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Research towards enabling minds as healthy and productive as twenty year olds in people who are 60-80

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Memory performance typically declines with age, as does cortical structural integrity, yet some older adults maintain youthful memory. We tested the hypothesis that superagers (older individuals with youthful memory performance) would exhibit preserved neuroanatomy in key brain networks subserving memory. We found that superagers not only perform similarly to young adults on memory testing, they …

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Lockheed says their Laser Weapons are Ready for Use Today and laser modules can be used to scale power

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“The [combat laser] technologies now exist,” said Paul Shattuck, company director for Directed Energy Systems. “They can be packaged into a size, weight, power and thermal which can be fit onto relevant tactical platforms, whether it’s a ship, whether it’s a ground vehicle or whether it’s an airborne platform. It is no longer a technological …

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DARPA parafoil system provides the equivalent of a mast as tall as a skyscraper

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DARPA’s Towed Airborne Lift of Naval Systems (TALONS) research effort recently demonstrated a prototype of a low-cost, fully automated parafoil system designed to extend maritime vessels’ long-distance communications and improve their domain awareness. Towed behind boats or ships, TALONS could carry intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and communications payloads of up to 150 pounds between 500 and …

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DARPA Semiconductor Starnet beyond CMOS research targets ten thousands times power improvement

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The DARPA Semiconductor Technology Advanced Research Network (STARNet) program is a government-industry partnership combining the expertise and resources from select defense, semiconductor, and information companies with those of DARPA to sponsor an external set of academic research teams that are focused on specific technology needs set by experts in industry and government. Efforts under this …

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Iraq War 3

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There will be about 1700 “coalition forces” in Iraq shortly. 1000 American special forces are already there. 600 Australians and 69 Canadians. The Kurds are being armed and Turkey is allowing the use of airbases for the air campaign. There are also US veterans who work with the private military contractors who are in the …

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Why it might have been reasonable for the Iraqis soldiers to desert rather than fight Isis and how a foreign legion could help solve it

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Before I made the case that a US foreign legion was a pragmatic economic solution for the USA. Consider now the position of a soldier in Iraqi army. The final straw was the death of a friend, killed two weeks ago by a sniper’s bullet. The infantryman, Bashar al-Halbousi, deserted, making the same choice as …

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Baidu hires Google Andrew Ng and plans to compete with Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence and have built a $20000 simulated brain with one billion connections

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[Technology Review]Andrew Ng is the newly appointed chief scientist at Baidu, China’s dominant search company. He has plans to advance deep learning, a powerful new approach to artificial intelligence loosely modeled on the way the brain works. It has already made computers vastly better at recognizing speech, translating languages, and identifying images—and Ng’s work at …

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Ethanol is bad for the environment overall and is increasing the cost of food for 500 million poor people

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James Conca at Forbes reports that the International Institute for Sustainable Development estimates that the CO2 and climate benefits from replacing petroleum fuels with biofuels like ethanol are basically zero (IISD). They claim that it would be almost 100 times more effective, and much less costly, to significantly reduce vehicle emissions through more stringent standards, …

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Xenon ion and water cubesat engines for interplanetary cubesats with costs ten thousand times less

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Benjamin Longmier, Michigan University, is developing the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT), a new rocket propulsion system powered by the Sun and propelled by water, which will push small spacecraft like CubeSats around and far beyond the Earth. They received a $200,000 private donation and have raised over $96,000 on Kickstarter. What can be enabled with …

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Several gene therapies are or will soon be in late-stage human trials

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Though many gene therapies have been tested in patients around the world in hopes of curing hereditary diseases, few governments have approved their sale, and none has been approved in the United States. That could change in coming years as several therapies enter advanced trials. Experts say it is likely to be a few years …

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