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Posts Tagged “

War

concept art

Massive Half-Life 2 Drydock Needs Defense and Some Paint

This is a drydock in HullBreach, a complete conversion for the Half-Life 2 video game. The team has an ambitious goal of creating 100% new content for the game, and they've been hard at work on it for several years. The game is set 2,000 years in our future, and involves a bloody world war that threatens to engulf the planet. So the upshot is, even 2,000 years from now, we won't be getting along. More »

futurism

Mental Illness on the Rise Throughout the Globe

It's become common sense to admit that war can make soldiers crazy — the condition has been called everything from "shell shock" to "post traumatic stress disorder." But now a study published yesterday offers concrete evidence that war drives civilians crazy too. In the first nationwide study of civilian mental health in war zones, a group of researchers in Lebanon surveyed thousands of people in that country to correlate their exposure to war with the likelihood that they would develop a mental illness. The results don't bode well for the future mental health of the globe. More »

lego

Famous Vietnam War Photographs, with Stormtrooper Legos

During the Vietnam War, world-famous photographers like Marc Riboud and Eddie Adams captured iconic (and traumatic) moments on film. In 2008, most war photographs are created by embedded journalists whose images are tightly controlled. So British photographer Mike Stimpson decided to make his contribution to the repository of war photography by staging mock Vietnam-era moments using Lego. This one, based on a 1967 protest in Washington, DC, stars Stormtrooper Legos as the US Army. See, it looks just like the original image. More »

lasers

Navy Initiates a Five-Year Plan to Build Laser Blasters

Long range laser weapons that do more than make little red dots show up on distant objects have long been a dream of science fiction creators and the military alike. Now it looks like a true, long-range laser blasting weapon may be ready for action within the next five years. The Navy is ponying up cash for three defense contracts to build out a laser developed a few years ago at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The laser, called a FEL (for "free electron laser"), can generate 10,000 watts of power, all across the visible spectrum. That means it could theoretically be optimized to shoot through fog or cloud. The Navy wants its current contractors to develop a prototype 100 kilowatt FEL, and then later one on the megawatt level. Noah Shachtman has all the details over at his Wired blog Danger Room. [Danger Room]

dystopia

Career of Tomorrow: Car Bomb Forensics Expert

Yes, it's another dystopian morning filled with the smell of burning chemicals and scorched ideology. And nothing says dark future more than working as a car bomb forensics expert, the detective who gets called in when a car bomb like this one (set off in Thailand over the weekend) goes off. It turns out you can learn an awful lot about who set this bomb off from reading the debris it left behind. More »

memo to hollywood

Earth Battles The Moon, Who Wins?

NASA is readying two spacecraft to slam into the Moon's South Pole in an effort to find hidden polar ice a year from now, which gives Hollywood plenty of time to prep the movie and release it when all of this Moon-violence is at a fever pitch. After the spacecraft crash dead-on into the moon, another standby ship will fly through the plume that gets thrown up, grab some of the debris, and then analyze it. But what if this were a major motion picture? Things would turn out a little differently. Here's our idea. More »

future war

Japanese Military Continues Its Quest to Make Gundam Real

Since late last year, the Japanese military has been working on projects aimed at "realizing" Gundam, the mobile armor suit that is both combat exoskeleton and A.I. in several popular anime and manga series. Just yesterday, the Defense Ministry of Techinical Research and Development Institute in Japan rolled out these new tanks, whose high-tech specs don't make it sentient armor exactly but certainly fit the bill of "smart tank." Want to see a strangely incongruous image of one of these tanks crunching its way out of a festive-looking tent in the suburbs? More »

future war

Can a Robotic Weapon Be Programmed to Have Ethics?

Combat robots and computerized missile launchers may one day be better soldiers than humans because they are programmed with ethical behavior and will never engage in friendly fire. You learn about all this and more from videos just posted from the awesome Technology in Wartime conference, held two weeks ago at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, and organized by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. (Caveat: I'm the Vice President of CPSR, and helped organize this conference.) More »

robots

Israeli Bomb Disposal Robot Has a Terrible Job Cleaning Up After Humans

Yesterday in Israel, a bomb disposal robot inspected the scene of a suicide bombing at a shopping mall in the town of Dimona. The bot is remote controlled, and used an articulated arm to remove the jacket of the alleged bomber to be sure he doesn't have more explosives on his body. Want to see what else the robot does as it finishes its inspection of the area? (Warning: Images of a corpse may be disturbing.) More »

futurism

Weaponizing Climate Change for Battle

A new article in Foreign Policy suggests that geoengineering (or weather engineering) may be part of the next high-tech battle strategy for troops who want a force multiplier. The article is an updated version of an essay by futurist Jamais Cascio. Others have already speculated about how the ability to control rain systems and pull down lightening may be the future of warfare. In fact, all the technologies to do this already exist. But Cascio thinks forced ecosystem imbalances may be the weapon of choice for offensive geoengineers. More »

really giant machines

Diving Into the Russian Nuclear Sub Wreck

The Kursk was a Russian nuclear cruise missile submarine that was lost under mysterious circumstances involving some explosions in 2000. Here it is a year later, dredged up from the waters by a Dutch crew. Want to see the insides? More »

technology in wartime

Will We Hold Robots Accountable for War Crimes?

Now that the military is using autonomous surveillance/combat robots created by iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robot vacuum, a strange question emerges: What do we do if a robot commits a war crime? This isn't idle speculation. An automated anti-aircraft cannon's friendly fire killed nine soldiers in South Africa last year, and computer scientists speculate that as more weapons (and aircraft) are robot-controlled that we'll need to develop new definitions of war crimes. In fact, the possibility of robot war crimes is the subject of a panel at an upcoming conference at Stanford. More »

concept art

Sexy Recruitment Posters For The Empire

Although most of the stormtroopers in the Star Wars movies turned out to be vat-grown clones of Boba Fett's daddy, perhaps some of them were citizens from around the Empire doing their duty. These concept art recruitment posters by Feng Zhu might have been plastered in cantinas and spaceports around the galaxy in an effort to beef up the Imperial presence. After all, you can't expect your average clone to do everything, can you? More sexy troopers after the jump. More »

review

Four Years From Now, Iraq War Is Much Worse

The book version of acclaimed webcomic Shooting War just came out. Set in 2011, Shooting War follows a videoblogger to Iraq, where the war continues, worse than ever. The comic, originally posted at Smithmag.com, explores the (bleak) future of mainstream media as well as the mainstreaming of bloggers and vloggers. The book version adds 110 pages of new material and smooths out the webcomic's sometimes jerky flow.
More »

battlestar galactica: razor

Everything You Need To Know About The Flashback Episodes


Battlestar Galactica's
two-hour telepic Razor will hit the airwaves on November 24th. Have you been doing your homework? Here's a handy Razor guide so you can feel fully briefed and prepared as it unspools on your viewing device of choice. More »