provide data security with the Department of Defense’s commercial partners.

In a Thursday announcement, Constellation said it had been working with Kinnami Software Corporation to develop an end-to-end data security solution using blockchain encryption and distributed data management for the United States Transportation Command, Air Mobility Command’s 618th Air Operations Center, and a Civil Reserve Air Fleet partner. According to the platform, its goal is to securely exchange data with commercial partners on missions involving the operations of aircraft and ships under contract to the Department of Defense, or DoD.

The United States Transportation Command, or USTRANSCOM, allows authorities — including those in the 618th — to coordinate missions using available resources from both the military and private sector. Constellation Network’s solution may have the potential to improve the existing cybersecurity and general effectiveness.