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There was a time when increasing the distance between yourself and a sharp shooter bent on your extermination would significantly improve your chances of survival. But that time is coming to an end. More »
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The Pentagon's already got brain-controlled prosthetics, and they are a major improvement over old-school artificial limbs. The devices are far from perfect, however. They rely on metal implants, which aren't compatible with the body's tissues, and they can only transmit a few signals at a time - turning what should be a simple movement into a Herculean task. More »
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When you or I ask for a flying car, we get "Terrafugia's Transition," a roadable aircraft. When DARPA asks for a flying car, they get a Hummer like the one pictured up top — a Hummer that is capable of taking off and landing vertically; traversing off-road terrain with ease; and withstanding small-arms fire, all while accommodating up to four passengers. More »
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What would the discovery of an alien civilization mean for the most basic tenets of Christianity? This question was explored last Saturday at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Orlando, Florida. More »
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Soldiers: Your underwear of the future will do more than prevent crotch rot. It'll protect you from injuries, monitor your vitals, and even "harvest" your energy. That is, if a new project from Darpa's Defense Sciences Office works out as planned. That's an illustration, to the right, of what Darpa thinks its "Warrior Web" onesie might look like. More »
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Anyone who looks back on Robert Heinlein's ‘juvenile' novels, twelve books written for young adults between 1947 and 1958, as inspiration for his current work gets my attention. I loved every one of those novels, particularly Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and Starman Jones (1953), but David Neyland says it was Time for the Stars (1956) that got him thinking about the 100 Year Starship Study. If you've been keeping up with Centauri Dreams, you know that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which handles cutting-edge research and development for the US military, is putting on a starship symposium this fall in Orlando, FL. More »
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Remember DARPA's Big Dog? Looks like this video could have inspired its design. The clip shows a composition of some animal motion studies (along with some killer dance moves) prepared for the 1989 CG short "Eurythmy" by Ohio State University's Computer Graphics Research Group. More »
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Remember that robotic hummingbird DARPA built? Now they've released a short video detailing how their pint-sized drone was developed over the course of five years. Check out some skittering prototype robobirds crashing and burning. More »
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The idea for a 100-year starship has been tossed around recently, and now DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has put out a Request for Information (RFI) looking for ideas about how a long-term human mission to boldly go out to the stars could possibly happen. More »
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Here's footage of AeroVironment's Nano Hummingbird, which was built with DARPA funding. This robot bird was built to be a spy ornithopter, can fly at a speed of 11 miles per hour, and weighs as much as a AA battery. Here are the traits DARPA required of this mechanical bird: More »
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Experimental robots can have some fairly jarring means of locomotion, but wait until you see the X-RHex, a half-wheeled, half-legged robot who scoffs at hills, grass, and other terrain. Watch this "legged laboratory" flail its way through the Mojave. More »
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Today the US Department of Defense announced that they would be collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University to develop an autonomous copilot for DARPA's upcoming "helicopter jeep" project. Yes, the military is developing a helicopter jeep. More »
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Earlier this month, a NASA researcher mentioned the "Hundred Year Starship," a plan to develop research and technology for one-way human space missions. But since then, all parties have been surprisingly mum on the subject. Why all the secrecy? More »
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War-zones such as Afghanistan never have enough interpreters, often forcing soldiers to rely on nonverbal communication that's easily misunderstood. Three new devices solve that by automatically translating one language to another - and you can see it in action! More »
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DARPA, the Department of Defense's R&D agency, has two new projects: BaTMAN (Biochronicity and Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature) and RoBIN (Robustness of Biologically-Inspired Networks). Their goals? To increase troop efficiency using quantum mechanics. They're making superheroes! More »
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Progress continues on a Pentagon-backed fringe science project to develop matter that can assemble itself into 3D forms (such as weapons) and flow like mercury through barriers. We all know where this leads, don't we? More »
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For some military operations, you need a submarine. For others, you need a plane. But what if you need both? DARPA has a plan for that - a submarine that flies. Or a plane that submerges, depending on your point of view. More »
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Development of the U.S.'s first hypersonic military space plane, the HTV-3X Blackswift, is zooming forward, with plans for Boeing and Lockheed to work together on the project. When it's ready to fly (possibly as soon as 2010), the Blackswift will give the U.S. the ability to send a missile to any spot on Earth within 60 minutes. Check out the unique propulsion system that will take Blackswift above Mach 6. More »
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How do you navigate when you're floating out in deep space? By pulsar, that's how. In outer space (and even in Earth orbit) GPS doesn't do you a whole lot of good, so space scientists at the PLANS navigation conference in Monterey, CA this week have put together a couple of papers designed to show that a spacecraft could navigate autonomously by triangulating off the X-ray light emitted from pulsars scattered throughout the universe. The new system promises to be for space what GPS is for Earth; pretty useful when your stranded out past Saturn wondering "maybe that should have been a right at Titan..." More »
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The U.S. military is famous for getting inspiration from science fiction — witness the not-very-aptly-named Star Wars defense system — and now they're turning to comic books too. Unfortunately, they're learning from the bad guys. DARPA has just announced a new project called the Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition (MAHEM), named after Magneto, one of the supreme bad guys from X-Men. And it's exactly the sort of weapon the magnetic-fields-manipulating Magneto would use: a jet of molten metal propelled by magnetic fields into its target. Could it really work? More »
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