Lifeboat Foundation

The American missile defense system, strategically placed all around the globe, has been the centerpiece of the “defensive” capabilities of Washington for years. The system relies on anti-aircraft missiles, supposed to shoot down incoming hostile projectiles. But the emergence of unconventional weaponry –namely the hypersonic missiles– has raised demand for new, equally unconventional defense systems.

Apart from hitting an incoming projectile with an intercepting one, the anti-missile research and development in the US revolved around two main ideas – using lasers and hitting hostile missiles with a kinetic device. The US military-industrial companies have been recycling the two concepts for years, fielding several prototypes that never entered full-scale production.

The Pentagon is also looking at living camouflage, self-healing paint, and a variety of other applications of engineered organisms, but the basic science remains a challenge.

How do you detect submarines in an expanse as large as the ocean? The U.S. military hopes that common marine microorganisms might be genetically engineered into living tripwires to signal the passage of enemy subs, underwater vessels, or even divers.

It’s one of many potential military applications for so-called engineered organisms, a field that promises living camouflage that reacts to its surroundings to better avoid detection, new drugs and medicines to help deployed forces survive in harsh conditions, and more. But the research is in its very early stages, military officials said.

Continue reading “The US Military Is Genetically Engineering New Life Forms To Detect Enemy Subs” »

Critics say that geoengineering efforts are Band-Aid solutions that treat the symptoms of climate change instead of the cause: global carbon emissions. Jim Thomas, the co-executive director of an environmental advocacy organization called the ETC Group, told Nature that he fears the Harvard project could push the concept of geoengineering into the mainstream.

But advocates say that anything that could buy some extra time in the face of looming climate catastrophe is worth exploring.

“I’m studying a chemical substance,” Harvard researcher Zhen Dai told Nature. “It’s not like it’s a nuclear bomb.”

Killer asteroids might be a bigger threat than you think.

• Small asteroids can strike Earth with the force of many nuclear weapons and destroy entire cities.
• A small fraction of such asteroids is estimated to have been found, but NASA is supposed to find 90% of them by 2020.
• Retired astronaut Rusty Schweickart says a relatively inexpensive space telescope, called the Near-Earth Object Camera, could find these space rocks — and quickly.
• NASA has denied full funding to NEOCam multiple times because the agency’s mission selection process is weighted against the telescope.
• NEOCam’s supporters say the telescope needs just $40 million more in NASA’s budget to launch into space.
• It’s up to President Trump and Congress to raise NASA’s budget enough to support the mission.

A former NASA astronaut says the agency he used to work for has a duty to protect civilians from killer asteroids, but that it isn’t meeting that obligation.

The threat of asteroid strikes might seem as abstract as outer space itself. But the risk, while infrequent, is real — and potentially more deadly than the threat posed by some of the most powerful nuclear weapons ever detonated.

Continue reading “Astronaut says a neglected telescope is NASA’s best chance of defending Earth from ‘city killer’ asteroids — ‘for God’s sake, fund it’” »

Back in 1958, in the earliest days of the computing revolution, the US Office of Naval Research organized a press conference to unveil a device invented by a psychologist named Frank Rosenblatt at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. Rosenblatt called his device a perceptron, and the New York Times reported that it was “the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence.”

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded satellite operator Telesat a contract to study the use of commercial buses in the agency’s experimental low-Earth-orbit constellation program known as Blackjack.

Telesat of Ottawa, Canada, is the third company to receive a study contract for Blackjack, a DARPA demonstration mission that envisions deploying 20 satellites — each carrying one or more payloads. DARPA’s goal is to find lower cost alternatives to traditional military satellites. DARPA aims to pay no more than $6 million per satellite, including launch. European satellite manufacturer Airbus Defence and Space and small satellite manufacturer Blue Canyon Technologies of Boulder, Colorado, received similar contracts over the past four weeks.

Telesat’s contract, which the company announced Nov. 27, is a 12-month study to assess the utility of Telesat buses as the company refines its plans for a constellation of roughly 300 small, broadband satellites. Telesat has yet to select a manufacturer for its satellites. Two contenders, Airbus Defence and Space and a team formed by Thales Alenia Space and Maxar Technologies, are competing to build an unspecified number of satellites. Michael Schwartz, Telesat’s senior vice president of corporate and business development said the company still plans to down select a manufacturer in the spring.

Continue reading “Telesat wins study contract for DARPA’s experimental constellation” »

Flying at 50,000 feet, diving deep in the ocean, or hiking for miles with gear through extreme climates, military service members face conditions that place unique burdens on their individual physiology. The potential exists to develop pharmacological interventions to help service members complete their toughest missions more safely and efficiently, and then recover more quickly and without adverse effects, but those interventions must work on complex physiological systems in the human body. They will not be realized under the prevailing system of drug discovery and development with its focus on engaging single molecular targets. DARPA created the Panacea program to pursue the means of rapidly discovering, designing, and validating new, multi-target drugs that work with the body’s complexity to better support the physiological resilience and recovery of military service members.

The premise of Panacea is that the physiological systems of the human body work in complex and highly integrated ways. Drugs exert effects on our bodies by physically interacting with and changing the functional state of biomolecules that govern the functions of cells and tissues. Most drugs target proteins, which are the principle cellular workhorses. Ideally, drugs would target multiple proteins simultaneously to exert precise, network-level effects.

One major problem facing the drug development community is that the functional proteome — the complete collection of proteins and their roles in signaling networks — is largely dark to science. Despite being able to identify many of the proteins within a cell, researchers do not have a firm grasp on everything those proteins do and how they interact to affect physiology.

The military plans to purchase as many as 100,000 HoloLens augmented reality devices.

An extremely rare World War II Spitfire fighter plane flown by a pilot who later took part in the “Great Escape” has been recovered from a remote Norwegian mountainside.

Specially equipped for long-range reconnaissance, the Royal Air Force Spitfire AA810 was shot down on March 5, 1942, during a mission to photograph the German battleship Tirpitz. The Spitfire’s pilot, Flt. Lt. Alastair ‘Sandy’ Gunn, bailed out from the plane but was captured by German forces. In 1944 he was part of the famous “Great Escape” breakout from the Stalag Luft III POW camp. Recaptured shortly after the breakout, the Scot was among 50 escapees executed by the Gestapo.

Gunn’s plane was a specially adapted Mk 1 Spitfire stripped of guns and armor and fitted with additional fuel tanks to extend its range from 575 miles to nearly 2,000 miles.

Continue reading “World War II fighter plane flown” »