Lifeboat Foundation

D.C. police will start using drones to respond alongside officers to some calls, including barricade situations and large-scale public gatherings, bolstering a broader government effort that has increased video surveillance of the District.

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A high school robotics team has built the world’s smallest and cheapest network switch.

The device was created by Murex Robotics and formed by students from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

The invention was necessary because they could not find an affordable embedded ethernet switch for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) they were building for an underwater drone competition.

However, the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement of policy on Tuesday: “The Administration strongly opposes Section 924, which would establish a Drone Corps as a basic branch of the Army. A Drone Corps would create an unwarranted degree of specialization and limit flexibility to employ evolving capabilities. Further, the Secretary of the Army already has the authority to create branches, as needed, and creating a branch through legislation would detract from the Army’s flexibility in addressing current and future requirements.” The statement included a list of concerns about various items in the House version of the NDAA that it finds objectionable.

Senior Army officers have also come out against the proposal.

Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin also did not explicitly say the Air Force would build its Next Generation Air Dominance fighter amid tight budgets.

As some entities identify new (or at least overlooked) sources to meet the growing demand for rare earth materials, others are looking toward new tools. UK deep-tech company Materials Nexus announced on Tuesday that it has designed a new rare-earth-free permanent magnet with the help of its AI platform. It says the AI-driven discovery and development process was 200 times faster than the resource-intensive manual route, bringing new hope to an electrifying world with a growing appetite for powerful magnets.

With the world moving away from internal combustion engines and gradually embracing electric mobility, the demand for compact, high-power motors is rapidly rising. By far the most popular option in the automotive industry right now is the permanent magnet motor, which powers upward of 80% of modern electric vehicles.

Materials Nexus estimates that demand for permanent magnets will grow tenfold by 2030, in the EV industry alone. And it’s not just electric cars and trucks, either. Permanent magnet motors are in demand for many applications, including robotics, drones, wind turbines and HVAC equipment.

Drone wars, what haven’t we seen. If we look at active wars and mark those drones gen1, do we have in army hangars strategic gen 3 or 4 drones? what do they look like, how does that c&c works?

Top Admiral: “I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities.”

Demonstration of RAF jackal drone firing missiles.

This footage shows a demonstration where a new RAF ‘Jackal’ drone fires missile at a target. The missile can be seen launching out the new drone as it flies above the ground.

Continue reading “New RAF ‘Jackal’ drone fires missiles in demonstration” »

Researchers from the Photonics Research Laboratory (PRL)-iTEAM at the Universitat Politècnica de València, in collaboration with iPRONICS, have developed a groundbreaking photonic chip. This chip is the world’s first to be universal, programmable, and multifunctional, making it a significant advancement for the telecommunications industry, data centers, and AI computing infrastructures. It is poised to enhance a variety of applications including 5G communications, quantum computing, data centers, artificial intelligence, satellites, drones, and autonomous vehicles.

The development of this revolutionary chip is the main result of the European project UMWP-Chip, led by researcher José Capmany and funded by an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. The work has been published in the Nature Communications journal.

New TOS system includes cope cages:

The pictures reportedly come from an official armed forces event in the southwest Saratov region.

The new system is heavily influenced by other variants of the Tyazhyelaya ognemyetnaya sistema (TOS) series but also includes anti-drone “cope cage” defenses.

Continue reading “Enter the ‘Dragon’: Russia unveils latest thermobaric rocket launcher” »