Lifeboat Foundation

Some of the greatest medical discoveries of the 20th century came from physicists who switched careers and became biologists. Francis Crick, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology and helped identify the structure of DNA, started his career as a physicist, as did Leo Szilard who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, writing the letter for Albert Einstein’s signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, but spent the last decades of his life doing pioneering work in biology, including the first cloning of a human cell.

Today, a group of world-renowned researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics with expertise from cosmology to quantum gravity are using physics to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

This simple laser demonstration is actually a great crash course on how these anti-drone weapons work.

At first glance, this video is just a simple promotional video for Rafael’s Drone Dome, an anti-drone laser weapon. But at just two minutes long, it does a really excellent job at explaining what how a laser weapon actually takes down a drone.

It’s a bit like a Bond villain lair, only much more dangerous.

An underground missile base lurking somewhere beneath Iran looks an awful lot like a James Bond villain lair, complete with walls carved out of rock, spotlights, and a promise of “severe revenge.”

Continue reading “Iran’s New Underground Missile Base Looks Mildly Terrifying. See for Yourself” »

Russia is currently carrying out scientific work on the concept of advanced rocket artillery armament. Efforts are simultaneously underway for upgrading the capabilities of existing weapon systems. Today the Russian artillery troops are receiving upgraded Tornado-G medium-caliber multiple launch rocket systems and modernized Tornado-S launchers, the general said.

The Iskander-M is unique and its upgraded potential “has been tapped by less than a half,” Russia’s Missile Forces and Artillery chief stressed.

Fido, meet F1d0.

Newly developed robotic K9s will soon be prowling Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida, to enhance security and surveillance patrolling, WMBB-TV reported Monday.

The 325th Security Forces Squadron, which handles security for the base, said the robo-dogs are weatherproof, four-legged, unmanned patrolling drones that have two-way communication abilities and high-tech sensors that cost about $100,000 a pop, the outlet reported.

Donning an augmented reality headset in the cockpit, a veteran F-22 pilot just had a dogfight with a projection of a Chinese J-20 fighter.

The Marine Corps has put a lot of emphasis on countering China, but tens of thousands of East Coast leathernecks have their sights set on another part of the world.

Members of II Marine Expeditionary Force wrapped up a training exercise last week that ran from North Carolina to New York. The Marines were tasked with taking back territory in a friendly country that was invaded by a near-peer adversary.

It’s a scenario not unlike Russia’s effective annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

Pearls have long been favored as objects of beauty. Now, Purdue University innovators are using the gem to provide potential new opportunities for spectral information processing that can be applied to spectroscopy in biomedical and military applications.

The Purdue team demonstrated light transport-assisted information processing by creating a pearl spectrometer.

Spectrometers probe interactions of matter and light as a function of the electromagnetic spectrum and are commonly used in biomedical and military applications. For example, they have been used for diagnostics of various types of cancer and for military gas sensing.

But they will be wingmen, not captains.

Science & technology.