Lifeboat Foundation

Phase 3 of DARPA’s Operational Fires (OpFires) program began in earnest this month with government and contractor staff finalizing the system architecture approach, including a plan to use existing components from ground-launched missile systems, along with new booster technologies designed to support future hypersonic weapons. Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control is leading the integration effort for the third phase of the program, which will focus on first stage booster design and maturation, launcher development, and vehicle integration.

Broad participation from the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, range safety offices, and performers from OpFires Phase 2 propulsion teams contributed to success in the early, critical stages of the program. Since 2018, OpFires has made impressive strides developing and demonstrating advanced booster technologies that had never been used in prior systems. Phase 1 and 2 performers Aerojet Rocketdyne, Exquadrum, and Sierra Nevada Corporation continue work towards throttle-able upper stage rocket motors suitable for tactical transport, storage, and engagement.

“The objective of DARPA’s OpFires program is to deliver an intermediate-range surface-to-surface missile in line with the Department of Defense’s push to field hypersonic platforms,” said MAJ Amber Walker (USA), the DARPA program manager for OpFires.

Is it so outlandish to believe that countries in the future might resort to military force to prevent other countries from altering the shared genetic code of humanity? Many countries have been invaded for far less.

The genetics revolution that will transform our health care, the way we make babies, the nature of the babies we make, and ultimately our evolutionary trajectory as a species has already begun. Just like parents in many places will need to make tough choices about whether, if at all, to genetically engineer their children, states will be forced to make monumental collective decisions on these issues with potentially fateful consequences.

Continue reading “The designer baby debate could start a war” »

The scientific revolution was ushered in at the beginning of the 17th century with the development of two of the most important inventions in history — the telescope and the microscope. With the telescope, Galileo turned his attention skyward, and advances in optics led Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek toward the first use of the compound microscope as a scientific instrument, circa 1665. Today, we are witnessing an information technology-era revolution in microscopy, supercharged by deep learning algorithms that have propelled artificial intelligence to transform industry after industry.

One of the major breakthroughs in deep learning came in 2012, when the performance superiority of a deep convolutional neural network combined with GPUs for image classification was revealed by Hinton and colleagues [1] for the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). In AI’s current innovation and implementation phase, deep learning algorithms are propelling nearly all computer vision-intensive applications, including autonomous vehicles (transportation, military), facial recognition (retail, IT, communications, finance), biomedical imaging (healthcare), autonomous weapons and targeting systems (military), and automation and robotics (military, manufacturing, heavy industry, retail).

It should come as no surprise that the field of microscopy would ripe for transformation by artificial intelligence-aided image processing, analysis and interpretation. In biological research, microscopy generates prodigious amounts of image data; a single experiment with a transmission electron microscope can generate a data set containing over 100 terabytes worth of images [2]. The myriad of instruments and image processing techniques available today can resolve structures ranging in size across nearly 10 orders of magnitude, from single molecules to entire organisms, and capture spatial (3D) as well as temporal (4D) dynamics on time scales of femtoseconds to seconds.

A is a piece of equipment seen in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and usable in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty Online, Call of Duty: Ghosts and Call of Duty: Heroes. Juggernauts are seen wearing the suits in the Special Ops levels “Snatch& Grab”, “Estate Takedown”, “High Explosive”, and “Armor Piercing”. A character with a juggernaut suit is also seen in “Museum”.

Elon Musk’s giant rocket is getting a bizarrely-shaped tower.

WASHINGTON — L3Harris has been awarded a 10-year $1.2 billion contract by the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center to maintain and modernize the military’s network of space surveillance sensors.

The award is for a new program named MOSSAIC, short for maintenance of space situational awareness integrated capabilities. The selection of L3Harris was announced Feb. 25 on the beta. SAM.gov federal contracting opportunities website.

MOSSAIC replaces a previous contract that Harris (before it merged with L3) had held since 2002 to maintain the Air Force’s network of telescopes — known as the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System — that track objects in geostationary orbits. Now under control of the U.S. Space Force are three GEODSS sites — on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean; at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; and in Maui, Hawaii.

Elon Musk also shared some thoughts on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Dyson helped create modern particle physics, criticized nuclear weapons tests, and imagined how civilizations could take to the stars.

Circa 2008

Okay, so no one has quite perfected laser weapons yet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t at least think about possible defenses. Naval researchers are looking at materials that could deflect high-powered lasers, reports Discovery:

“If you have a ship being hit by a laser, and it was made of this metamaterial, you could reflect the laser beam,” said Simin Feng, one of the study co-authors and a researcher at China Lake.

Continue reading “Researchers Work to Laser-Proof Ships” »