Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force has inked a $19.8 million deal with Microsoft to develop a virtual and mixed-reality training environment. This agreement positions the tech giant in the burgeoning military simulation market and expands its Azure cloud’s reach into space applications.

The one-year contract announced Jan. 5 is to continue work on an augmented reality space simulation tool that Microsoft started developing last year for the Space Systems Command in Los Angeles.

Dubbed the Integrated, Immersive, Intelligent Environment (I3E), the system features Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets, Azure cloud platform, and a mesh framework for building shared AR experiences. Together, these technologies enable an interactive model of space with accurately scaled orbital objects that users can manipulate in real time.

DARPA and Aurora Flight Sciences have begun building the first full-scale X-65 aircraft to demonstrate a new method of flight control that uses no external moving parts.

The X-65 is an experimental jet being developed by the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program overseen by DARPA, (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Pentagon’s research and development agency. Since the first aircraft were invented, they have been controlled by moving surfaces such as rudders, flaps, elevators and ailerons.

Weather forecasting is important for various sectors, including agriculture, military operations, and aviation, as well as for predicting natural disasters like tornados and cyclones. It relies on predicting the movement of air in the atmosphere, which is characterized by turbulent flows resulting in chaotic eddies of air.

However, accurately predicting this turbulence has remained significantly challenging owing to the lack of data on small-scale turbulent flows, which leads to the introduction of small initial errors. These errors can, in turn, lead to drastic changes in the flow states later, a phenomenon known as the chaotic butterfly effect.

To address the challenge of limited data on small-scale turbulent flows, a data-driven method known as Data Assimilation (DA) has been employed for forecasting. By integrating various sources of information, this approach enables the inference of details about small-scale turbulent eddies from their larger counterparts.

Reminds me of how the space shuttle moved in orbit. Great idea though hopefully they’ll pass it on to us civilians too. That could be very useful. Though the military sometimes passes their tech to us like the CIA is responsible for some medical science amazingly. Yes I was surprised.

DARPA has selected Aurora Flight Sciences to build a full-scale X-plane to demonstrate the viability of using active flow control (AFC) actuators for primary flight control. The award is Phase 3 of the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program.

The X-65 flight is controlled by using jets of air from a pressurized source to shape the flow of air over the aircraft surface, with AFC effectors on several surfaces to control the plane’s roll, pitch, and yaw. Eliminating external moving parts is expected to reduce weight and complexity and to improve performance.

Continue reading “DARPA and Aurora Flight Sciences Building Full Scale X-65 Plane With No Moving Control” »

LONDON, Jan 4 (Reuters Breakingviews) — Yemen’s Houthis are stirring up the Red Sea and shipping company investors. Denmark’s Maersk (MAERSKb. CO) and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd (HLAG.DE), for example, have gained some $18 billion in market value since mid-December, as militant attacks shut the Suez Canal, causing freight rates to double. Yet hopes for a lasting boost may be disappointed.

Maersk this week decided to shun the Suez Canal indefinitely, where 12% of global trade passes through. That’s after one of the $35 billion group’s vessels narrowly escaped a hijacking thanks to U.S. helicopters, in turn prompting Iran, which backs the Houthi rebels, to send in a warship. As a result, shipping groups are now re-routing major trade lanes including the Asia to Europe traffic around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, which adds at least 10 days of travel time.

The extra time and riskiness of the journey has caused freight rates to soar. Asia to Europe prices, for example, have nearly doubled since mid-December to more than $4,000 per forty-foot equivalent unit (FEU), Freightos data showed as of Jan. 3. While that’s still a far cry from the more than 10-fold increase during the pandemic, the result should be a windfall for shipping groups.

The US is trying its best to slow China down.

However, an equally serious challenger has now emerged in the form of SEIDA, a Chinese startup founded by a veteran Silicon Valley software executive.

Liguo “Recoo” Zhang, the CEO of SEIDA, and three other Chinese-born colleagues left Siemens EDA, a U.S. unit of Siemens AG, aiming to break the foreign monopoly on Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) technology, reported Reuters.

Continue reading “Can this startup help China break through US chip restrictions?” »

Early PDP-11 models were not overly impressive. The first PDP-11 11/20 cost $20,000, but it shipped with only about 4KB of RAM. It used paper tape as storage and had an ASR-33 teletype printer console that printed 10 characters per second. But it also had an amazing orthogonal 16-bit architecture, eight registers, 65KB of address space, a 1.25 MHz cycle time, and a flexible UNIBUS hardware bus that would support future hardware peripherals. This was a winning combination for its creator, Digital Equipment Corporation.

The initial application for the PDP-11 included real-time hardware control, factory automation, and data processing. As the PDP-11 gained a reputation for flexibility, programmability, and affordability, it saw use in traffic light control systems, the Nike missile defense system, air traffic control, nuclear power plants, Navy pilot training systems, and telecommunications. It also pioneered the word processing and data processing that we now take for granted.

And the PDP-11’s influence is most strikingly evident in the device’s assembly programming.

The 2024 nuclear doomsday clock has been reset, but there is still time for final revisions.

The clock was created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit that was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project. It began because of escalated fears of a potentially catastrophic nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It has been reset 25 times since its creation.

Viewed as a visual representation to warn the global populace about multiple factors that could negatively affect the planet, the clock was last changed on January 24 and moved forward to 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. The reasoning cited the Russia-Ukraine war that, as of this February, will have lasted for two years and has led to nuclear threats from Russia.

Today’s infrared lasers are only powerful enough to disable aerial targets, but scientists now have the keys to building high-powered laser weaponry that can ‘melt’ distant targets.