Marking a milestone for the Navy, the Office of Naval Research and its industry partner on April 6 successfully tested a solid-state, high-energy laser (HEL) from a surface ship, which disabled a small target vessel.

The Navy and Northrop Grumman completed at-sea testing of the Maritime Laser Demonstrator (MLD), which validated the potential to provide advanced self-defense for surface ships and personnel by keeping small boat threats at a safe distance.

“The success of this high-energy laser test is a credit to the collaboration, cooperation and teaming of naval labs at Dahlgren, China Lake, Port Hueneme and Point Mugu, Calif.,” said Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Nevin Carr. “ONR coordinated each of their unique capabilities into one cohesive effort.”

The latest test occurred near San Nicholas Island, off the coast of Central California in the Pacific Ocean test range. The laser was mounted onto the deck of the Navy’s self-defense test ship, former USS Paul Foster (DD 964).

Carr also recognized the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s High Energy Joint Technology Office and the Army’s Joint High Powered Solid State Laser (JHPSSL) program for their work. MLD leverages the Army’s JHPSSL effort.

“This is the first time a HEL, at these power levels, has been put on a Navy ship, powered from that ship and used to defeat a target at-range in a maritime environment,” said Peter Morrison, program officer for ONR’s MLD.

In just slightly more than two-and-a-half years, the MLD has gone from contract award to demonstrating a Navy ship defensive capability, he said.

“We are learning a ton from this program—how to integrate and work with directed energy weapons,” Morrison said. “All test results are extremely valuable regardless of the outcome.”

Additionally, the Navy accomplished several other benchmarks, including integrating MLD with a ship’s radar and navigation system and firing an electric laser weapon from a moving platform at-sea in a humid environment. Other tests of solid state lasers for the Navy have been conducted from land-based positions.

Having access to a HEL weapon will one day provide warfighter with options when encountering a small-boat threat, Morrison said.

But while April’s MLD test proves the ability to use a scalable laser to thwart small vessels at range, the technology will not replace traditional weapon systems, Carr added.

“From a science and technology point of view, the marriage of directed energy and kinetic energy weapon systems opens up a new level of deterrence into scalable options for the commander. This test provides an important data point as we move toward putting directed energy on warships. There is still much work to do to make sure it’s done safely and efficiently,” the admiral said.

Consider the federal investigators who have “formally concluded” their investigation into the 2001 anthrax killings, pointing again to the late anthrax vaccine researcher Bruce Ivins as the case’s culprit.

Whatever history’s verdict on Ivins, one brouhaha at the center of the case has already outlived him — the story of “weaponized” anthrax.

“One of my biggest frustrations with this has been showing people the data, and it doesn’t matter,” says researcher Joseph Michael of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M. Michael has presented electron microscope results that show the 2001 attack anthrax wasn’t weaponized for two years, “but still the idea refuses to go away.”

The notion took hold in October of 2001, as the Hart senate office building faced closure due to anthrax contamination, when then-House minority leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., described some of the anthrax used in the attacks as “weapons-grade material.” The claim sparked a flurry of reports about the peculiar properties of the attack spores, their high quality and lightness, which hastened their spread through the building’s ventilation system.

Fears centered around silica, the chief ingredient in sand, which allows small bacterial spores to float more freely in the air, or aerosolize, if applied as a coating, a Cold War bioweapons technique studied at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.

In particular, a 2001 warning that silica had been purposely added to the attack anthrax came from virologist Peter Jahrling of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The warning was delivered to White House officials (reported in Robert Preston‘s 2002 book, The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story), after U.S. Armed Forces Institutes of Pathology X-ray results showed silica present in samples of the attack anthrax. The fear gained currency in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war‘s beginning, which centered around fears of bioweapons, as well as chemical and nuclear weapons.

“The spores in the Washington, D.C. letters were of exceptional purity,” says the Justice Department’s just-released investigation summary.

So, as part of the investigation, Michael and his colleagues looked at the attack spores using electron microscopes, which can see at fine enough resolution, on the nanometer scale, to spot exactly where the silica resided.In so doing they knocked down the notion the attack anthrax had been weaponized with a silicon coating. Instead, they found silicon that occurred naturally inside the spores.

“I believe I made an honest mistake,” Jahrling told The Los Angeles Times, in a 2008 response to this news, adding he was “overly impressed” by his initial views of the attack spores under the microscope.

Still the idea lives on, for example, in a January opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, that cited scientists who see the amount of silica in the attack spores as “blowing the FBI‘s case out of the water.” (The FBI argued the lab where Ivins worked didn’t have the facilities to weaponize the anthrax.)

Michael calls it “remarkable” that the opinion piece didn’t note his team’s well-publicized findings. “As a sheltered scientist, it kind of shocks me,” Michael says. “People will believe what they want to believe.”

So, how did the silica get inside the spores then? A January Journal of Bacteriology study led by Ryuichi Hirota of Japan’s Hiroshima University offers one answer. Looking at Bacillus cereus, a bacterium closely related to anthrax, researchers find silica naturally ingest the stuff if grown in sand-laced Petri dishes. Further, the silica produces acid resistance in the bugs, something they need to survive a trip to the stomach of grazing animals, one way they spread in the wild.

But it doesn’t make the spores float any more easily, Hirota and colleagues find. FBI scientist Vahid Majidi in 2008 suggested the crushing the anthrax letters underwent in postal sorting machines likely contributed to the fineness of the powders released in the Senate office building.

“I have to wonder if the controversial (Wall Street Journal opinion) piece didn’t put pressure on the Department of Justice and FBI to close the case. Maybe they realized that continuing the case just encouraged such misinformation,” says anthrax scientist Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, who managed the investigation’s repository of 1,070 anthrax samples. “Everyone can judge for themselves how the investigation was handled and the strength of the conclusions. Not everyone will be happy with the FBI conclusions, but this is America and we revel in conspiracy theories.”

Source: USA Today

Nano Aerial Vehicle will help soldiers fighting in crowded urban areas

Soldiers fighting future battles in crowded urban areas will be able to launch hummingbird-sized unmanned nano aerial vehicles — or NAVs — capable of carrying sophisticated sensors and flying through open windows in buildings to report back on enemy positions.

A new project partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA) called the Nano Aerial Vehicle (NAV) program aims to develop an extremely small, ultra-lightweight aerial vehicle for urban military missions that can fly both indoors and outdoors and that is capable of climbing and descending vertically as well as flying sideways left and right.

DARPA says the NAV program pushes the limits of aerodynamic and power conversion efficiency, endurance and maneuverability for very small air vehicle systems.

The design the agency green lighted for further development actually will look and fly much like a hummingbird. The winning concept, developed by AeroVironment, is called Nano Scout (Nano Sensor Covert Observer in Urban Terrain). It is a remote-controlled, battery powered NAV with two flapping wings that weighs about two grams (about as heavy as two nickels) and is just slightly longer than three inches.

Lots of competition
The Scout is designed to fly forward at speeds of up to 20 mph, slow down to one mph for precision navigation inside buildings, withstand five mph wind gusts, operate inside buildings and have a range of over one-half mile.

The Nano Scout was selected over competing concepts submitted by Lockheed Martin, MicroPropulsion Inc., and Draper Laboratory at the end of the program’s first phase last year.

An early prototype tested by the company has already reached a technical milestone by achieving a hovering flight equal to that of a two-wing flapping wing aircraft while carrying its own energy source and using only the flapping wings for propulsion. A working prototype, scheduled for demonstration to DARPA when the second phase of the NAV program ends this summer, will have a flight endurance of 11 to 20 minutes.

But DARPA and AeroVironment aren’t the only players with a wing in the NAV game. Though its monocoptor design that is shaped like a maple leaf was passed over for the second phase of the DARPA program, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works’ Advanced Development Programs is continuing its exploration of NAVs on its own dime with the Samurai program.

The company has built two larger mono-wing vehicles as part of the program, a 30-inch flyer and a 12-inch version that is small enough to fit into a backpack and fly through an open window to enter a building. The Samurai design, says Kingsley Fregene, principal investigator for the program, is inherently stable and has few moving parts, which makes it a robust, aerodynamically clean airframe. Unlike more conventional designs, the entire aircraft rotates.

Nano-sized pack mules
Most of the excitement has been about the platform and getting devices in the air and keeping them there. But the payoff for NAVs is in the payload. “A lot of people can build aircraft that fly,” Neil Adams told TechNewsDaily. “Making them work is the

critical element.”

Bat Bombs

Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.

According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

After that accident, the project was turned over to the Navy, which continued it for more than a year. During that time, the Marines conducted a successful proof of concept at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where they released bats over a mock-up of a Japanese city. The critters were able to start quite a few fires.

Alaskan Area 51

A few years ago, Todd Pedersen, an Air Force physicist, sat in the snow and watched as auroras — similar to the famous northern lights — began to glow above his base in the Alaska wilderness. But these luminous forms weren’t created by nature. Pedersen had made them himself, with the help of an enormous array of antennas that can hurl several megawatts of radio waves into the upper atmosphere, creating brilliant light shows in the sky.

The facility is known as HAARP, or the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, and it is meant to answer some intriguing questions about the ionosphere. But it has raised even more questions among conspiracy theorists. Over the years, it’s been called a weather-control machine, a superweapon and the ultimate underground spying machine. As if creating artificial aurora borealis wasn’t freaky enough.

Nuke Test, Too Close for Comfort

When a nuclear warhead detonates, you don’t want to be anywhere nearby. And you definitely don’t want to be taking cover just a couple of miles away. But during the Cold War, a handful of soldiers were ready to start a nuke fight, right up-close and personal, using portable launchers and low-yield bombs.

In the 1960s, the Army had more than two thousand guns meant for launching small nukes, each with a maximum range of only 2.5 miles. The Army lit one of those firecrackers in the Nevada desert during the summer of 1962 while Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy watched. It exploded only 1.7 miles from where it was launched, and was the last above-ground nuclear explosion conducted by the United States.

Extreme Skydiving

In 1960, Captain Joe Kittinger rode a balloon up into the stratosphere — 20 miles above the Earth — and then jumped out of it. He hurled toward the ground at 714 miles per hour, faster than the speed of sound, and landed safely in the sands of the New Mexico desert.

His daring leap was part of Project Excelsior, an attempt to explore the safety issues that pilots would face while handling high-flying aircraft. Kittinger’s test proved that an experimental parachute, designed by Francis Beaupre, would hold up under the most extreme conditions.

To date, nobody has broken Kittinger’s altitude record. But a privately funded team, backed by the makers of Red Bull, is trying to do it.

Deadly Dolphins

In the early 1990s, a Russian military officer allegedly trained several dolphins to attack enemy ships. He conducted tests to show that they could recognize different vessels by the sounds of their propellers. In theory, the mammals could be used to drag explosives up to enemy ships, while leaving friendly boats unharmed.

Years later, when he could not afford to care for the animals, he sold them to Iran. Their fate is still unlearned. And rumors persist of even-wilder military dolphin programs — marine mammals taught to kill enemy swimmers.

Hi-tech ‘lie detectors’ have fascinated neuroscientists and the public alike for years, but whether they work is another matter

Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a machine that could tell you whether someone was telling the truth? It would, of course, be really useful – but more than that, it would represent the ultimate triumph of technology. The utterly private world of our consciousness would be private, and sacred, no more.

Given how fascinating the idea is, then, it’s no surprise that there have been plenty of attempts to design technological lie detectors, and no shortage of people willing to pay for the chance to use them. All of them have worked, in theory. But that doesn’t mean they work.

A group of Scottish neuroscientists recently warned against the seductions of the latest approach – the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect deception. A number of commercial enterprises, such as the US-based No Lie MRI now offer fMRI lie detection, and fMRI evidence has been submitted to courts of law in the US several times, although it has never yet been accepted as admissible evidence.

The judge’s conservativism is well placed. To be sure, fMRI is an incredible technology. Scientists use it to probe the workings of the brain, and doctors use it to work out which parts of the brain do what, so they can avoid damaging the important bits during brain surgery.

But it’s just not capable of detecting lies with the kind of certainty that could stand up in court. When scientists use fMRI in an experiment to investigate brain function, it’s typical to scan 10 to 20 people. Scans are expensive, and we don’t do this for fun: we do it because it’s very difficult to interpret the results of any individual person’s scan. There’s just too much variability. Using fMRI you can see which parts of the brain tend to light up in response to, say, listening to music. Or telling lies. But everyone’s brain is a bit different and there’s a lot of random noise in every scan, so it’s only by averaging over many people that you can achieve good results.

With every new technological advance, it’s never long before someone claims to be able to use it to detect deception – for a price. Last time it was computers. An company called Nemesysco sell software – Layered Voice Analysis – which they say can mathematically process voice recordings and reveal the emotional stress-patterns associated with lying. If that doesn’t float your boat, you can buy the same technology to work out whether someone you’re chatting to online is attracted to you.

In 2007, two Swedish academics published a paper criticising the science behind Nemesysco’s system. The academic journal that printed the article was promptly slapped with a lawsuit, and the article was taken down amid much controversy, but bootleg copies are available online. It’s well worth a read, given that in 2007-2008, the government performed extensive trials of Nemesysco’s unproven technology for the purpose of catching “benefit scroungers”.

Going further back, electroencephalography (EEG), the brain-scanning technology that people used before fMRI arrived, is crude but still effective at measuring neural activation. It turns out that there’s a particular neural response, the P300, that happens when you see something that you’ve seen before – a recognition spike. So if you show a murder suspect pictures of the murder scene, say, you could tell if they’d been there. Even better than just lie detection, it’s mind reading. In theory.

This “brain fingerprinting” is certainly an interesting technique, but we just don’t know whether it’s reliable in practice. Studies have shown that it works fairly well in the lab on normal volunteers (such as students) instructed to lie about imaginary crimes, but real-life field tests are lacking. That hasn’t stopped it being promoted commercially, and EEG has been admitted as evidence in Indian courts several times, although the Indian supreme court recently banned such tests.

This is a common theme. Most “lie detectors” are based on real evidence, but they require you to disregard all of the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts, that are the stuff of science. It’s not hard to see why: lie detectors are a commercial product. Caveats don’t sell, but if you can show people even a bit of evidence that something exciting should work in theory, you’ll go far.

In theory, you can use EEG or fMRI to see through deception, but only if you assume that the brains of hardened criminals with strong motivations to lie behave the same was as the brains of college students. This is also true of the very oldest lie detector, the polygraph, invented over 100 years ago. It simply records heart rate and blood pressure etc, on the theory that when you lie, you get stressed and your body reacts. But does it work on actual criminals? Can it distinguish between stress associated with lying and stress associated with telling painful truths? It’s hard to say. Yet if we don’t know whether it works in any individual case, it’s not much use.

Neuroscience is advancing rapidly and one day, it surely will be possible to reliably read criminal’s minds with brain scans. But not yet. We must resist the temptation to let entrepreneurs blind us with science and claim to be able to peer into a world which is, for now, private.

Source: The Guardian

Federal employees and managers will be able to meet, interact, train and learn together in a government-only online virtual world being created in the vGov project.

The Agriculture and Homeland Security departments, Air Force and National Defense University iCollege have joined to create the vGov virtual world behind a secure firewall that can only be accessed by federal employees with authenticated identities.

Paulette Robinson, assistant dean for teaching, learning and technology at the iCollege, said at the Gov 2.0 Expo today the project will use the three-dimensional immersive experience of virtual worlds to bring employees together from locations worldwide for real-time interactions. People will use avatars to appear in the virtual world, where they can chat with other avatars and interact with the environment.

“Webinars are boring,” Robinson said. But in the online virtual world, “you feel like you are there and you have a sense that others are there.” It is difficult to describe the experience to those who have not tried it on public virtual worlds such as Second Life, she added.

The vGov virtual world environment is now being built and is expected to go online starting in July. It will be used for employee education, continuity of operations training, cybersecurity education and disaster response, Robinson said.

The entire vGov program will be structured behind a firewall, and participation will be limited to federal employees who have undergone an e-authentication process to verify their identity, she said.

The goal is to create a virtual work environment that includes enabling the three-dimensional visualization of data. “We are experimenting with a repository of knowledge management in 3D,” Robinson said.

Another possibility is offering cybersecurity training for employees in the virtual world, she added. Mandatory cybersecurity training for federal employees can be dense and tedious, while the virtual world offers a chance to make the training more of “an adventure” that is highly interactive, she said.

Source: Government Computer News

For years, the U.S. Navy has been pursuing a workable ray gun that could provide a leap ahead in ship self-defenses. Now, with a series of tests of a system called the Laser Weapon System, or LaWS), it may be one step closer to that goal.

Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the service’s technology development arm, announced today that LaWS had “successfully tracked, engaged, and destroyed” a drone in flight, during an over-the-water engagement at San Nicholas Island, Calif.

It’s certainly not the first time lasers have shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle — last year, the Air Force zapped several drones with beam weapons in a series of tests at China Lake, Calif. — but this test brings an additional bit of realism — and an extra technical challenge. Laser beams can lose strength as they move through the moist, salty sea atmosphere above the sea, so the Navy needs directed-energy weapons that can work effectively on ships.

The LaWS is essentially a laser upgrade to the MK 15 Close In Weapon System (CIWS), a.k.a. the Phalanx gun, a radar-guided autocannon that is already installed on Navy surface combatants. According to NAVSEA, the system tested (shown here) fired a laser through a beam director installed on a tracking mount, which in turn was controlled by a  Mk 15 CIWS. That’s the basically same system that controls the Phalanx.

It represents a possible next step for the Phalanx system, which is currently limited by the range of its 20mm autocannon (Raytheon, manufacturer of the Phalanx, is also marketing a missile system to replace the gun). The Phalanx is a last line of defense against sea-skimming anti-ship missiles and hostile aircraft, but the laser wouldn’t replace the gun completely. Theoretically, directed energy weapons would increase the range of the system, but you would still have the gun as a backup if the laser fails to do the job.

LaWS might also have other applications: land-based Phalanx guns have been used to shoot down incoming  rockets and mortars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a laser Phalanx could — theoretically — avoid the problem of the “20mm shower” (unexploded rounds falling back to earth).

And after all, what’s a holiday weekend at Danger Room without news of the latest directed-energy weapon?

Source: Wired

Believing that a moon base is essential for exploration of the solar system, Japan has recently announced plans to send humanoid robots to the moon to construct a robot lunar base. As part of the $2.2 billion project, the robots will begin surveying the moon around 2015, and then build the unmanned base near the moon’s South Pole by 2020.

A Japanese government panel chaired by Katsuhiko Shirai, President of Waseda University, has developed a rough outline of the project. First, the robots, weighing about 660 pounds each, will begin by surveying the moon, taking images of the surface, collecting rocks, and returning the rocks to Earth via rocket for seismographic research. Later, robots will be sent to the moon to construct the lunar base for themselves.

According to the government panel, the robots and the unmanned moon base will be powered by solar panels. The robots will be controlled from Earth, but will also have a high degree of autonomy that enables them to operate on their own to perform certain tasks. Ultimately, the base could serve as a starting point for future robot colonizers, and even human colonizers.

Boron carbide is one of the hardest materials on Earth, used by the military in body armor. Unfortunately it’s too heavy for daily wear. Until now. Chemists discovered how to turn cotton fibers to boron carbide, creating armor from t-shirts.

Though the process is still experimental, it could lead to extremely flexible, strong body armor that weighs far less than the current models.

A simple cotton T-shirt may one day be converted into tougher, more comfortable body armor for soldiers or police officers.

Researchers at the University of South Carolina, collaborating with others from China and Switzerland, drastically increased the toughness of a T-shirt by combining the carbon in the shirt’s cotton with boron – the third hardest material on earth. The result is a lightweight shirt reinforced with boron carbide, the same material used to protect tanks.

Dr. Xiaodong Li, USC College of Engineering and Computing Distinguished Professor in Mechanical Engineering, co-authored the recent article on the research in the journal, Advanced Materials.

“USC is playing a leading role in this area. This is a true breakthrough,” Li said, calling the research “a conceptual change in fabricating lightweight, fuel-efficient, super-strong and ultra-tough materials. This groundbreaking new study opens up unprecedented opportunities.”

The scientists started with plain, white T-shirts that were cut into thin strips and dipped into a boron solution. The strips were later removed from the solution and heated in an oven. The heat changes the cotton fibers into carbon fibers, which react with the boron solution and produce boron carbide.

The result is a fabric that’s lightweight but tougher and stiffer than the original T-shirt, yet flexible enough that it can be bent, said Li, who led the group from USC. That flexibility is an improvement over the heavy boron-carbide plates used in bulletproof vests and body armor.

“The currently used boron-carbide bulk material is brittle,” Li said. “The boron-carbide nanowires we synthesized keep the same strength and stiffness of the bulk boron carbide but have super-elasticity. They are not only lightweight but also flexible. We should be able to fabricate much tougher body armors using this new technique. It could even be used to produce lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts.”

The resulting boron-carbide fabric can also block almost all ultraviolet rays, Li said.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the ACS Petroleum Research Fund and the USC NanoCenter. The idea was first developed at USC, and the materials were synthesized and characterized in Columbia. Tests on individual boron-carbide nanowires were carried out in Zurich, Switzerland, and ultraviolet irradiation tests were performed in Zhejiang University of Technology in China.

Source: R & D Mag