Thanks to the huge budgets involved, the military forces of the world tend to get a chance to play with all the best new technology before anyone else. The US Army Flight School is adopting a new augmented reality helmet for training purposes, which enables the wearer to see tactical information and thermal imagery, and to focus on distant objects. A more long-term Pentagon plan is to adopt militarily useful iterations of directed energy technology – to build laser blasters, in other words. Another technology that soldiers are more likely to get before the rest of us, albeit due to the most unpleasant of circumstances, are cybernetic limbs like the iHand prosthesis, a myo-electric replacement hand that can lift delicate objects without crushing them.
Tag Archives: military
UK military denies deploying killer badgers
You just can’t make a story like this up … a spokesman for the UK armed forces in Iraq has had to deny rumours that they were responsible for releasing a horde of man-eating animals into Basra. A bit implausible, especially for us traditionalist Brits … but it strikes me as the sort of thing DARPA might have thrown money at, had they thought of it first.
The Real Bioweapons Threat Is Homegrown
In order to protect its citizens from terrorist bioweapons, the United States government has undertaken a massive expansion in bioweapons research. I recall articles several years back that worried this kind of crash program might not be in our long-term best interests. Although nothing catastrophic has happened yet, it seems the authors of those articles might have been on to something. There have been a whole series of accidents at labs in the last few years, including accidental infections or exposures to tularemia, brucellosis, Q fever, anthrax, Valley Fever and tuberculosis. [image by tedsblog]
Defense Looking For Human Scale Power System
Gargoyles and uber-geeks begarlanded with gadgets may have the Department of Defense to thank for improvements in portable power supplies. They’re sponsoring a new $1 million prize to encourage the development of a power system that weighs less than 4 kilograms and provides 96 hours of power for soldiers in the field. [image by moria] [defense tech]
Inhumanity and the inhuman
Here’s a story that says something interesting about our ability to empathise with machines, and that shatters the myth of the heartless hard men of military brass: while watching a demonstration of an autonomous landmine-clearance robot which adapts to damage so it can continue its perilous journey, a US Army Colonel became distressed by seeing the plucky ‘bot still carrying on with only one remaining limb, and demanded that the demonstration stop, as it was ‘inhumane’. [PostHumanBlues]