Lifeboat Foundation

Using newly refined analysis methods, scientists have discovered that a North Korean nuclear bomb test last fall set off aftershocks over a period of eight months. The shocks, which occurred on a previously unmapped nearby fault, are a window into both the physics of nuclear explosions, and how natural earthquakes can be triggered. The findings are described in two papers just published online in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

The September 3, 2017 underground test was North Korea’s sixth, and by far largest yet, yielding some 250 kilotons, or about 17 times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Many experts believe the device was a hydrogen bomb—if true, a significant advance from cruder atomic devices the regime previously exploded. The explosion itself produced a magnitude 6.3 earthquake. This was followed 8.5 minutes later by a magnitude 4 quake, apparently created when an area above the test site on the country’s Mt. Mantap collapsed into an underground cavity occupied by the bomb.

The test and collapse were picked up by seismometers around the world and widely reported at the time. But later, without fanfare, seismic stations run by China, South Korea and the United States picked up 10 smaller shocks, all apparently scattered within 5 or 10 kilometers around the test site. The first two came on Sept. 23, 2017; the most recent was April 22, 2018. Scientists assumed the bomb had shaken up the earth, and it was taking a while to settle back down. “It’s not likely that there would be so many events in that small area over a small period of time,” said the lead author of one of the studies, Won-Young Kim, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “These are probably triggered due to the explosion.”

Continue reading “North Korea’s 2017 bomb test set off later earthquakes, new analysis finds” »

“The traditional model of U.S. military power is being disrupted, the way Blockbuster’s business model was amid the rise of Amazon and Netflix,” Brose writes. “A military made up of small numbers of large, expensive, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace systems will not survive on future battlefields, where swarms of intelligent machines will deliver violence at a greater volume and higher velocity than ever before.”

America risks a catastrophic defeat if it doesn’t radically change the way it thinks about war.

Circa 2018

Lockheed Martin quietly obtained a patent for what could be a game-changing nuclear fusion reactor, one that could potentially fit into a fighter jet.

If the latest patent from defence manufacturing giant Lockheed Martin is anything to go by, nuclear fusion technology could revolutionise the future of travel.

Continue reading “Is Lockheed Martin working on a nuclear fusion-powered fighter jet?” »

Now, almost 100 years later, the Department of Defence, through its Next Generation Technology Fund, has selected 11 projects that exploit the extraordinary properties of quantum mechanics to deliver improved security for Australians. The Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) at the University of Adelaide is involved in four of these ambitious projects.

IPAS will work closely with the Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group on four ambitious quantum technology projects. Three of the four projects focus on quantum detection.

One project explores whether ‘quantum’ radar can be used to detect stealth aircraft.

Continue reading “Quantum sensors to make Australia safer” »

Circa 2018

This first pitch isn’t about baseball. It’s about a military hero regaining his sense of independence. Militarykind, USA TODAY.

“To me, it’s very simple. If a rogue nation or other entity shoots an ICBM, inter-continental ballistic missile, at us, we intercept it.” — #USArmy Maj. Jason Brewer, Colorado National Guard #CombatReadyForce

A recent survey by the IE University in Madrid reveals that one in four Europeans would be ready to put an artificial intelligence in power. Should we be concerned for democracy or, on the contrary, welcome Europeans’ confidence in technology?

Europeans ready to elect an AI?

According to the study in question, about one in four out of the 25,000 Europeans surveyed would be prepared to be governed by an AIt worth noting that there are significant variations between countries, because where the European average is around 30%, respondents in the Netherlands are much more open to having a government run by a supercomputer (+ 43%) than in France (+ 25%). “The idea of a pragmatic machine, impervious to fraud and corruption” is one of the reasons that seems most compelling to the interviewees. Added to this are the options that Machine Learning would enable: in fact, the AI described would be able to improve by studying and selecting the best political decisions in the world… It would then be able to make better decisions than existing politicians.

Continue reading “Even more frightening than military AI: an AI President of the Republic?” »

In early 1962, members of the male space squad gathered at a dining room in Star City and were joined by Yuri Gagarin. “Congratulations! Get ready to welcome the girls in a few days,” announced Gagarin.

“We, a tiny group of military test pilots selected for the space program, had been living together as one big family in Star City for two years. We shared struggles and knew everything about each other, and now we had to accept new members to our family,” recalled cosmonaut Georgi Shonin.

“When we started training together, it was very unusual to hear soft and feminine call signs Chaika (seagull) or Bereza (birch) instead of solid and firm Sokol (falcon) or Rubin (ruby),” Shonin continues. “Their intonations alone were telling. If a voice was sonorous, everything went as planned. But sometimes their voices sounded pitiful. That meant the instructor was practicing certain failures of the system with them, and Bereza or Chaika was trying to fix the problem.”

Continue reading “The First Group of Female Cosmonauts Were Trained to Conquer the Final Frontier” »

COLORADO SPRINGS — Blue Origin wants the U.S. Air Force to wait until 2021 before picking the two companies it intends use for launching critical military satellites in the decade ahead.

The Air Force, however, aims to solicit proposals this spring and choose its two preferred launch providers in 2020 — perhaps a year or more before the new rockets that the Air Force is fostering at Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Northrop Grumman make their first flights.

All three companies were chosen in October by the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center to share $2.3 billion in so-called Launch Service Agreement (LSA) funding to support development of next-generation rockets capable of meeting the military’s satellite launch needs.

Continue reading “Blue Origin urging Air Force to postpone launch competition” »