Minimizing personnel costs and vulnerability
“The goal is to build a plane that can launch from ship flight decks and small austere land locations in adverse weather without launch and recovery equipment typically needed for these systems,” stated DARPA’s press release published on Friday.
Boron as rocket fuel has been a tough nut to crack.
Rocket scientists in China are working to develop a boron-powered supersonic missile that can fly like a commercial airliner and then swim in the water to act as a torpedo, South China Morning Post.
IStock/AlexLMX
Boron is a highly reactive light element that reacts equally well with water as it does with air to release vast amounts of heat. The U.S. Air Force experimented with boron in the 1950s to increase the power of its supersonic bombers. However, the project was shelved since ignited boron is hard to control and also forms a layer of debris that impacts rocket performance.
Iran’s recent seizure of unmanned US Navy boats shined a light on a pioneering Pentagon program to develop networks of air, surface and underwater drones for patrolling large regions, meshing their surveillance with artificial intelligence.
The year-old program operates numerous unmanned surface vessels, or USVs, in the waters around the Arabian peninsula, gathering data and images to be beamed back to collection centers in the Gulf.
The program operated without incident until Iranian forces tried to grab three seven-meter Saildrone Explorer USVs in two incidents, on August 29–30 and September 1.
The testing tube is roughly twice as large as comparable facilities in the West, with a diameter of 80cm (2.6 ft).
The most giant free-piston-powered shock tunnel in the world is already operational in southwest China. It enables low-cost, excellent wind tunnel tests for hypersonic research.
The facility can simulate severe flight conditions at speeds ranging from 2.5 to 11.5 kilometers per second (1.55−7.14 miles per second), or more than 33 times the speed of sound, according to a report published by South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Thursday.
https://youtu.be/pDSEjaDCtOU?t=2526
Ian Hutchinson’s concerns for existential risk after minute 42.
Ian Hutchinson is a nuclear engineer and plasma physicist at MIT. He has made a number of important contributions in plasma physics including the magnetic confinement of plasmas seeking to enable fusion reactions, which is the energy source of the stars, to be used for practical energy production. Current nuclear reactors are based on fission as we discuss. Ian has also written on the philosophy of science and the relationship between science and religion.
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PODCAST INFO:
“So a quantum key distribution consists of two things: No. 1, got to have a quantum random number generator, and that’s one of the things that QNu Labs makes,” he said. “The second thing that you need is the receivers in which those two devices connect and be used to convey encrypted messages in this fashion.”
In military use, quantum key distribution would work best in point to point communication — that is, communicating from one person to another. Creating a “true network” that’s able to send the same encrypted message to multiple receivers at once is challenging because the encrypted bit that’s carrying the message eventually begins to lose its coherence and “drops away,” Herman said.
“In the military, where you’re sending extremely sensitive classified data from one office to the next, you want to make sure that no one’s going to be able to break into and decrypt that,” he said. “Well, [quantum key distribution] is definitely a way in which to carry that out.”
Posted in military
“Almost every male character so far is a coward, a jerk or both,” he posted to Twitter. “Tolkien is turning in his grave.”
Amazon aired the first two episodes of Rings of Power on Friday, which centered on Galadriel, commander of the Northern Armies, bent on exacting vengeance for the death of her brother centuries earlier. By comparison, fellow elf Elrond prefers his life of quiet counsel to King Gil-galad, who attempts to send Galadriel away to avoid any military skirmish with Sauron’s scattered forces.
The debate over Amazon’s Rings of Power began in earnest after showrunners and studio executives argued in Vanity Fair they needed to take liberties when adapting Tolkien characters such as Galadriel and Elrond, since his Middle-earth was badly in need of an update to reflect today’s more modern societies.
Robo-Dog Assault Droids 
CHILLING video shows the Chinese military unveiling more of their high-tech weapons as tensions continue to rage with the West.
Beijing flaunted its military tech in the new video which shows a machine-gun armed robot dog, a small ball scout drone and a soldier wearing an exoskeleton.
It is understood the technology is made by Chinese defence firm Kestrel and the clips from the exercises were shared on Beijing’s state-monitored social media site Weibo.
Practical nuclear fusion is, famously, always 10 years in the future. Except that the Pentagon recently gave an award to a tiny startup to launch a fusion power system into space in just five.
There is no shortage of organizations, from VC-backedstartups to nation states, trying to realize the dream of cheap, clean, and reliable power from nuclear fusion. But Avalanche Energy Designs, based near a Boeing facility in Seattle, is even more ambitious. It is working on modular “micro fusion packs,” small enough to hold in your hand yet capable of powering everything from electric cars to spaceships.
Last month, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced it had awarded Avalanche an unspecified sum to develop its Orbitron fusion device to generate either heat or electricity, with the aim of powering a high-efficiency propulsion system aboard a prototype satellite in 2027. The contract to Avalanche was one of two awarded by the DIU—the second going to Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear for development of its radioisotope battery.
Title: Strong AI: Why we should be concerned about something nobody knows how to build.
Synopsis: At the moment, nobody fully knows how to create an intelligent system that rivals or exceed human capabilities (Strong AI). The impact and possible dangers of Strong AI appear to concern mostly those futurists that are not working in day-to-day AI research. This in turn gives rise to the idea that Strong AI is merely a myth, a sci fi trope and nothing that is ever going to be implemented. The current state of the art in AI is already sufficient to lead to irrevocable changes in labor markets, economy, warfare and governance. The need to deal with these near term changes does not absolve us from considering the implications of being no longer the most intelligent beings on this planet.
Despite the difficulties of developing Strong AI, there is no obvious reason why the principles embedded in biological brains should be outside of the range of what our engineering can achieve in the near future. While it is unlikely that current narrow AI systems will neatly scale towards general modeling and problem solving, many of the significant open questions in developing Strong AI appear to be known and solvable.
Talk held at ‘Artificial Intelligence / Human Possibilities’ event as adjunct to the AGI17 conference in Melbourne 2017.
Assessing emerging risks and opportunities in machine cognition.
With AI Experts Ben Goertzel, Marcus Hutter, Peter Cheeseman and Joscha Bach.
Event Focus:
Given significant developments in Artificial Intelligence, it’s worth asking: What aspects of ideal AI have not been achieved yet?
There is good reason for the growing media storm around AI — many experts agree on the big picture that with the development of Superintelligent AI (including Artificial General Intelligence) humanity will face great challenges (some polls suggest that AGI is not far). Though in order to best manage both the opportunities and risks we need to achieve a clearer picture — this requires sensitivity to ambiguity, precision of expression and attention to theoretical detail in understanding the implications of AI, communicating/discussing AI, and ultimately engineering beneficial AI.
Meetup details: https://www.meetup.com/Science-Technology-and-the-Future/events/242163071/
