Lifeboat Foundation

Ray Tomlinson, widely credited as the inventor of email, died this past weekend. He was 74.

By all accounts, Tomlinson was a brilliant man. And he’s being mourned around the world as the person who brought us the @ in our inboxes. The format novak@gizmodo didn’t just invent itself. Tomlinson did that. But the fascinating secret history of email was that the US Defense Department was initially angry that Tomlinson helped create it.

“It wasn’t an assignment at all, he was just fooling around; he was looking for something to do with ARPANET,” Raytheon spokeswoman Joyce Kuzman said in a statement about Tomlinson’s death.

Continue reading “The Defense Department Got Mad at DARPA For Creating Email” »

Perdix drones were tested 150 times during the exercise in Alaska, including 72 from fighter jets.

Thousands of electrical components make up today’s most sophisticated systems – and without innovative cooling techniques, those systems get hot. Lockheed Martin is working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) on its ICECool-Applications research program that could ultimately lead to a lighter, faster and cheaper way to cool high-powered microchips – by cooling the chips with microscopic drops of water.

This technology has applications in electronic warfare, radars, high-performance computers and data servers.

A core team of Lockheed Martin engineers is working on a solution to meet the goal of DARPA’s Inter/Intra Chip Enhanced Cooling (ICECool) program: to enhance the performance of RF MMIC power amplifiers and embedded high performance computing systems through chip-level heat removal techniques. Lockheed Martin experimentally demonstrated the effectiveness of its microfluidic cooling approach which resulted in a four-times reduction in thermal resistance and a corresponding six-times increase in RF output power when compared to conventional cooling techniques.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter disclosed last week that the Pentagon’s new high-technology weapons to deal with threats from China and Russia will include ultra-high speed missiles.

Carter revealed during a speech in California that part of the $71.8 billion for weapons research and development this year will fund “new hypersonic missiles that can fly over five times the speed of sound.”

Days earlier, the general in charge of Air Force weapons research, Maj. Gen. Thomas Masiello, revealed that two technology prototypes of hypersonic strike weapons, a scramjet powered cruise missile and a hypersonic glider, could be ready in four years.

Continue reading “Hypersonic Arms Race Heats Up as U.S. Builds High-Speed Missiles” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ou9rOssPg

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange perspective on Google & its leadership “Assange criticizes the hypocrisy of Google executives Schmidt and Jared Cohen[11] and says both are “out to lunch.”[12] If Assange’s assessment is correct, then what does having such men in leadership positions of behemoth corporations augur?”

What happens when you merge a psychopath with a killer?, Ash Carter, Eric Schmidt, Google, Privacy, United States.

New funding awarded by DARPA on new spinal implants; this should make some commercial pilots that I know happy.

Carmel, IN-based startup Nanovis is no stranger to nabbing research grants. It’s just nabbed one from the National Institutes of Health for preclinical research on the use of its porous Forticore interbody fusion devices in combination with nanotube technology. The combination is expected to result in a surface that mimics nature and encourages regeneration around an implant.

Nanovis has previously gotten 8 competitive peer-reviewed grants from the NIH and other research organizations; this is its second NIH grant. In September 2014, it got FDA clearance for its FortiCore interbody fusion devices and then last October it launched an expanded FortiCore line.

Continue reading “NIH awards grant to upstart for nanotech, regenerative spinal implants” »

Researchers in Milan have discovered which will lead to major improvements computing and sensing devices.

Scientists have demonstrated a novel approach for designing fully reconfigurable magnetic nanopatterns whose properties and functionality can be programmed and reprogrammed on-demand.

Cool beans.

Using a bionic fingertip, an amputee for the first time has been able to feel rough and smooth textures in real-time, as though the fingertip were naturally connected to his hand.

Continue reading “Bionic fingertip lets amputee feel textures” »

Biometric technology can be used for everything from shopping apps to police work, but it brings with it a whole host of privacy concerns.