Security and Defense
Storm Trooper, or U.S. Air Force personnel? Getting hard to tell. From the Kirtland Air Force Base Web site:
"Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHaSR)
The Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHaSR) is a rifle-sized laser weapon system that uses two non-lethal laser wavelengths to deter, prevent, or mitigate an adversary’s effectiveness. The laser light generated by this weapon illuminates or “dazzles” aggressors, temporarily impairing individuals and their ability to see the laser source.
Experts estimate that $9 in productivity, health and other benefits are returned for every dollar invested installing toilets for people in countries that today are off-track in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for sanitation.
A six-inch robotic spy plane modeled after a bat would gather data from sights, sounds and smells in urban combat zones and transmit information back to a soldier in real time.
There is evidence that brain imaging technology is being used to interrogate suspected terrorists despite concerns that it may not be reliable, and that it might inadvertently promote abuse of detainees, according to a Penn State researcher. He says the risk that such technology could license further abuse of detainees remains ever present, given President Bush's March 8 veto of legislation that would have prohibited the CIA from conducting aggressive interrogations.
Adversaries the U.S. currently faces in Iraq rely on surprise and apparent randomness to compensate for their lack of organization, technology and firepower. If one could find some method to their madness, however, the asymmetric threat could be made significantly less serious, according to scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
I got this from the folks at ScienceDebate2008 and I'm passing it along.
Now that the primaries have narrowed the number of viable major-party presidential candidates to three, ScienceDebate2008 promises to give each of them an opportunity to address an issue that is not strictly partisan: science and technology policy and what it means for the future of our nation and the world.
Philadelphia's Franklin Institute has announced its prestigious awards, the Benjamin Franklin Medals and the Bower Awards for significant achievements in science and business leadership.
The Franklin Medal has been awarded for 184 years, far longer than the Nobel Prize, and its recipients have included many of the greatest names in international science and technology.
Naval warships might look like all-powerful vessels but they are also highly vulnerable to being spotted by the enemy. That fear of being detected has led the military to develop new stealth technologies that allow ships to be virtually invisible to the human eye, to dodge roaming radars, put heat-seeking missiles off the scent, disguise their own sound vibrations and even reduce the way they distort the Earth’s magnetic field, as senior lecture in remote sensing and sensors technology at Britannia Royal Navy College, Chris Lavers, explains in March’s Physics World.
For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison—a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety. According to a new report released today by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, at the start of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 men and women, according to the study.
As robots take to the battlefield, a robot expert and one-time judge of Robot Wars is raising concerns about the creation of autonomous killing machines.
A robotics expert at the University of Sheffield will issue stark warnings over the threat posed to humanity by new robot weapons being developed by powers worldwide. In a keynote address to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Professor Noel Sharkey, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science, will express his concerns that we are beginning to see the first steps towards an international robot arms race. He will warn that it may not be long before robots become a standard terrorist weapon to replace the suicide bomber.
Researchers at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) have developed the SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP) allowing analysts to query automatically learned rules on terrorist organization behavior, forecast potential behavior based on these rules, and, most importantly, to network with other analysts examining the same subjects.
A team of academic, industry and independent researchers has demonstrated a new class of computer attacks that compromise the contents of “secure” memory systems, particularly in laptops. The attacks overcome a broad set of security measures called “disk encryption,” which are meant to secure information stored in a computer’s permanent memory. The researchers cracked several widely used technologies, including Microsoft’s BitLocker, Apple’s FileVault and Linux’s dm-crypt, and described the attacks in a paper and video published on the Web Feb. 21.
Malaria is a constant threat to US military personnel operating in Afghanistan, but some troops may face further risk, as epidemiologists have revealed a significant prevalence of contraindications to the safe use of the anti-malarial drug, mefloquine.
