Tag: technology

Pentagon Marches Towards AI Taking The Kill Shot

Dozens of autonomous war machines capable of deadly force conducted a field training exercise south of Seattle last August. The exercise involved no human operators but strictly robots powered with artificial intelligence, seeking mock enemy combatants.

The exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon, armed the robots with radio transmitters designed to simulate a weapon firing. The drill expanded the Pentagon’s understanding of how automation in military systems on the modern battlefield can work together to eliminate enemy combatants.

“The demonstrations also reflect a subtle shift in the Pentagon’s thinking about autonomous weapons, as it becomes clearer that machines can outperform humans at parsing complex situations or operating at high speed,” according to WIRED. 

It’s undeniable artificial intelligence will be the face of warfare for years to come. Military planners are moving ahead with incorporating autonomous weapons systems on the modern battlefield.

General John Murray of the US Army Futures Command told an audience at the US Military Academy in April that swarms of robots will likely force the military to decide if a human needs to intervene before a robot engages the enemy.

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Pentagon collecting Americans’ phone data without warrants and hiding details, senator says

U.S. federal agencies including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have been purchasing access to large databases of phone location data and hiding their motives in what Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) described as “warrantless surveillance” of Americans.

In a Thursday letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Wyden called on Austin to declassify all answers about the Department of Defense’s data collection practices. Wyden noted that of eight questions he raised with the DoD, he received unclassified answers to three questions, while the answers to the five remaining questions were offered in a classified manner.

“In February 2020, media reports revealed that U.S. government agencies are buying location data obtained from apps on Americans’ phones and are doing so without any kind of legal process, sich as a court order,” Wyden wrote. “I have spent the last year investigating the shady, unregulated data brokers that are selling this data and the government agencies that are buying it. My investigation confirmed the warrantless purchase of American’s location data by the Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”

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The Smallest-Ever Injectable Chip Hints at a New Cybernetic Medicine

Electronics are getting imperceptibly small, opening new avenues for medical technology to place advanced monitoring and treatment devices inside our bodies. And Columbia University engineers just demonstrated a new and revolutionary version of this, creating the world’s smallest single-chip system ever developed, according to a recent study published in the journal Science Advances.

And, critically, the tiny new chip can be implanted via a hypodermic needle to measure internal body temperature, and potentially much more.

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New High-Speed Propulsion System Paves Way for Hypersonic Flight up to Mach 16

We humans have a wonderful ability to keep developing, innovating, and engineering bigger, better, and faster contraptions. Close to Earth, we’ve been soaring through the skies in airplanes since 1903 thanks to the Wright brothers, and we’ve been launching spacecraft into space since 1957 when the Soviet Union rocketed the Sputnik satellite above our heads.

So why not try even further, and even faster using less energy and fuel? How does a flight from New York to Los Angeles in a mere 30 minutes instead of six hours spent sitting next to a stranger in cramped conditions sound? This may soon be possible thanks to a team of engineers from the University of Central Florida.

The team discovered a way of stabilizing detonation for hypersonic propulsion by creating a hypersonic reaction chamber for jet propulsions.

This breakthrough allows for a potential way to develop, and integrate ultra-high-speed detonation technology that allows for hypersonic propulsion, and advanced power systems, as the team explained in its study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They’re not the only ones working on such technology. For example, in late 2020 China was testing a hypersonic jet engine that’s able to go 16 times the speed of sound in a one-of-a-kind wind tunnel in Beijing. If this jet engine, called sodramjet, was used, you’d be able to travel anywhere on Earth in just two hours. 

Other agencies, companies, and governments are focusing their energy on the future of hypersonic flight, not only for fast commercial travel across the world but to also improve how spacecraft engines launch up into space.

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Research Finds More Than Half of School Apps Sending Personal Student Data to Third Parties

According to a new research report published by the nonprofit entity Me2B Alliance, around 60 percent of school apps are sending student data to a wide range of high-risk third parties without getting the permission of either the students or their parents.

The study audited 73 apps from 38 different schools spread over 14 American states. It involved almost half a million people, including students, their teachers, and family members. The organization warned that school apps must not include third-party data channels and that an “unacceptable amount” of school data was being shared with third parties through these apps, specifically with analytics and advertising platforms.

“The findings from our research show the pervasiveness of data sharing with high-risk entities and the amount of people whose data could be compromised due to schools’ lack of resources… The study aims to bring these concerns to light to ensure the right funding support and protections are in place to safeguard our most vulnerable citizens – our children,” Lisa LeVasseur, executive director of Me2B Alliance, said in a statement.

The study found that around 18 percent of the apps had links to very high risk third parties, meaning that such parties probably re-shared the data with hundreds of thousands of entities. 67 percent of public school apps were found to be sending data to third parties, which is 10 percent higher than private school apps. 

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Starlink Satellites Launch Sparks Fears of ‘Alien Invasion’ on US West Coast, Media Says

This week’s SpaceX launch puts the total number of Starlink satellites orbiting Earth at over one thousand.

A recent SpaceX launch has apparently caused quite a commotion in Los Angeles when the rocket’s payload reached orbit and became visible to those on the ground.

According to TMZ, the ensuing spectacle, which appeared as “string of lights moving across the sky in unison”, left many onlookers in LA puzzled and somewhat uncertain about what exactly they were witnessing.

As the media outlet points out, however, the objects spotted in the sky were no UFOs but rather the result of a Falcon 9 rocket delivering some 60 Starlink satellites in orbit earlier this week, with the total number of these satellites circling our planet now exceeding 1,000.

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Scientists Use Scalps From Aborted Babies to Create “Humanized Mice” and Fauci is Funding It

A new video from the Center for Medical Progress exposes a gristly experiment at the University of Pittsburgh that involved scalping five-month aborted babies and implanting their scalps onto rodents.

Now, Pennsylvania leaders are demanding an investigation and urging the university to stop its experiments using aborted baby body parts.

“Publicly available information demonstrates that Pitt hosts some of the most barbaric experiments carried out on aborted human infants, including scalping 5-month-old aborted fetuses to stitch onto lab rats,” the Center for Medical Progress said in a statement.

The information comes from a study that University of Pittsburgh researchers published in September 2020 in the journal “Scientific Reports.” It describes how scientists used scalps from aborted babies to create “humanized” mice and rats to study the human immune system.

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World’s 1st multinode quantum network is a breakthrough for the quantum internet

Scientists have gotten one step closer to a quantum internet by creating the world’s first multinode quantum network. 

Researchers at the QuTech research center in the Netherlands created the system, which is made up of three quantum nodes entangled by the spooky laws of quantum mechanics that govern subatomic particles. It is the first time that more than two quantum bits, or “qubits,” that do the calculations in quantum computing have been linked together as “nodes,” or network endpoints. 

Researchers expect the first quantum networks to unlock a wealth of computing applications that can’t be performed by existing classical devices — such as faster computation and improved cryptography.

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