Lifeboat Foundation

Learn more about nuclear weapons and what you can do to stop them.
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Continue reading “What if We Nuke a City?” »

Ever since the compass was invented, perhaps about 2,000 years ago, humans have used Earth’s magnetic field to guide them. Many ages later, Sheldon Breiner devised ways to use magnetism to guide him to things that might otherwise never have been found — like sunken ships, a lost city and colossal basalt heads buried underground.

Dr. Breiner, a geophysicist, inventor and serial entrepreneur, started a company called Geometrics in 1969 that built sophisticated magnetometers, which measure magnetic fields. (A compass is probably the most simple example of one.) He then discovered how to use them to detect objects by observing the way the objects affect the magnetic fields that surround them.

Dr. Breiner had started employing rubidium magnetometers to detect seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault when he was studying geophysics at Stanford University. In time he harnessed magnetometers to search for mineral and oil deposits deep underground; find hidden weapons; locate skiers lost in avalanches; and help the government track down sunken submarines and a hydrogen bomb that had fallen into the ocean after a B-52 bomber collided with a refueling jet over Spain in 1966.

It was the second day of a three-day-long tech demonstration at the David Taylor Model Basin at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where attendees had gathered to stand around in the dark to look at something they mostly couldn’t see.

It was a long-range, free-space power beaming system — the first of its kind. Attendees that day, May 23, could see the system itself—the two 13-foot-high towers, one a 2-kilowatt laser transmitter, the other a receiver of specially designed photovoltaics. But the important part, the laser that was beaming 400 watts of power across 325 meters, from the transmitter to the receiver, was invisible to the naked eye.

Raytheon has delivered the first anti-drone buggy to the US Air Force, just over year after it introduced the technology. It’s a high-energy laser system mounted on a small all-terrain vehicle, to be specific, which uses electro-optical/infrared sensors to detect and track drones. After it identifies and tracks the unwelcome flying device, it then neutralizes it with its laser in a process that takes a few seconds.

Researchers have found that giving your brain an electrical stimulation while you sleep can lead to quicker learning and improved memory. Future You’s episode 6 explores what this will mean in 2050.

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Continue reading “The Military Discovered A Way To Boost Soldiers’ Memories, And We Tried It | Future You | NPR” »

Rogue drones will be brought down by “detect and destroy” technology under plans for a new national counter-drone force to prevent Gatwick-style disruption, ministers have announced.

The new mobile special unit, to be set up by the Home Office, will be available to any police force or law enforcement agency in the UK to counter potential drone threats at major events or malicious attacks such as the chaos at Gatwick airport last Christmas.

The unit is expected to have military-grade cameras, radar and radio frequency scanners to detect rogue drones, similar to those deployed by the Army at Gatwick.

In an effort to make robots more effective and versatile teammates for Soldiers in combat, Army researchers are on a mission to understand the value of the molecular living functionality of muscle, and the fundamental mechanics that would need to be replicated in order to artificially achieve the capabilities arising from the proteins responsible for muscle contraction.

Bionanomotors, like myosins that move along actin networks, are responsible for most methods of motion in all life forms. Thus, the development of artificial nanomotors could be game-changing in the field of robotics research.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory have been looking to identify a design that would allow the artificial nanomotor to take advantage of Brownian motion, the property of particles to agitatedly move simply because they are warm.

I n August, three graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University were crammed together in a small, windowless basement lab, using a jury-rigged 3D printer frame to zap a slice of mouse brain with electricity.

The brain fragment, cut from the hippocampus, looked like a piece of thinly sliced garlic. It rested on a platform near the center of the contraption. A narrow tube bathed the slice in a solution of salt, glucose, and amino acids. This kept it alive, after a fashion: neurons in the slice continued to fire, allowing the experimenters to gather data. An array of electrodes beneath the slice delivered the electric zaps, while a syringe-like metal probe measured how the neurons reacted. Bright LED lamps illuminated the dish. The setup, to use the lab members’ lingo, was kind of hacky.

There is strong evidence from publicly available sources that a Russian company called KB Arsenal is working on a new type of military satellite equipped with a nuclear power source. Called Ekipazh, its mission may well be to perform electronic warfare from space.

KB Arsenal, based in St. Petersburg, is no newcomer to the development of nuclear-powered satellites. In the Soviet days it built satellites known as US-A (standing for “active controllable satellite”), which carried nuclear reactors to power radars used for ocean reconnaissance (in the West they were known as “radar ocean reconnaissance satellites” or RORSAT for short.) The satellites had been conceived in the early 1960s at the OKB-52 design bureau of Vladimir Chelomei before work on them was transferred to KB Arsenal at the end of that decade. The satellites’ three-kilowatt thermoelectric reactors, known as BES-5 or Buk, were built by the Krasnaya Zvezda (“Red Star”) organization. The US-A satellites operated in low Earth orbits at an altitude of roughly 260 kilometers and, after finishing their mission, the reactors were boosted to storage orbits at an altitude of about 900 kilometers.