Tag: darpa

PENTAGON’S BLUE PROGRAM AIMS TO FUEL UNDERWATER REMOTE SENSORS USING MICROSCOPIC MARINE ORGANISMS

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched an ambitious effort to harness the power of microscopic marine organisms to power remotely deployed naval sensor platforms. 

The initiative, known as the “BioLogical Undersea Energy” or “BLUE” program, seeks to revolutionize the capabilities of ocean-deployed sensor technologies by developing self-refueling power supplies that run on dissolved organic matter abundantly found throughout the world’s oceans. 

“The BLUE program seeks to develop technologies to continuously provide electrical power that will expand the capabilities of remote, ocean-deployed sensor systems,” reads documents issued to prospective industry partners. “Such systems hold great potential for national security, understanding dynamics of marine environments, and monitoring marine climate change.”

According to a solicitation notice issued last week by DARPA, the BLUE program is driven by the recognition that current battery-powered sensor systems face limitations due to their finite energy capacity and frequent need for recharging or swapping of batteries.

Replacing batteries for some underwater sensors can present significant logistical hurdles and even risks to personnel and equipment. This is particularly evident in scenarios involving covert sensor systems that monitor strategic waters adjacent to a potential foreign adversary.

By exploring alternative energy sources derived from marine biomass, DARPA seeks to overcome these challenges and unlock new remote marine monitoring and surveillance possibilities.

Specifically, the BLUE program will target microscopic forms of marine biomass, including dissolved organic matter, phytoplankton, bacteria, and microscopic zooplankton, as potential electrical power sources. 

Unlike approaches utilizing macroscopic biomass, such as seaweed or kelp, BLUE will focus solely on harnessing energy from the abundant and diverse microorganisms in marine environments. 

“It is our hypothesis that the energy requirements of many ocean-deployed systems can be met by development of an onboard device that converts marine biomass into simple fuels and then converts those fuels into operational power,” Dr. Leonard Tender, BLUE program manager, said in a statement issued by DARPA. 

Using natural processes to convert organic waste into usable energy is hardly a novel idea.

Anaerobic digestion, a process where microorganisms break down biodegradable material without oxygen, is a significant source of renewable energy and biofuel production. The International Energy Agency reports that biofuels currently contribute to over 3.5% of the world’s transport energy, with projections indicating a 150% increase by 2030.

This is also not the first time the Pentagon has tried to recruit marine life to serve out U.S. national security interests. A previous DARPA effort, the “Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors” or “PALS” program, sought to use marine animal behavior as a way of monitoring strategic waters, including tracking adversarial subs. 

Nevertheless, DARPA’s aim to replicate biofuel production within a self-contained underwater system is unprecedented. While innovative, this ambitious endeavor could likely encounter some engineering hurdles, primarily due to the intricacies of operating in remote marine environments.

To meet program requirements, a power supply must sustain at least 0.1 kW average continuous power for over a year while remaining fully submerged. The device should also be compact enough to fit within the specified size and weight constraints of a form factor of less than 180 liters or 440 lbs. 

Crucially, the power supply should be expected to self-refuel on marine biomass, offering a persistent and sustainable energy solution for remote sensor systems in oceanic environments. 

As with most programs run by the Pentagon’s brain trust, DARPA does not elaborate on what times of sensor platforms a new microscopic marine power supply might fuel. However, solicitation documents repeatedly mention the need for systems to operate underwater and be capable of independently providing consistent power for “at least one year.” The microscopic marine organisms fueling the system must also be “sufficiently abundant” in locations identified through sources such as satellite imaging. 

Keep reading

DARPA’S NEW REMA PROGRAM IS TURNING ORDINARY DRONES INTO AUTONOMOUS KILLING MACHINES. KIND OF.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected the contractors for their Rapid Experimental Missionized Autonomy (REMA) program, which will practically turn ordinary commercial and military drones into autonomous killing machines.

By joining a program that was announced less than three months ago, the newly awarded partner companies will create a universal system that can equip existing drones with the capability to act autonomously and finish their mission even when the connection to their human operator has been lost.

“REMA is focused on creating autonomous solutions to maximize effectiveness of stock commercial and small military drones on the battlefield,” said Dr. Lael Rudd, REMA program manager when announcing the new awards. “Through creating an autonomy adapter that works with all commercial drones, regardless of manufacturer, and by developing mission-specific autonomy that is constantly refreshed and easy to upload prior to a mission, we aim to give drone operators the advantage in fast-paced combat operations.”

Keep reading

DARPA’S MYSTERIOUS X-PLANE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE FLIGHT BY BREAKING THIS CENTURY-OLD AVIATION DESIGN PARADIGM

DARPA is preparing to revolutionize flight as it moves forward with the development of its experimental X-plane, which the agency says will upend a century of flight technology with an aircraft featuring no moving control surfaces.

The X-65, a technology demonstrator with a 30-foot wingspan weighing slightly more than 7000 pounds, is expected to be capable of reaching Mach 0.7.

The agency has been working with its partners at Aurora Flight Sciences, who were recently given the green light to construct a full-scale experimental aircraft that will demonstrate the company’s novel active flow control (AFC) actuators for its flight control system.

Utilizing an innovative design that controls the flow of air over an aircraft’s surface, the recent award granted to Aurora represents the third phase of DARPA’s Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program.

Keep reading

Pentagon Aims to Create a Human-Machine Soldier as Part of Dangerous New Artificial Intelligence Race

“In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider created the US Information Processing Techniques Office at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). His vision, published two years earlier in his seminal work Man–Computer Symbiosis (Licklider 1960), heralded an ambitious, and ultimately successful, push to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The Agency, now called DARPA with the D emphasizing its focus on defense applications, has supported AI research, as popularity has ebbed and flowed, over the past 60 years.”[1]

The Pentagon has been at the forefront of researching and developing artificial intelligence technologies for use in warfare and spying since the early 1960s, primarily through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).[2] According to the Brookings Institution, 87% of the value of federal contracts over the five years 2017-2022 that had the term “artificial intelligence” in the contract description were with the Department of Defense.[3] This article reviews the Pentagon’s current application of AI technologies.[4]

Keep reading

U.S. SPY AGENCY DREAMS OF SURVEILLANCE UNDERWEAR IT’S CALLING “SMART EPANTS”

THE FUTURE OF wearable technology, beyond now-standard accessories like smartwatches and fitness tracking rings, is ePANTS, according to the intelligence community. 

The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop “smart” clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection.

Billed as the “largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles,” the SMART ePANTS — Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems — program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable.

The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community’s secretive counterpart to the military’s better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA’s website says it “invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community.” Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures.

“A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator,” Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” told The Intercept. “It may or may not stick.”

Keep reading

ARPA-H: The Nosy Love Child of DARPA and the NIH

On March 15, 2022, President Biden signed a law allowing for the creation and funding of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The agency received $1 billion for fiscal year 2022.

ARPA-H’s stated mission is  to“accelerate better health outcomes for everyone by supporting the development of high-impact solutions to society’s most challenging health problems.”  So, the federal government is tossing another billion into the black hole that is the American health care system.  Okay.

We’re already spending a fortune on healthcare.

Let’s think about this for a minute.  The U.S. already spends far more per capita than any other nation in the world.  We spend an average of $11,495 per person, per year.  Most other First World countries hover between $5000 and $6000.  (source)

Health care in the U.S. represented 17.7% of the economy as of 2018, and has been projected to increase to 19.7% in 2028.  That means that more than 1 in 6 dollars spent in the U.S. is being spent on healthcare.

So, is this paying off?  Are Americans the healthiest people in the world?

No.  We’re sick and have been getting sicker.  Our life expectancy dropped again last year, to 76.4 years, which is the lowest since the 1990s.  Meanwhile people in dozens of other countries can expect to live into their 80s on average, American life expectancy just continues to drop. I don’t think we’re getting what we pay for.

Keep reading

What’s Inside the Budget for the Secretive DARPA?

The Economist has called DARPA the agency “that shaped the modern world,” and listed weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which “DARPA can claim at least partial credit.” These technologies were originally invented for the military aims of the Pentagon. 

DARPA was providing funding and technical support to Moderna’s mRNA vaccine technology since at least 2013. DARPA also had long-time associates and partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

A look at their new budget provides a glimpse at what the U.S. Military sees as part of the future of warfare. 

Using machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate information or human behavior seems to be a priority for DARPA judging by the budget. 

A project named AAI aims to further the “facilitation of operator-machine interface, knowledge management and dissemination, and social context-informed AI forecasting.” The project also aims to include a “focus on measuring and aggregating preconscious signals and how these can be used to determine what people believe to be true.” 

Project SemaFor is being earmarked for hundreds of millions of dollars and will use AI “to identify false information, its origin, and its intent [emphasis added]. A project named ASED is developing “counter-social engineering bots.” A little description of this project is given. 

Once thought to be a thing of only movies and television shows, DARPA plans to further its development of a type of “ray gun.” Project Warden is being earmarked millions of dollars to “amplify the range and lethality of high-power microwave systems and weapons.” 

The World Economic Forum idea of Fourth Industrial Revolution technology, which is partly defined as the merging of the digital, technical and biological systems is also highlighted in the DARPA budget. 

Keep reading

DARPA and NIH-Funded MIT Researchers Create ‘Stickers that Can See Inside the Body’

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a proof-of-concept for a new “ultrasound sticker,” which is the size of a stamp and is able to provide continuous ultrasound imagining of a person’s internal organs for up to 48 hours. The stickers, which utilize hydrogel in order to function, currently require a wired connection to instruments, but future iterations will function wirelessly.

“Currently, ultrasound imaging requires bulky and specialized equipment available only in hospitals and doctor’s offices,” MIT notes in a press release describing the ultrasound sticker. “But a new design by MIT engineers might make the technology as wearable and accessible as buying Band-Aids at the pharmacy.”

To create their ultrasound sticker the researchers, who outlined their design and prototype in a closed-access paper in Science, paired a “stretchy adhesive layer” with “a rigid array of transducers.” Transducers are electronic devices that convert energy from one form to another—in this instance, by sending sound waves into a human body, which, in turn, echo off internal organs and return back where the echoed signals are translated into visual images.

In order for the ultrasound echoes to work, however, they must travel through a liquid gel, which acts as a conductive medium that creates a bond between the skin and the ultrasound transducer. In this instance, the researchers chose hydrogel as the conductive medium. Hydrogel, for those unfamiliar, is a crosslinked three-dimensional polymeric network structure, which can absorb and retain considerable amounts of water. It’s used to make, for example, the kinds of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used to deliver the COVID-19 mRNA “vaccines.”

Keep reading

Federal Research On Manipulating Brains And Rewriting DNA Should Worry Us All

The future of evolution is now in our hands. Or rather, the godlike power to alter biology rests in a few scientists’ hands, and we’re all going to pay for it, one way or another. The U.S. government is pouring billions of dollars into understanding genetics and the human brain, and most consequentially, how to manipulate those systems.

Last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched its “BRAIN 2.0” initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnology), ramping up an existing program started eight years ago. Comparable to the Human Genome Project in scope and scale, BRAIN 2.0 grants $600 million to fully map our 86 billion neurons and their uncounted connections. The project is expected to reach a grand total cost of $5 billion by 2026.

In theory, once scientists have created this detailed brain atlas in silico, they can directly alter neural function using digital devices. The director of the BRAIN Initiative, John Ngai, exhibits a troubling fixation on this method.

In a recent interview with Stat News, Ngai noted two concrete results of his current neuro-mapping efforts. One is an advanced brain-computer interface — implanted last year at the University of California, San Francisco — that allows for astounding thought-to-text communication. The other is a major breakthrough in deep brain stimulation at Baylor University, where electrodes are implanted to alter mood and behavior, relieving depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. 

Ngai’s cyborg obsession is shared by his close government partner, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where “man-computer symbiosis” has been a longstanding paradigm. The defense agency’s involvement in the BRAIN Initiative is open and well documented. However, beyond the NIH’s declared mission to heal, our top military minds also have a deep interest in human enhancement. 

“DARPA has been a pioneer in brain-machine interface technology since the 1970s, but we began investing heavily in the early 2000s,” boasted Justin Sanchez, the director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office. “We’ve laid the groundwork for a future in which advanced brain interface technologies will transform how people live and work.” 

This transformation involves neural implants, to an extent, but also non-invasive devices, such as wearable neuro-bands or skull caps. “Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics,” said DARPA program manager Phillip Alvelda, whose goals include “Bridging the Bio-Electronic Divide” and developing a “High-Resolution, Implantable Neural Interface.”

If successful, the atlas created by BRAIN 2.0 will be a crucial bridge across this “bio-electronic divide.” The neural territory will be mapped and ready to conquer. 

Keep reading

This Biden Proposal Could Turn US into A “Digital Dictatorship”

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.”  

Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur. Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic “pre-crime” organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as “wrongthink.”

The Biden administration has asked Congress for $6.5 billion to fund the agency, which would be largely guided by Biden’s recently confirmed top science adviser, Eric Lander. Lander, formerly the head of the Silicon Valley–dominated Broad Institute, has been controversial for his ties to eugenicist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relatively recent praise for James Watson, an overtly racist eugenicist. Despite that, Lander is set to be confirmed by the Senate and Congress and is reportedly significantly enthusiastic about the proposed new “health DARPA.”

This new agency, set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA, would be housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would raise the NIH budget to over $51 billion. Unlike other agencies at NIH, ARPA-H would differ in that the projects it funds would not be peer reviewed prior to approval; instead hand-picked program managers would make all funding decisions. Funding would also take the form of milestone-driven payments instead of the more traditional multiyear grants.

ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID. BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV.

Other “innovative” technologies that will be a focus of this agency are less well known to the public and arguably more concerning.

Keep reading