To defend against military lasers, Adsys Controls of Irvine, California, has created Helios, which can be carried on drones. To do much damage, an offensive laser needs to remain focused on its target for several seconds. Helios stops a laser from doing this by disrupting the systems controlling the beam – the Achilles’ heel for …
Here is a follow up to the report of a SETI signal detected on May 15, 2015 by a radio telescope operated by the Russian Academy of Science. It appeared to come from the star HD 164595, a sun-like star located roughly 95 light-years from Earth. The system has only one known planet: a warm …
Smartphone speech recognition software is not only three times faster than human typists, it’s also more accurate. The researchers hope the revelation spurs the development of innovative applications of speech recognition technology. In the past two to three years, speech recognition was actually improving a lot, benefiting from big data and deep learning to train …
The Office of Naval research (ONR) gets $2.1 billion per year in funding. This is about two thirds of the DARPA budget. The ONR is trying to develop combat lasers, railguns, quantum computing, nanotechnology, synthetic biology and other areas Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million …
Researchers at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) said they were able to heat the gas to nearly three times the temperature at the core of the Sun, and keep it there for 102 seconds. The goal of the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak was to reach 100 million Kelvins for over 1,000 seconds (nearly 17 …
Rambus Inc., the chip technology intellectual property vendor, is working with Microsoft Research on future memory requirements for quantum computing. Rambus (NASDAQ: RMBS), Sunnyvale, Calif., confirmed just before the holidays it is collaborating with the software giant (NASDAQ: MSFT) on memory systems for next-generation quantum computing. The promising but largely untested technology is slowly gaining …
Lasers could heat materials to temperatures hotter than the centre of the Sun in only 20 quadrillionths of a second, according to new research. Theoretical physicists from Imperial College London have devised an extremely rapid heating mechanism that they believe could heat certain materials to ten million degrees in much less than a million millionth …
A report claims that the Gaofen-4 geostationary earth observation satellite will be launched by the end of this year with the express purpose of hunting US aircraft carriers. The satellite is equipped with a visible light imager at 50 meters and infrared staring optical imager at 400 meters. China has created the means of holding …
DARPA and Special Ops Commands plan a 2018 debut for the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, or TALOS — exoskeleton to give make commandos more lethal while being better protected. They are particularly wanting this for the vulnerable first soldier to breach a compound. The TALOS program has churned out several prototypes and is on …
SpaceX had been working for some time on an upgrade to the current Falcon 9 v1.1, sometimes called v1.2, with increased thrust. That first launch of the upgraded Falcon 9 was scheduled for September before the June 28 launch failure. The upgraded Falcon 9 will be slightly taller than the Falcon 9 v1.1 and have …
The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is a proposed infrared space observatory which was selected by National Research Council committee as the top priority for the next decade of astronomy. The WFIRST space telescope could be in space by 2024 if it is started in 2017. Estimates suggested that every planetary system in the …