Lifeboat Foundation

In another example of space technology coming down to Earth.

One of the big arguments in favor of investing in space technologies is that the same technology is often used to benefit citizens down here on Earth.

In a new example of an Earth-focused application of space technology, SpaceX has won a U.S. Air Force contract worth over $102 million to help deliver humanitarian aid using heavy rockets, according to a report from SpaceNews.

Continue reading “SpaceX Won a $102 Million Contract to Deliver Aid and Military Cargo” »

China has introduced what it claims to be the world’s largest electrically-powered quadruped robot to assist the military on logistics and reconnaissance missions.

With a “yak-like appearance,” the four-legged robot can reportedly carry up to 352 pounds (160 kilograms) of payload and run at six miles (10 kilometers) per hour.

Continue reading “China Unveils ‘World’s Largest’ Quadruped Military Robot” »

Researchers reveal details about recent cyberattacks carried out by the Donot Hacking Team against government and military entities in South Asia.

High-tech missiles, sensors, aircraft, ships, and artillery all rely on atomic clocks on GPS satellites for nanosecond timing accuracy. A timing error of just a few billionths of a second can translate to positioning being off by a meter or more. If GPS were jammed by an adversary, time synchronization would rapidly deteriorate and threaten military operations.

To address this scenario, DARPA has announced the Robust Optical Clock Network (ROCkN) program, which aims to create optical atomic clocks with low size, weight, and power (SWaP) that yield timing accuracy and holdover better than GPS atomic clocks and can be used outside a laboratory. ROCkN will leverage DARPA-funded research over the past couple decades that has led to lab demonstration of the world’s most precise optical atomic clocks. ROCkN clocks will not be as precise as the best lab optical clocks, but they will surpass current state-of-the-art atomic clocks in both precision and holdover while maintaining low SWaP in a robust package. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-01-20

The footage speaks for itself.

In a scene straight out of a spy movie, an elderly couple reportedly escaped from an assisted living facility using some cunning military expertise—and an antiquated telecommunications method.

On March 2, 2020, a resident of a secure memory care unit in Elmcroft of Lebanon, a Tennessee nursing facility, “eloped” with his wife from the premises, according to a state report on the incident. (The Tennessean first reported the incident last month.) The man was admitted to Elmcroft with a diagnosis of dementia, while the woman was admitted with Alzheimer’s disease.

A stranger spotted the residents, who were safe, walking two blocks from Elmcroft about 30 minutes after they left and picked them up.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, in collaboration with TCS Research and Wageningen University, recently devised a new strategy that could improve coordination among different robots tackling complex missions as a team. This strategy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a split-architecture that addresses communication and computations separately, while periodically coordinating the two to achieve optimal results.

The researchers’ paper was recently presented at the IEEE RoboCom 2022 conference, held in conjunction with IEEE CCNC 2022, a top tier conference in the field of networking and distributed computing. At IEEE RoboCom 2022, it received the Best Paper Award.

“Swarm-robotics is on the path to becoming a key tool for human civilization,” Dr. Sudipta Saha, the lead researcher of the team that carried out the study, told TechXplore. “For instance, in medical science, it will be necessary to use numerous nano-bots to boost immune-therapy, targeted and effective drug transfer, etc.; while in the army it will be necessary for exploring unknown terrains that are hard for humans to enter, enabling agile supervision of borders and similar activities. In construction, it can enable technologies such as large-scale 3D printing and in agriculture it can help to monitor crop health and intervene to improve yields.”

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department are already using the technology.

Who can forget the attack on Capital last January 6th? For those who do remember it well, there is an urgency to do something to avoid it ever happening again. One way to do that is to predict these events before they happen just like you can predict weather patterns.

Some data scientists believe they can achieve exactly that, according to The Washington Post. “We now have the data — and opportunity — to pursue a very different path than we did before,” said Clayton Besaw, who helps run CoupCast, a machine-learning-driven program based at the University of Central Florida that predicts coups for a variety of countries.

Continue reading “Can Algorithms Predict Political Unrest? These Data Scientists Believe So” »

From the cosmic microwave background to Feynman diagrams — what are the underlying rules that work to create patterns of action, force and consequence that make up our universe?
Brian’s new book “Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe” is available now: https://geni.us/clegg.
Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/RZB95znAGRE

Brian Clegg will explore the phenomena that make up the very fabric of our world by examining ten essential sequenced systems. From diagrams that show the deep relationships between space and time to the quantum behaviours that rule the way that matter and light interact, Brian will show how these patterns provide a unique view of the physical world and its fundamental workings.

Continue reading “The Fundamental Patterns that Explain the Universe — with Brian Clegg” »