Whether you call it a data-driven prediction or think of it as a self-fulfilling prophecy, Moore’s Law has been going strong. It’s approaching half a century despite frequent observations that it can’t continue forever (Gordon Moore himself only gave it a decade).
The military uses long-wave infrared (LWIR) cameras as thermal imagers to detect humans at night. These cameras are usually mounted on vehicles as they are too large to be carried by a single warfighter and are too expensive for individual deployment. However, DARPA researchers recently demonstrated a new five-micron pixel LWIR camera that could make this class of camera smaller and less expensive.
The U.S. Military relies on the space-based Global Positioning System (GPS) to aid air, land and sea navigation. Like the GPS units in many automobiles today, a simple receiver and some processing power is all that is needed for accurate navigation. But, what if the GPS satellites suddenly became unavailable due to malfunction, enemy action or simple interference, such as driving into a tunnel? Unavailability of GPS would be inconvenient for drivers on the road, but could be disastrous for military missions. DARPA is working to protect against such a scenario, and an emerging solution is much smaller than the navigation instruments in today’s defense systems.
“The most important thing in life is having a child,” said the late Prof Sir Robert Edwards.
He was one of the pioneers of in vitro fertilisation, known as IVF, alongside his colleague Dr Patrick Steptoe.
NASA, and plenty of private individuals, want to put mankind on Mars. Now a team at the University of Washington, funded by the space agency, is about to start building a fusion engine that could get humans there in just 30 days and make other forms of space travel obsolete.
AMD claims that the delay in transitioning from 28nm to 20nm highlights the beginning of the end for Moore’s Law.
Human moves rat’s tail with thoughts alone
When the world’s largest defence contractor reportedly paid $10 million for a superfast quantum computer, the Burnaby, B.C., company that built it earned a huge vote of confidence.
Two years after Lockheed Martin acquired the first commercially viable quantum computer from D-Wave Systems, the American aerospace and technology giant is once again throwing its weight behind a technology many thought was still the stuff of science fiction.
Mantis - Two Tonne Turbo Diesel Hexapod Walking Machine
A team of researchers has made a major breakthrough in measuring the structure of nanomaterials under extremely high pressures. For the first time, they developed a way to get around the severe distortions of high-energy X-ray beams that are used to image the structure of a gold nanocrystal. The technique, described in April 9, 2013, issue of Nature Communications, could lead to advancements of new nanomaterials created under high pressures and a greater understanding of what is happening in planetary interiors.
Lead author of the study, Wenge Yang of the Carnegie Institution’s High Pressure Synergetic Consortium explained: “The only way to see what happens to such samples when under pressure is to use high-energy X-rays produced by synchrotron sources. Synchrotrons can provide highly coherent X-rays for advanced 3-D imaging with tens of nanometers of resolution. This is different from incoherent X-ray imaging used for medical examination that has micron spatial resolution. The high pressures fundamentally change many properties of the material.”
A tent that blocks light on a sunny day and becomes transparent and waterproof on a dim, rainy one could be an outcome of work by US scientists.
The U.S. Navy announced Monday that it is preparing to deploy a new weapon that can disable a hostile boat and even destroy a surveillance drone overhead — all without dispensing any expensive ammunition.
Petman Tests Camo
Not since last year’s TacoCopter fiasco has there been such a vague and ominous potential use for multicopters to hit the web. Last week, the golf company Titleist tweeted a photo of a rather monstrous multicopter with a camera hovering over the shoulder of pro golfer Scott Stallings. It looks a bit makeshift and draws more similarity to War of the Worlds than intended, no doubt, but the point of it is clear: even more camera angles to watch golfers in action.
Add one more to the list of career paths that are being obviated by robots: news delivery.
In Auvergne, a province in central France, residents get their daily news the old-fashioned way: through newspapers. But the delivery of said newspapers, apparently, will soon be executed with the help of high tech — because it’ll be done with the help of drones.
