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New technology to detect common but difficult to detect explosives
MIT researchers synthesized a molecule based on zinc to allow the detection not only of RDX, but of RDX vapors, which are about 1,000 times more difficult to detect than TNT vapors
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U.S. recommends commercial technologies for communication interoperability
While the debate on emergency communication interoperability continues, the U.S. Commerce Department recommends that the federal, state, and local public safety community consider using commercial technologies
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Affordable, downloadable navigation applications are coming
If millions of phones were to be equipped with cameras and navigation applications and E911, we would have an army of millions of forward spotters
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ATDC at 25: Looking Back with Satisfaction
Companies graduating from Georgia Tech’s science and technology incubator attract more than $1 billion in venture funding
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TraceGuard files for additional patents relating to its detection technology
The company’s propietary Automated Trace Extraction (ATE) uses air jetting, pressurization, and at times even vibration and heating to enhance detection
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Navy to use OPT's buoys in Deep Water
New Jersey-based bouy specialist makes stand-alone buoys which harness wave power to generate energy; the Navy wants to use them for its ocean-based, far-flung vessel tracking project
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Superconductivity at room temperature a step closer
Transporting energy without any loss: Scientists have been dreaming about the possibility — and its benefits — for decades, and CNRS rsearchers have made an important breakthrough toward making this dream a reality
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Siemens, Catalyst partner on communication interoperability
The two companies’ strategic collaboration aims to strengthen interoperable communications for first responders and the military
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Secret weapon targeting system stolen from defense contractor
Burglars break into a Lockheed Martin facility in Orlando and steal the display and controls for an Apache helicopter weapons-targeting system
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Marine Corps. contracts Israeli armor specialist for IED protection
IEDs now cause most of the U.S. casualties in Iraq; DHS officials say that it is only a matter of time before IEDs are used by terrorists on American soil; the search for a solution spans the globe
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Growing deal-making activity in the alternative energy sector
With the battle over wind turbine maker Repower over, and the battle over Nordex may begin — both offering evidence for rich deal making in alternative energy
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S&T Directorate announces new opportunities
Biometrics, interoperable communications, document validatiion, and blast mitigation top the agency’s wish list
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Irdeto, SafeNet partner on mobile TV protection
There are two competing technologines aiming to protect mobile TV broadcasts — conditional access and DRM; now the leaders of each technology partner
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Cyberlux demonstrates hybrid lighting technology
The company’s covert lighting technology is already used by the military and law enfrocement; now the company tests hybrid lighting technology which will help conserve energy
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Mirkos, Isonics report good fiscal results
Two technology companies show good fiscal results in their latest quarterly reports
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The long view
Designing the Coastal City of the Future
Boston is situated along the Gulf of Maine, which is warming faster than 99 percent of the ocean due, in part, to changing sea patterns from melting ice in Greenland and the Arctic Ocean. Coupled with increased heat and precipitation, the rising sea level is threatening the low-lying city, much of which was built on landfill over the past 300 years along a 50-square-mile harbor. To save the 685,000-person city, the local government is calling on architects to help implement one of the most ambitious municipal resiliency plans in the United States: Climate Ready Boston. Launched in 2016 by Mayor Martin J. Walsh, Climate Ready Boston is an initiative to prepare the city for the long-term impacts of climate change.
Mysterious Case of the Vanishing UFOs
All over the rest of the world UFOs are in sharp decline, and may soon disappear altogether. People are simply not spotting unidentified spacecraft like they used to. Alien abductions are at an all-time low. UFO-spotting organizations are closing down. Since 2014 alien sightings have halved. The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, and dropping. “Where have all the UFOs gone?” Ben Macintyre asks in The Times, noting that “The recent drastic worldwide decline of unexplained phenomena is one of the odder unexplained phenomena of modern times.”
AI Could Be a Disaster for Humanity. A Top Computer Scientist Thinks He Has the Solution.
Stuart Russell is a leading AI researcher who co-authored the top textbook on the topic. He has also, for the last several years, been warning that his field has the potential to go catastrophically wrong. In a new book, Human Compatible, he explains how. AI systems, he notes, are evaluated by how good they are at achieving their objective: winning video games, writing humanlike text, solving puzzles. If they hit on a strategy that fits that objective, they will run with it, without explicit human instruction to do so.
How Climate Change Will Help China and Russia Wage Hybrid War
Americans and Europeans may not yet notice the existential threat climate change poses, but they had better pay attention to it. Their adversaries could use climate change as a new front in hybrid warfare. “In several African countries we’re already seeing rural settlements disrupted by development projects funded and executed by China,” Howard Jones, CEO of the Born Free Foundation. Told Defense One’s Elizabeth Braw. “Those projects include altering the flows of entire river systems and putting good land to use for export of food and resources to China. Put this together with climate change and pre-existing poverty and we have a huge problem. And why would China care?” Braw adds: “Indeed, China, Russia, and other hostile states can use climate change as a new tool in blended aggression (often called hybrid warfare) against the West.”
Why America Isn’t Equipped for the New Rules of War
Sean McFate is a former paratrooper in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division; he’s also worked as a private military contractor in West Africa. Today he’s a professor at the National Defense University and Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. His book The New Rules of War, published earlier this year, dissects the ways warfare must change in order for America to succeed. MIT Technology Review’s war reporter Janine di Giovanni sat down to ask him about his vision for the future of conflict.
California Wildfires Signal the Arrival of a Planetary Fire Age
Another autumn, more fires, more refugees and incinerated homes. For California, flames have become the colors of fall. Stephen Pyne writes that free-burning fire is the proximate provocation for the havoc, since its ember storms are engulfing landscapes. But in the hands of humans, combustion is also the deeper cause. Modern societies are burning lithic landscapes - once-living biomass now fossilized into coal, gas and oil - which is aggravating the burning of living landscapes. “Add up all the effects, direct and indirect – the areas burning, the areas needing to be burned, the off-site impacts with damaged watersheds and airsheds, the unraveling of biotas, the pervasive power of climate change, rising sea levels, a mass extinction, the disruption of human life and habitats – and you have a pyrogeography that looks eerily like an ice age for fire,” he writes. “You have a Pyrocene. The contours of such an epoch are already becoming visible through the smoke. If you doubt it, just ask California.”