Lifeboat Foundation

« The U.S. Air Force is at least researching what it might take to develop a nuclear-armed hypersonic boost-glide vehicle with a range equivalent to a traditional intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. This vehicle could potentially go on top of the service’s future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent ICBMs, which are now in development. Publicly, the hypersonic weapons programs now in progress across the U.S. military are all conventionally-armed.

Aviation Week was first to report on this potential nuclear hypersonic weapon effort on Aug. 18, 2020, based on information the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center had included in a request for information posted online six days earlier. That document, which was marked “For Official Use Only” and has since been taken offline, outlined seven potential upgrade tracks for an ICBM with a “modular open architecture.” «

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The plan in the next big war will probably be to let waves of AI fighters wipe out all the enemies targets, Anti aircraft systems, enemy fighters, enemy air fields etc…, however many waves that takes. And, then human pilots come in behind that.

An artificial intelligence algorithm defeated a human F-16 fighter pilot in a virtual dogfight sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Thursday.

There is little in the way of law or custom to restrain this new arms race. Alarmed by the risks, several groups of diplomats and lawyers are trying to change that, and work out how to extend the laws that cover Earth-bound war into orbit.

Experts want to clarify how the laws of war on Earth apply beyond it.

Science & technology Aug 15th 2020 edition.

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Two Chinese air force J-20 stealth fighters have appeared at an air base in China’s far west as the mountain stand-off between India and Chine enters its fourth month.

The twin-engine J-20s are visible in commercial satellite imagery of Hotan air base, in the Uighur autonomous region of Xinjiang. Chinese social-media users first spotted the planes.

The J-20 deployment, however temporary, signals Beijing’s resolve as China wrestles with India for influence over a disputed region of the Himalayas. But a pair of warplanes, no matter how sophisticated, don’t represent much actual combat power.

Instead of recruiting whole phages into phage therapy armies, antibacterial campaigns may simply requisition the organisms’ battle-tested cell-wall-breaching enzymes.

It was 1917 when Felix d’Herelle, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, first proposed using bacteriophages (or phages)—viruses that infect bacteria—as a therapy for human bacterial infections. Although used for decades in parts of Europe, notably Russia, Poland, and the Republic of Georgia, phage therapy is only permitted in the United States under the “compassionate use” umbrella—when there is nothing else available.

The rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria that defy traditional antibiotics has forced clinicians to seek alternative measures to curb deadly infections. Two cases made headlines in recent years. In 2016, the life of Thomas Patterson, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, was saved by phage therapy after he developed a deadly Acinetobacter baumannii infection. (The story is recounted in The Perfect Predator, the book that Patterson co-authored with his wife, epidemiologist Steffanie A. Strathdee, PhD.) Last year, the life of an English teenager was saved after she developed an infection following a lung transplant for cystic fibrosis.

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Female #Astrophysicist Helped Build 1st #AtomicBomb

Today marks 75 years since the 1st use of #nuclear weapons in #war-time, when the #US dropped the 1st atomic bomb on #Hiroshima, #Japan. One of the very few female #scientists who worked on the #ManhattanProject went on to become a researcher in high-energy #physics, #astrophysics, #cosmology, & diatomic molecular #spectroscopy.

MORE INFO: CLICK ON #IMAGE OR LINK

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The researchers fused machine learning from demonstration algorithms and more classical autonomous navigation systems. Rather than replacing a classical system altogether, APPLD learns how to tune the existing system to behave more like the human demonstration. This paradigm allows for the deployed system to retain all the benefits of classical navigation systems—such as optimality, explainability and safety—while also allowing the system to be flexible and adaptable to new environments, Warnell said.

In the future, a soldier and a game controller may be all that’s needed to teach robots how to outdrive humans.

At the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin, researchers designed an algorithm that allows an autonomous ground vehicle to improve its existing navigation systems by watching a human drive. The team tested its approach—called adaptive planner parameter learning from demonstration, or APPLD—on one of the Army’s experimental autonomous ground vehicles.

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The FBI and NSA issue joint security alert containing technical details about new Linux malware developed by Russia’s military hackers.

France is deploying two Rafale fighter jets and a naval frigate in the eastern Mediterranean because of tensions between Greece and Turkey.

French President Emmanuel Macron has urged Turkey to halt oil and gas exploration in disputed waters in the area. A Turkish survey ship began such a mission on Monday, angering Greece.

Mr Macron told Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis that the French military would monitor the situation.