On May 31, the Department of Defense announced $300 million worth of additional military aid to Ukraine. In this latest package are four kinds of anti-air missiles—meaning missiles meant to shoot down threats in the air—including the AIM-7 air-to-air missile.

The Air Intercept Missile-7 (AIM-7) Sparrow is a guided missile with its origins in the 1940s. It saw its first deployment in 1958, though the missiles of that era are a far cry from the weapons deployed today. The modern version, AIM-7M, substantially improved from early days, has been in service since 1982. It’s used by the US, NATO allies like Italy, Spain, Canada, and others, as well as countries like Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

The AIM-7 is carried by aircraft to destroy other aircraft. In the May 31 package authorized for Ukraine, it is joined by three ground-based anti-air systems. These include Patriot missiles, which can target planes or cruise missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which are human portable and especially useful against low-flying targets like attack helicopters or strafing jets, and Avenger air defense systems. The Avenger mounts multiple Stinger launchers on a turret on the back of a HMMWV (better known as a Humvee) vehicle, and pairs those weapons with a heavy .50 caliber machine gun. This gives it range and flexibility against both aircraft in Stinger range, as well as a cheaper weapon that can hit other flying enemies, like small drones.

“Russia has continued to wage a brutal, completely unprovoked war against Ukraine, launching yet more airstrikes and bombarding Ukrainian cities across the country,” said National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby during a briefing at the White House. The release from the Pentagon paired that statement with the note that Russia recently launched 17 separate air assaults against Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in May.

“One of Ukraine’s most urgent requirements is ground-based air defense,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in the same briefing. “And this contact group will continue driving hard to help Ukraine defend the skies. In recent weeks, Russia has intensified its sordid bombardment of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. And the Kremlin’s cruelty only underscores Ukraine’s need for a stronger, layered ground-based air defense architecture.”    

The three ground-based air defenses make sense in light of this specific call. The AIM-7, which fits into an overall approach of arming Ukraine against Russian aircraft, requires aircraft to launch it. This May, several months after Ukrainian’s president Zelensky asked for artillery, tanks, planes, and Patriot missiles, the Biden administration joined other nations in agreeing to provide F-16 fighter-bombers to the country. These single-engine fighters, used widely across the world, are more than capable of carrying AIM-7 missiles, and while the US models may feature more advanced weapons, the AIM-7 is able to get the job done.

While the exterior form of the Sparrow has remained largely the same for its decades of service, how the missile finds and tracks targets has changed massively over the years. The first Sparrow missiles “used a beam-riding guidance system, in which an aircraft’s fire-control radar would lock on to a target and the missile would fly along the radar beam,” wrote Norman Friedman, in a history of the weapon. That fixed-beam path meant pilots had to keep their plane and radar directed in the same path as when they fired the weapon. It was a plausible use case for jets against propeller-powered bombers, but locking a pilot into a fixed route against a maneuvering plane like an enemy jet would render the missile easily beatable.

In April 1959, Popular Science boasted of an early improvement to the Sparrow III, noting the supersonic guided missiles “packs 50 percent more wallop than its predecessor.” Sparrow IIIs saw action in Vietnam, but the missiles were designed as a way for fighter pilots to shoot down bombers beyond visual line of sight. Over the skies of Vietnam, instead, pilots encountered fast flying and turning fighters.  

The AIM-7M version in use today uses better radar and maneuvering, allowing it to track targets more closely and without requiring the firing jet to maintain a lock on the target. It’s a weapon that had success when used by US pilots in 1990’s Persian Gulf War, and one that would likely prove straightforward to use by Ukraine, once the weapon is attached to planes that can launch it.

This latest military aid is the 39th transfer of such equipment to the country, dating back to August 2021, when Ukraine’s war was limited to reclaiming the Donbas. That was before Russia’s full invasion in February 2022 transformed the ongoing war into an existential threat to Ukraine.

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On May 9, under partly cloudy skies at Travis Air Force Base in California, the military invited an autonomous driving and flying robot to roll into a hangar and deliver a package. The machine, half of Elroy Air’s Chaparral delivery drone, was all exposed wires and metal brackets on four tall stands, and is a testbed for their autonomous driving program. With the demonstration, the Air Force got one step closer to adapting a useful cargo drone for military resupply missions, all without further strain on human pilots.

The Chaparral is a vertical takeoff and landing drone, with a large fixed wing, propellers for vertical thrust, and rotors that can provide vertical lift, enabling it to operate from small landing pads. None of that was present in the demonstration at Travis AFB, which was part of the Golden Phoenix Exercise. Instead, the ground autonomy system was mounted on a freestanding rig, with motors and wheels and sensors to steer around any obstacles it might encounter on a runway. Beneath it, and central to the Chaparral’s function, was a detachable cargo pod.

“One of the things that we showed at the event was our robotic ground tester, what we call ground bot. That demonstrated our autonomous taxing capability as well as our cargo pod pickup and drop off, and our cargo handling capabilities that we would use on the Chaparral,” says Amisah Prakash, director of customer programs at Elroy Air.

Autonomy for delivery on the ground is an important part of the overall vision for the drone, as it keeps the burden on human operators low while ensuring that the goods carried can get where they need to be. A runway is a complex environment, with planes and people and other vehicles moving around, to say nothing of the possibility of animals interloping on some of the more remote environments the drone is expected to operate. Getting the goods from point A to point B without incident is especially important when a runway collision might involve cargo that explodes.

“One of the use cases that we’ve been talking a lot with the Air Force on is logistics resupply types of missions, like, bringing cargo back and forth from different locations, whether that is fuel or munitions, anything that is needed for the ground troops to be able to do what they need to do,” says Prakash.

While shipping munitions is a more uniquely military mission, the Chaparral is intended as a truly dual-use aircraft, with an eye towards the commercial cargo market. As Popular Science reported last year, FedEx was interested in the plane, specifically taking advantage of the cargo pod’s 300-to-500-pound capacity, or about half the weight of what a typical delivery truck can carry. The drone will be able to deliver this at a range of up to 300 miles, and do so while flying faster than 100 mph.

If the comparison point for ground transport is a delivery truck, for remote delivery to small military bases a good point of comparison is a helicopter. During the US war in Afghanistan, both crewed and autonomous helicopters would deliver supplies to forward operating bases, austere outposts located where the fighting was and far from regular access to supplies. 

Imagine, says Clint Cope, chief product officer and co-founder for Elroy Air, that a mission commander is trying to send supplies somewhere, and triaging what is the most important use for an aircraft. “That decision-making gets a lot simpler when you can send a cheaper, in some ways expendable air asset, when you’re using an uncrewed system,” he says.

Cope offers as a comparison point a single helicopter making one supply run with 5,000 pounds of cargo. If that helicopter is shot down, it’s all lost in one go, and in order to make the mission, that full 5,000 pounds of load has to be assembled before any of it can go out for delivery. “You can go and load up a Chaparral [drone] and send a much smaller, almost right-sized amount of supplies where they’re needed and be able to have that much more rapid turnaround,” says Cope. 

In that way, using the drones changes resupply from fewer, higher-stakes missions, to more of managing a logistics flow through drones.

The Chaparral runs on jet fuel, like much of the Air Force, and has a generator to power its electric motors. It still needs human refueling, but the drone’s design, especially the pivot on its wing, is made so it can be transported inside larger cargo aircraft, like a C-130 or C-5, and flown from almost anywhere. 

While autonomous driving is useful for getting between the runway and the hangar, the loading ramp of a cargo plane is not a place to risk automated driving.

“We demonstrated how you can manually remote control the vehicle as well,” says Matt Michini, director of robotics at Elroy Air. “So if somebody on the ground wants to taxi it into a hangar or they want to move it to move it outta the way so that a plane can drive by or something, we want it to demonstrate how that’s possible as well without too much rigamarole.”

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On March 15, the US Navy launched a torpedo-shaped robot into the Persian Gulf from the back of a helicopter. The robot was a Slocum glider, an uncrewed sensing tool that can collect data on ocean conditions below the surface. Dropping it from a helicopter was a proof of concept, a test towards expanding the array of vehicles that can put the robots into the water. As the US Navy seeks to know more about the waterways it patrols, distributing data collection tools can provide a more complete image of the ocean without straining the existing pool of sailors.

The US Navy helicopter, part of Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron (HM) 15, delivered the glider by flying low and slow over the sea surface. The glider, held between railings facing seaward, slid forward, diving but not tumbling into the water. The setup enabled smooth entry into the water, keeping the robot from falling aft over teakettle.

“We are excited to be a part of another series of firsts! In this instance, the first launch from a helicopter and the first-ever successful glider deployment from an aircraft,” Thomas Altshuler, a senior VP at Teledyne, said in a release. While the test took place in March, it was only recently announced by both the Navy and Teledyne, makers of the Slocum glider. “Teledyne Marine​ takes pride in our continued innovation and support of the U.S. Navy as it expands the operational envelope of underwater gliders.”

This is what that entry looked like:

A second video, which appears to be recorded by the phone camera of one of the sailors standing next to the rail, offers a different angle on the descent. The mechanics of the rail mount are clearer, from the horseshoe-shaped brace holding the glider in place, to the mechanism of release. When the glider hits water, it makes a splash, big at the moment then imperceptible in the wake of the rotor wash on the ocean surface.

For this operation, Teledyne says the glider was outfitted with “Littoral Battlespace Sensing – Glider (LBS-G) mine countermeasures (MCM) sensors.” In plain language, that means sensors designed to work near the shore, and to collect information about the conditions of the sea where the Navy is operating. This data is used by both the Navy for informing day-to-day operation and by the Naval Oceanographic Office, for understanding ocean conditions and informing both present and future operations.

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

In addition to HM 15, the test was coordinated with the aforementioned Naval Oceanographic Office, which regularly uses glider robots to collect and share oceanographic data. The Slocum glider is electrically powered, with range and endurance dependent upon battery type. At a minimum, that means the glider can travel 217 miles over 15 days, powerlessly gliding at an average speed of a little over 1 mph. (Optional thruster power doubles the speed to 2 mph.) With the most extensive power, Teledyne boasts that the gliders can range over 8,000 miles under water, stay in operation for 18 months, and work from shallows of 13 feet to depths of 3,280 feet.

“Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command directs and oversees more than 2,500 globally-distributed military and civilian personnel who collect, process, and exploit environmental information to assist Fleet and Joint Commanders in all warfare areas to make better decisions faster than the adversary,” notes the Navy description of the test.

Communicating that data from an underwater robot to the rest of the Navy is done through radio signals, satellite uplink, and acoustic communication, among other methods. These methods allow the glider to transmit data and receive commands from remote human operators. 

“The invention of gliders addressed a long-standing problem in physical oceanography: how do you measure changes in the ocean over long periods of time?” reads an Office of Navy Research history of the program. The Slocum gliders themselves date back to a concept floated in 1989, where speculative fiction imagined hundreds of autonomous floats surveying the ocean by 2021. The prototype glider was first developed in 1991, had sea trials in 1998, and today according to that report,the Naval Oceanographic Office alone operates more than 150 gliders.

This information is useful generally, as it builds a comprehensive picture of the vast seas on which fleets operate. It is also specifically useful, as listening for acoustics underwater can help detect other ships and submarines. Undersea mines, hidden from the surface, can be found through sensing the sea, and revealing their location protects Navy ships, sailors, and commercial ocean traffic, too.

Releasing the gliders from helicopters expands how and where these exploratory machines can start operations, hastening deployment for the undersea watchers. When oceans are battlefields, knowing the condition of the waters first can make all the difference.

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In April, the Air Force took its Angry Kitten out for a spin in the skies above Nevada. The feline-monikered system is a tool of electronic warfare, developed originally to simulate enemy systems in testing and training. Now, the Air Force is exploring using the system as an offensive tool, and as a weapon it can bring to future fights. This testing included putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone.

Electronic warfare is an increasingly important part of how modern militaries fight. The systems generally operate on the electromagnetic spectrum outside the range of visible light, making their actions perceived primarily by their resulting negative effects on an adversary, like lost signals or incorrect sensor information. What makes Angry Kitten especially valuable as a training tool, and as a future weapon, is that it uses a software-defined radio to adjust frequencies, perceiving and then mimicking other aircraft, and overall making a fussy mess of their signals.

“Electronic Attack on the MQ-9 is a compelling capability,” said Michael Chmielewski, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron commander, in a release. “15 hours of persistent noise integrated with a large force package will affect an adversary, require them to take some form of scalable action to honor it, and gets at the heart of strategic deterrence.”

In other words, putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone means that the jamming system can be airborne for a long time, as Reapers are long-endurance drones. Any hostile air force looking to get around the jamming will need to attack the Reaper, which as an uncrewed plane is more expendable than a crewed fighter. Or, it means they will need to route around the jammed area, letting the Air Force dictate the terms of where and how a fight takes place.

Reapers were developed for and widely used during the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars saw the drones’ long endurance, slow speed, and ability to loiter over an area as valuable assets, especially since the drones rarely had to contend with any anti-air missiles. They were operating in, to use Pentagon parlance, “uncontested” skies. As the Pentagon looks to the future, one in which it may be called upon to use existing equipment in a war against nations with fighter jets and sophisticated anti-air systems, it’d be easy to see Reapers sidelined as too slow, vulnerable, or irrelevant for the task.

Putting an Angry Kitten on a Reaper is a way to make the drone relevant again for other kinds of war.

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

“The goal is to expand the mission sets the MQ-9 can accomplish,” said Aaron Aguilar, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron assistant director of operations, in the same release. “The proliferation and persistence of MQ-9s in theater allows us to fill traditional platform capability gaps that may be present. Our goal is to augment assets that already fill this role so they can focus and prioritize efforts in areas they are best suited for.”

Putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper turns a counter-insurgency hunter-killer into a conventional-war surveillance platform and jammer. It emphasizes what the tool on hand can already do well, while giving it a different set of ways to interact with a different expected array of foes. 

An earlier exercise this spring saw the Air National Guard test landing and launching a Reaper from a highway in Wyoming, expanding how and where it can operate. The ability to quickly deploy, refuel, rearm, and relaunch Reapers, from found runways as well as established bases, can expand how the drones are used.

In addition to testing the Angry Kitten with Reapers, the Air Force tested the Angry Kitten in Alaska on F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolts, both older planes originally designed for warfare against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In the decades since, Fighting Falcons—known more colloquially as vipers—have expanded to become a widely used versatile fighter in the arsenal of the US and a range of nations. Meanwhile, the Air Force has long worked to retire the A-10s, arguing that they lack protection against modern weapons. That process began in earnest this spring, with the oldest models selected for the boneyard.

In the meantime, putting the Angry Kitten on drones and planes still in service means expanding not just what those planes can do, but potentially how effective they can be against sophisticated weapons. Targeting systems, from those used by planes to find targets to those used by missiles to track them, can be disrupted or fooled by malicious signals. An old plane may not be able to survive a hit from a modern missile, but jamming a missile so that misses its mark is better protection than any armor.

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In the desert plain south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and just north of the Isleta Pueblo reservation, the Air Force defeated a swarm of drones with THOR, a powerful microwave weapon. THOR, or the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, is designed to defend against drone swarms, frying electronics at scale in a way that could protect against many flying robots at once.

THOR has been in the works for years, with a successful demonstration in February 2021 at Kirtland Air Force Base, south of Albuquerque. From 2021 to 2022, THOR was also tested overseas. 

This latest demonstration, which took place on April 5, saw the microwave face off against a swarm of multiple flying uncrewed aerial vehicles. The event took place at the Chestnut Range, short for “Conventional High Explosives & Simulation Test,” which has long been used by the Air Force Research Lab for testing.

“The THOR team flew numerous drones at the THOR system to simulate a real-world swarm attack,” said Adrian Lucero, THOR program manager at AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate, in a release earlier this month. “THOR has never been tested against these types of drones before, but this did not stop the system from dropping the targets out of the sky with its non-kinetic, speed-of-light High-Power Microwave, or HPM pulses,” he said.

Crucial to THOR’s concept and operation is that the weapon disables and defeats drones without employing explosive or concussive power, the kind derived from rockets, missiles, bombs, and bullets. The military lumps these technologies together as “kinetics,” and they make up the bread and butter of how the military uses force. Against drones, which can cost mere hundreds or even thousands of dollars per vehicle, missiles represent an expensive form of ammunition. While the bullets used in existing counter-rocket weapons are much cheaper than missiles, they still create the problem of dangerous debris everywhere they don’t hit. Using microwaves means that only the damaged drone itself becomes a falling danger, without an added risk from the tools used to shoot it down.

“THOR was extremely efficient with a near continuous firing of the system during the swarm engagement,” Capt. Tylar Hanson, THOR deputy program manager, said in a release. “It is an early demonstrator, and we are confident we can take this same technology and make it more effective to protect our personnel around the world.”

The THOR system fits into a broader package of directed energy countermeasures being used to take on small, cheap, and effective drones. Another directed energy weapon explored for this purpose is lasers, which can burn through a drone’s hull and circuitry, but that approach takes time to hold focus on and melt a target.

“The system uses high power microwaves to cause a counter electronic effect. A target is identified, the silent weapon discharges in a nanosecond and the impact is instantaneous,” reads an Air Force fact sheet about the weapon. In a video from AFRL, THOR is described as a “low cost per shot, speed of light solution,” which uses “a focused beam of energy to defeat drones at a large target area.”

An April 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office is much more straightforward: A High Power Microwave uses “energy to affect electronics by overwhelming critical components intended to carry electrical currents such as circuit boards, power systems, or sensors. HPM systems engage targets over an area within its wider beam and can penetrate solid objects.”

Against commercial or cheaply produced drones, the kind most likely to see use on the battlefield in great numbers today, microwaves may prove to be especially effective. While THOR is still a ways from development into a fieldable weapon, the use of low-cost drones on the battlefield has expanded tremendously since the system started development. A report from RUSI, a British think tank, found that in its fight against Russia’s invasion, “Ukrainian UAV losses remain at approximately 10,000 per month.”

While that illustrates the limits of existing drone models, it also highlights the scale of drones seeing use in regular warfare. As drone technology improves, and militaries move from adapting commercial drones to dedicated military models made close to commercial cost and scale, countering those drones en masse will likely be a greater priority for militaries. In that, weapons like THOR offer an alternative to existing countermeasures, one that promises greater effects at scale.

Watch a video about THOR, which also garnered a Best of What’s New award from PopSci in 2021, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, below:

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On May 18, the United States Department of the Air Force announced that it is looking to award a contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance Platform in 2024. The name, shortened to NGAD, is a jumble of Pentagon concepts, obscuring what is actually sought: a novel fighter jet representing the newest era of military aircraft—a sixth-generation fighter. 

“The NGAD Platform is a vital element of the Air Dominance family of systems which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in a release. “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the ability to survive, persist, interoperate, and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments. No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now.”

The solicitation to industry for the NGAD is classified, making the details of what, exactly, the Air Force wants hard to know at this time. But jet fighters have, for decades, been classified into generations. So what makes a fighter generation, and what makes a sixth-generation fighter?

“In calling NGAD a sixth-generation fighter, that’s an important signal that it’s moving into a new level of capability, and it has to, because the threats are really evolving,” says Caitlin Lee, senior fellow at Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Aircraft generations, explained

Fighter planes date to the first World War as a distinct concept, and ever since that time observers have grouped fighters into generations, or models built at similar times around similar technologies. Fighter evolution in war happened rapidly, as the first exchanges of pistol-fire between the pilots of scout planes gave way to aircraft built for combat, with dedicated machine guns firing first around and then even through propellers. As hostile planes got better, new aircraft were built to let pilots win fights. Once enough of these changes were accumulated in new models of planes, those aircraft could be grouped by sets of features into different generations.

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

This is true for the earliest fixed-wing and biplane fighters, up through the piston-powered patrollers of World War II and into the jet era. In October 1954, Popular Science showed off four fighter generations flying in formation for ceremonies at an Air Force gunnery competition. This snapshot of generations captured two propeller-driven planes: the SPAD biplane from World War I and the F-51 fighter from World War II. They are joined by two distinct jet fighters: the F-86 Sabre, a type which saw action in the Korean War, and F-100 Super Sabre, a model that would go on to see action in the Vietnam War.

The attributes that go into an aircraft generation

What separates fighter generations, broadly, is their speed, weapons, sensors, and other new features as they become part of the overall composition of a plane. Sticking to jets, fighters with that method of propulsion have gone from straight-wing planes flying at top speeds below the sound barrier, with guns, unguided rockets, and bombs, all the way to sensor-rich stealth jets capable of carrying a range of anti-air and anti-ground missiles.

There is no one agreed-to definition of exactly what fighter generations are, though jet fighters are generally grouped separately from propeller predecessors. Historian Richard Hallion expressed a version, published in the Airpower Journal’s Winter 1990 issue, that outlines six generations as defined primarily by speed and maneuverability. Hallion’s definitions precede not just the Next Generation Air Dominance plane, but also the F-35 and F-22, which have become widely accepted as definitive fifth-generation fighters.

First generation

• Feature: The propulsion comes from jet engines. Weapons, wing shapes, and sensors are similar to preceding and contemporary propeller-driven plane designs.
• Models: Germany’s Me 262, which saw action in World War II. The P-80 Shooting Star, flown by the United States from 1945 to 1959.

Second generation

• Features: The wings are swept backwards, planes are now equipped with onboard radar, and they are armed with missiles.
• Models: The F-86 Sabre, flown by the US in Korea, and the MiG-15, flown by China and North Korea in the Korean War.

Third generation

• Features: The jets can now achieve supersonic speed for short bursts and are equipped with missiles that could hit targets beyond line of sight.
• Models: The MiG-21, designed by the USSR and still in service today, and the F-4 Phantom, developed for the US Navy and still in service with a few countries today.

Fourth generation

• Features: These jets have reduced radar signatures, better radars, and even more advanced missiles.
• Models: France’s Mirage 2000, a delta-wing fighter still in service today, and the F/A-18, used by the US Navy and Marine Corps. Plus, the US Air Force’s F-15 and F-16.

Fifth generation

• Features: Jets are built for stealth, use internal weapons bays, fly with high maneuverability, have better sensors, and have the ability to sustain cruise at supersonic speeds.
• Models: The F-22 and F-35 family developed by the US, and the J-20 made by China and the Su-57 developed by Russia.

Tirpak defined a fifth-generation fighter as having “All-aspect stealth with internal weapons, extreme agility, full-sensor fusion, integrated avionics, some or full supercruise,” and pointed to the F-22 and F-35 as examples. 

To unpack the jargon above, “stealth” is a set of technologies, from the coating of the plane to the shape it takes, that make it hard to detect, especially with radar. Sensor fusion combines information from a plane’s sensors, like targeting cameras and radar, as well as other avionics, to create a fuller picture of the environment around the aircraft. “Supercruise” is flight at above supersonic speed, for sustained time, without having to dump extra fuel into the engines, a previous way of achieving supersonic bursts.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight? Fast enough to bring the booms.]

All of these changes are responses to the new threat environment encountered by previous fighters. Stealth is one way for plane design to mitigate the risk from advanced anti-air missiles. Enhanced sensors are a way to allow fighters to see further and better than rival aircraft, and rival air-defense radars. Fighter design is about both building with the threats of the day, while anticipating the threats of the future, and ensuring the plane is still capable of surviving them.

One way to think of this is that the NGAD will be one among several kinds of aircraft the Air Force intends to use in the future, the way it might use wings of fighters today. This could include fighting alongside the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a combat drone the Air Force plans as part of its Next Generation operations model.

“What’s next-generation about CCA is that they will have more autonomy than the current UAVs in the Air Force inventory like Reaper. And the question is how much more autonomy will they actually have,” says Lee. “And I think what the Air Force is interested in is starting with having that manned fighter aircraft, whether it’s NGAD or something else, be able to provide inputs and certainly oversee the operations of the CCA.”

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Pilots can experience forces while flying that punish their bodies, and they can also find themselves in disorienting situations. A military pilot in a fighter jet will endure G-forces as they maneuver, resulting in a crushing sensation that causes the blood to drain downwards in their bodies, away from the brain. And someone at the controls of a plane or helicopter, even in more routine flights, can have their senses become discombobulated. One of the causes of the crash that killed Kobe Bryant in 2020 was “spatial disorientation” on the pilot’s part, according to the NTSB. 

Then there’s being launched in a rocket up into space. One astronaut recalled to PopSci that when flying in the space shuttle, the engines shut down, as planned, 8.5 minutes after launch. “It felt like the shuttle stopped, and I went straight through it,” he said. “I got a tremendous tumbling sensation.” Another astronaut noted in a recent NASA press release that he felt like he “was on a merry-go-round as my body hunted for what was up, down, left, and right,” in the shuttle as well.

And of course, anyone down on Earth who has ever experienced vertigo, a sensation of spinning, or nausea, knows that those are miserable, even frightening sensations. 

To better understand all the uncanny effects that being up in the air or in space has on humans, NASA is going to employ a Navy machine called the Kraken, which is also fittingly called the Disorientation Research Device—a supersized contraption that cost $19 million and weighs 245,000 pounds. Pity the poor person who climbs into the Kraken, who could experience three Gs of force and be spun around every which way. NASA notes that the machine, which is located in Ohio, “can spin occupants like laundry churning in a washing machine.” It can hold two people within its tumbling chamber. As tortuous as it sounds, the machine provides a way to study spatial disorientation—a phenomenon that can be deadly or challenging in the air or in space—safely down on dry land. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

The NASA plan calls for two dozen members of the military to spend an hour in the Kraken, which will be using “a spaceflight setting” for this study. After doing so, half of them, the space agency says, “will perform prescribed head turns and tilts while wearing video goggles that track their head and eye movements.” The other half will not. All of them will carry out certain exercises afterwards, like balancing on foam. Perhaps, NASA thinks, the head movements can help. “Tests with the Kraken will allow us to rigorously determine what head movements, if any, help astronauts to quickly recover their sense of balance,” Michael Schubert, an expert on vestibular disorders at Johns Hopkins University and the lead researcher on this new study, said in the NASA release on the topic.

The study will also involve civilians who have pre-existing balance challenges (due to having had tumors surgically removed), who thankfully won’t have to endure the Kraken. They will also perform the head movements and carry out the same balance exercises. The goal of all this research is to discover if these head movement techniques work, so that “astronauts could adopt specific protocols to help them quickly adapt to gravitational changes during spaceflight,” NASA says. 

Additionally, the same techniques could help regular people who aren’t going to be launched into space but do struggle with balance or dizziness down on Earth. Watch a video about the Kraken, below. 

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Navy SEALs have a well-earned reputation as an amphibious force. The special operations teams, whose acronym derives from “Sea, Air and Land,” are trained to operate from a range of vehicles, departing as needed to carry out missions through water, in the sky, or on the ground. When deploying covertly in the ocean, SEALs have for decades taken the SEAL Delivery Vehicle, a flooded transport in which the crew ride submerged and immersed in ocean water.  Now, Special Operations Command says the new enclosed submarine—in other words, it’s dry inside—should be ready for operation before the end of May.

This new submarine, in contrast to the open-water SEAL Delivery Vehicle, is called the Dry Combat Submersible. It’s been in the works since at least 2016, and was designed as a replacement for a previous enclosed transport submarine, the Advanced SEAL Delivery System. This previous advanced sub, developed in the early 2000s, was canceled after a prototype caught fire in 2008. That, compounded by cost overruns in the program, halted development on the undersea vehicle. It also came at a time when SEALs were operating largely on land and through the air, as part of the increased operational tempo of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

But now, it appears to be full-steam ahead for the Dry Combat Submersible. The news was confirmed at the SOF [Special Operations Forces] Week conference in Tampa, Florida, which ran from May 8 through 11. The convention is a place for Special Operations Forces from across the military to talk shop, meet with vendors selling new and familiar tools, and gather as a chattering class of silent professionals. It is also, like the Army, Navy, and Air Force association conventions, a place for the military to announce news directly relevant to those communities.

“This morning we received an operational test report. So that means the Dry Combat Submersible is going to be operational by Memorial Day, and we’re coming to an end scenario,” John Conway, undersea program manager at SOCOM’s program executive office-maritime, said on May 10, as reported by National Defense Magazine.

The flooded submersible in use today allows four SEALs and two drivers, clad in wetsuits, to travel undetected under the surface of the water several miles. With just the driver and navigator, the craft can traverse 36 nautical miles at 4 knots, a journey taking nine hours. With the four SEALs, the distance is limited, not just by the weight of passengers and their gear, but by the conditions of the submersible itself.

“Because the SEALs are exposed to the environment water temperature can be a more limiting factor than battery capacity,” wrote Christopher J. Kelly, in a 1998 study of the submarine in joint operations.

When Lockheed Martin announced in 2016 that it would be manufacturing Dry Combat Submersibles, it offered no specifics on the vehicle other than that it would weigh more than 30 tons and be capable of launch from surface ships. (The current SEAL Delivery Vehicle is launched from larger submarines.) The Dry Combat Submersible, at announcement, promised “longer endurance and operate at greater depths than swimmer delivery vehicles (SDV) in use,” the ability to travel long distances underwater, and an overall setup that “allows the personnel to get closer to their destination before they enter the water, and be more effective upon arrival.”

Concept art for the vehicle showed a passenger capacity of at least nine, though it would still be a fairly compact ride. The S351 Nemesis, made by MSubs, who has partnered with Lockheed Martin on this project, and is the likely basis for the Dry Combat Submersible. As listed, the Nemesis has a capacity for eight passengers and one pilot. The nemesis can travel as far as 66 nautical miles, and do so at a speed of 5 knots, or make the journey in 13 hours. 

Once in the Navy’s hands, the new submersible will ensure better starts to operations for SEALs, who can arrive at missions having only briefly donned wetsuits, instead of dealing with the fullness of the ocean for hours.

As the Pentagon shifts focus from terrestrial counter-insurgencies to the possibility of major power war, especially in and over the islands of the Pacific, the Dry Combat Submersible will expand how its SEALs can operate. It’s a lot of effort for a relatively small part of the overall military, but the precise application of specialized forces can have an outsized impact on the course of subsequent operations, from harbor clearing to covert action behind fortified lines. 

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This story was first published on June 3, 2013. It covered the most up-to-date technology in bomb detection at the time, with a focus on research based off canine olfaction. Today, dogs still hold an edge to chemical sensors with their noses: They’ve even been trained to sniff out bed bugs, the coronavirus, and homemade explosives like HMTDs.

IT’S CHRISTMAS SEASON at the Quintard Mall in Oxford, Alabama, and were it not a weekday morning, the tiled halls would be thronged with shoppers, and I’d probably feel much weirder walking past Victoria’s Secret with TNT in my pants. The explosive is harmless in its current form—powdered and sealed inside a pair of four-ounce nylon pouches tucked into the back pockets of my jeans—but it’s volatile enough to do its job, which is to attract the interest of a homeland defender in training by the name of Suge.

Suge is an adolescent black Labrador retriever in an orange DO NOT PET vest. He is currently a pupil at Auburn University’s Canine Detection Research Institute and comes to the mall once a week to practice for his future job: protecting America from terrorists by sniffing the air with extreme prejudice.

Olfaction is a canine’s primary sense. It is to him what vision is to a human, the chief input for data. For more than a year, the trainers at Auburn have honed that sense in Suge to detect something very explicit and menacing: molecules that indicate the presence of an explosive, such as the one I’m carrying.

The TNT powder has no discernible scent to me, but to Suge it has a very distinct chemical signature. He can detect that signature almost instantly, even in an environment crowded with thousands of other scents. Auburn has been turning out the world’s most highly tuned detection dogs for nearly 15 years, but Suge is part of the school’s newest and most elite program. He is a Vapor Wake dog, trained to operate in crowded public spaces, continuously assessing the invisible vapor trails human bodies leave in their wake.

Unlike traditional bomb-sniffing dogs, which are brought to a specific target—say, a car trunk or a suspicious package—the Vapor Wake dog is meant to foil a particularly nasty kind of bomb, one carried into a high traffic area by a human, perhaps even a suicidal one. In busy locations, searching individuals is logistically impossible, and fixating on specific suspects would be a waste of time. Instead, a Vapor Wake dog targets the ambient air.

As the bombing at the Boston marathon made clear, we need dogs—and their noses. As I approach the mall’s central courtyard, where its two wings of chain stores intersect, Suge is pacing back and forth at the end of a lead, nose in the air. At first, I walk toward him and then swing wide to feign interest in a table covered with crystal curios. When Suge isn’t looking, I walk past him at a distance of about 10 feet, making sure to hug the entrance of Bath & Body Works, conveniently the most odoriferous store in the entire mall. Within seconds, I hear the clattering of the dog’s toenails on the hard tile floor behind me.

As Suge struggles at the end of his lead (once he’s better trained, he’ll alert his handler to threats in a less obvious manner), I reach into my jacket and pull out a well-chewed ball on a rope—his reward for a job well done—and toss it over my shoulder. Christmas shoppers giggle at the sight of a black Lab chasing a ball around a mall courtyard, oblivious that had I been an actual terrorist, he would have just saved their lives.

That Suge can detect a small amount of TNT at a distance of 10 feet in a crowded mall in front of a shop filled with scented soaps, lotions, and perfumes is an extraordinary demonstration of the canine’s olfactory ability. But what if, as a terrorist, I’d spotted Suge from a distance and changed my path to avoid him? And what if I’d chosen to visit one of the thousands of malls, train stations, and subway platforms that don’t have Vapor Wake dogs on patrol?

Dogs may be the most refined scent-detection devices humans have, a technology in development for 10,000 years or more, but they’re hardly perfect. Graduates of Auburn’s program can cost upwards of $30,000. They require hundreds of hours of training starting at birth. There are only so many trainers and a limited supply of purebred dogs with the right qualities for detection work. Auburn trains no more than a couple of hundred a year, meaning there will always be many fewer dogs than there are malls or military units. Also, dogs are sentient creatures. Like us, they get sleepy; they get scared; they die. Sometimes they make mistakes.

As the tragic bombing at the Boston Marathon made all too clear, explosives remain an ever-present danger, and law enforcement and military personnel need dogs—and their noses—to combat them. But it also made clear that security forces need something in addition to canines, something reliable, mass-producible, and easily positioned in a multitude of locations. In other words, they need an artificial nose.

IN 1997, DARPA created a program to develop just such a device, targeted specifically to land mines. No group was more aware than the Pentagon of the pervasive and existential threat that explosives represent to troops in the field, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that the need for bomb detection extended beyond the battlefield. In 1988, a group of terrorists brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. In 1993, Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil drove a Ryder truck full of explosives into the underground garage at the World Trade Center in New York, nearly bringing down one tower. And in 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated another Ryder truck full of explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. The “Dog’s Nose Program,” as it was called, was deemed a national security priority.

Over the course of three years, scientists in the program made the first genuine headway in developing a device that could “sniff” explosives in ambient air rather than test for them directly. In particular, an MIT chemist named Timothy Swager honed in on the idea of using fluorescent polymers that, when bound to molecules given off by TNT, would turn off, signaling the presence of the chemical. The idea eventually developed into a handheld device called Fido, which is still widely used today in the hunt for IEDs (many of which contain TNT). But that’s where progress stalled.

Olfaction, in the most reductive sense, is chemical detection. In animals, molecules bind to receptors that trigger a signal that’s sent to the brain for interpretation. In machines, scientists typically use mass spectrometry in lieu of receptors and neurons. Most scents, explosives included, are created from a specific combination of molecules. To reproduce a dog’s nose, scientists need to detect minute quantities of those molecules and identify the threatening combinations. TNT was relatively easy. It has a high vapor pressure, meaning it releases abundant molecules into the air. That’s why Fido works. Most other common explosives, notably RDX (the primary component of C-4) and PETN (in plastic explosives such as Semtex), have very low vapor pressures—parts per trillion at equilibrium and once they’re loose in the air perhaps even parts per quadrillion.

The machine “sniffed” just as a dog would and identified the explosive molecules. “That was just beyond the capabilities of any instrumentation until very recently,” says David Atkinson, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington. A gregarious, slightly bearish man with a thick goatee, Atkinson is the co-founder and “perpetual co-chair” of the annual Workshop on Trace Explosives Detection. In 1988, he was a PhD candidate at Washington State University when Pan Am Flight 103 went down. “That was the turning point,” he says. “I’ve spent the last 20 years helping to keep explosives off airplanes.” He might at last be on the verge of a solution.

When I visit him in mid-January, Atkinson beckons me into a cluttered lab with a view of the Columbia River. At certain times of the year, he says he can see eagles swooping in to poach salmon as they spawn. “We’re going to show you the device we think can get rid of dogs,” he says jokingly and points to an ungainly, photocopier–size machine with a long copper snout in a corner of the lab; wires run haphazardly from various parts.

Last fall, Atkinson and two colleagues did something tremendous: They proved, for the first time, that a machine could perform direct vapor detection of two common explosives—RDX and PETN—under ambient conditions. In other words, the machine “sniffed” the vapor as a dog would, from the air, and identified the explosive molecules without first heating or concentrating the sample, as currently deployed chemical-detection machines (for instance, the various trace-detection machines at airport security checkpoints) must. In one shot, Atkinson opened a door to the direct detection of the world’s most nefarious explosives.

As Atkinson explains the details of his machine, senior scientist Robert Ewing, a trim man in black jeans and a speckled gray shirt that exactly matches his salt-and-pepper hair, prepares a demonstration. Ewing grabs a glass slide soiled with RDX, an explosive that even in equilibrium has a vapor pressure of just five parts per trillion. This particular sample, he says, is more than a year old and just sits out on the counter exposed; the point being that it’s weak. Ewing raises this sample to the snout end of a copper pipe about an inch in diameter. That pipe delivers the air to an ionization source, which selectively pairs explosive compounds with charged particles, and then on to a commercial mass spectrometer about the size of a small copy machine. No piece of the machine is especially complicated; for the most part, Atkinson and Ewing built it with off-the-shelf parts.

Ewing allows the machine to sniff the RDX sample and then points to a computer monitor where a line graph that looks like an EKG shows what is being smelled. Within seconds, the graph spikes. Ewing repeats the experiment with C-4 and then again with Semtex. Each time, the machine senses the explosive.

A commercial version of Atkinson’s machine could have enormous implications for public safety, but to get the technology from the lab to the field will require overcoming a few hurdles. As it stands, the machine recognizes only a handful of explosives (at least nine as of April), although both Ewing and Atkinson are confident that they can work out the chemistry to detect others if they get the funding. Also, Atkinson will need to shrink it to a practical size. The current smallest version of a high-performance mass spectrometer is about the size of a laser printer—too big for police or soldiers to carry in the field. Scientists have not yet found a way to shrink the device’s vacuum pump. DARPA, Atkinson says, has funded a project to dramatically reduce the size of vacuum pumps, but it’s unclear if the work can be applied to mass spectrometry.

If Atkinson can reduce the footprint of his machine, even marginally, and refine his design, he imagines plenty of very useful applications. For instance, a version affixed to the millimeter wave booths now common at American airports (the ones that require passengers to stand with their hands in the air—also invented at PNNL, by the way) could use a tube to sniff air and deliver it to a mass spectrometer. Soldiers could also mount one to a Humvee or an autonomous vehicle that could drive up and sniff suspicious piles of rubble in situations too perilous for a human or dog. If Atkinson could reach backpack size or smaller, he may even be able to get portable versions into the hands of those who need them most: the marines on patrol in Afghanistan, the Amtrak cops guarding America’s rail stations, or the officers watching over a parade or road race.

Atkinson is not alone in his quest for a better nose. A research group at MIT is studying the use of carbon nanotubes lined with peptides extracted from bee venom that bind to certain explosive molecules. And at the French-German Research Institute in France, researcher Denis Spitzer is experimenting with a chemical detector made from micro-electromechanical machines (MEMs) and modeled on the antennae of a male silkworm moth, which are sensitive enough to detect a single molecule of female pheromone in the air.

Atkinson may have been first to demonstrate extremely sensitive chemical detection—and that research is all but guaranteed to strengthen terror defense—but he and other scientists still have a long way to go before they approach the sophistication of a dog nose. One challenge is to develop a sniffing mechanism. “With any electronic nose, you have to get the odorant into the detector,” says Mark Fisher, a senior scientist at Flir Systems, the company that holds the patent for Fido, the IED detector. Every sniff a dog takes, it processes about half a liter of air, and a dog sniffs up to 10 times per second. Fido processes fewer than 100 milliliters per minute, and Atkinson’s machine sniffs a maximum of 20 liters per minute.

Another much greater challenge, perhaps even insurmountable, is to master the mechanisms of smell itself.

OLFACTION IS THE OLDEST of the sensory systems and also the least understood. It is complicated and ancient, sometimes called the primal sense because it dates back to the origin of life itself. The single-celled organisms that first floated in the primordial soup would have had a chemical detection system in order to locate food and avoid danger. In humans, it’s the only sense with its own dedicated processing station in the brain—the olfactory bulb—and also the only one that doesn’t transmit its data directly to the higher brain. Instead, the electrical impulses triggered when odorant molecules bind with olfactory receptors route first through the limbic system, home of emotion and memory. This is why smell is so likely to trigger nostalgia or, in the case of those suffering from PTSD, paralyzing fear.

All mammals share the same basic system, although there is great variance in sensitivity between species. Those that use smell as the primary survival sense, in particular rodents and dogs, are orders of magnitude better than humans at identifying scents. Architecture has a lot to do with that. Dogs are lower to the ground, where molecules tend to land and linger. They also sniff much more frequently and in a completely different way (by first exhaling to clear distracting scents from around a target and then inhaling), drawing more molecules to their much larger array of olfactory receptors. Good scent dogs have 10 times as many receptors as humans, and 35 percent of the canine brain is devoted to smell, compared with just 5 percent in humans.

Unlike hearing and vision, both of which have been fairly well understood since the 19th century, scientists first explained smell only 50 years ago. “In terms of the physiological mechanisms of how the system works, that really started only a few decades ago,” says Richard Doty, director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “And the more people learn, the more complicated it gets.”

Whereas Atkinson’s vapor detector identifies a few specific chemicals using mass spectrometry, animal systems can identify thousands of scents that are, for whatever reason, important to their survival. When molecules find their way into a nose, they bind with olfactory receptors that dangle like upside-down flowers from a sheet of brain tissue known as the olfactory epithelium. Once a set of molecules links to particular receptors, an electrical signal is sent through axons into the olfactory bulb and then through the limbic system and into the cortex, where the brain assimilates that information and says, “Yum, delicious coffee is nearby.”

While dogs are fluent in the mysterious language of smell, scientists are only now learning the ABC’s.As is the case with explosives, most smells are compounds of chemicals (only a very few are pure; for instance, vanilla is only vanillin), meaning that the system must pick up all those molecules together and recognize the particular combination as gasoline, say, and not diesel or kerosene. Doty explains the system as a kind of code, and he says, “The code for a particular odor is some combination of the proteins that get activated.” To create a machine that parses odors as well as dogs, science has to unlock the chemical codes and program artificial receptors to alert for multiple odors as well as combinations.

In some ways, Atkinson’s machine is the first step in this process. He’s unlocked the codes for a few critical explosives and has built a device sensitive enough to detect them, simply by sniffing the air. But he has not had the benefit of many thousands of years of bioengineering. Canine olfaction, Doty says, is sophisticated in ways that humans can barely imagine. For instance, humans don’t dream in smells, he says, but dogs might. “They may have the ability to conceptualize smells,” he says, meaning that instead of visualizing an idea in their mind’s eye, they might smell it.

Animals can also convey metadata with scent. When a dog smells a telephone pole, he’s reading a bulletin board of information: which dogs have passed by, which ones are in heat, etc. Dogs can also sense pheromones in other species. The old adage is that they can smell fear, but scientists have proved that they can smell other things, like cancer or diabetes. Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, says that a “mouse sniffing another mouse can obtain much more information about that mouse than you or I could by looking at someone.”

If breaking chemical codes is simple spelling, deciphering this sort of metadata is grammar and syntax. And while dogs are fluent in this mysterious language, scientists are only now learning the ABC’s.

THERE ARE FEW people who better appreciate the complexities of smell than Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist and the associate director of Auburn’s Canine Research Detection Institute. He has been hacking the dog’s nose for more than 20 years.

“By the time you leave, you won’t look at a dog the same way again,” he says, walking me down a hall where military intelligence trainees were once taught to administer polygraphs and out a door and past some pens where new puppies spend their days. The CRDI occupies part of a former Army base in the Appalachian foothills and breeds and trains between 100 and 200 dogs—mostly Labrador retrievers, but also Belgian Malinois, German shepherds, and German shorthaired pointers—a year for Amtrak, the Department of Homeland Security, police departments across the US, and the military. Training begins in the first weeks of life, and Waggoner points out that the floor of the puppy corrals is made from a shiny tile meant to mimic the slick surfaces they will encounter at malls, airports, and sporting arenas. Once weaned, the puppies go to prisons in Florida and Georgia, where they get socialized among prisoners in a loud, busy, and unpredictable environment. And then they come home to Waggoner.

What Waggoner has done over tens of thousands of hours of careful study is begin to quantify a dog’s olfactory abilities. For instance, how small a sample dogs can detect (parts per trillion, at least); how many different types of scents they can detect (within a certain subset, explosives for instance, there seems to be no limit, and a new odor can be learned in hours); whether training a dog on multiple odors degrades its overall detection accuracy (typically, no); and how certain factors like temperature and fatigue affect performance.

The idea that the dog is a static technology just waiting to be obviated really bothers Waggoner, because he feels like he’s innovating every bit as much as Atkinson and the other lab scientists. “We’re still learning how to select, breed, and get a better dog to start with—then how to better train it and, perhaps most importantly, how to train the people who operate those dogs.”

Waggoner even taught his dogs to climb into an MRI machine and endure the noise and tedium of a scan. If he can identify exactly which neurons are firing in the presence of specific chemicals and develop a system to convey that information to trainers, he says it could go a long way toward eliminating false alarms. And if he could get even more specific—whether, say, RDX fires different cells than PETN—that information might inform more targeted responses from bomb squads.

After a full day of watching trainers demonstrate the multitudinous abilities of CRDI’s dogs, Waggoner leads me back to his sparsely furnished office and clicks a video file on his computer. It was from a lecture he’d given at an explosives conference, and it featured Major, a yellow lab wearing what looked like a shrunken version of the Google Street View car array on its back. Waggoner calls this experiment Autonomous Canine Navigation. Working with preloaded maps, a computer delivered specific directions to the dog. By transmitting beeps that indicated left, right, and back, it helped Major navigate an abandoned “town” used for urban warfare training. From a laptop, Waggoner could monitor the dog’s position using both cameras and a GPS dot, while tracking its sniff rate. When the dog signaled the presence of explosives, the laptop flashed an alert, and a pin was dropped on the map.

It’s not hard to imagine this being very useful in urban battlefield situations or in the case of a large area and a fast-ticking clock—say, an anonymous threat of a bomb inside an office building set to detonate in 30 minutes. Take away the human and the leash, and a dog can sweep entire floors at a near sprint. “To be as versatile as a dog, to have all capabilities in one device, might not be possible,” Waggoner says.

Both the dog people and the scientists working to emulate the canine nose have a common goal: to stop bombs from blowing up. It’s important to recognize that both sides—the dog people and the scientists working to emulate the canine nose—have a common goal: to stop bombs from blowing up. And the most effective result of this technology race, Waggoner thinks, is a complementary relationship between dog and machine. It’s impractical, for instance, to expect even a team of Vapor Wake dogs to protect Grand Central Terminal, but railroad police could perhaps one day install a version of Atkinson’s sniffer at that station’s different entrances. If one alerts, they could call in the dogs.

There’s a reason Flir Systems, the maker of Fido, has a dog research group, and it’s not just for comparative study, says the man who runs it, Kip Schultz. “I think where the industry is headed, if it has forethought, is a combination,” he told me. “There are some things a dog does very well. And some things a machine does very well. You can use one’s strengths against the other’s weaknesses and come out with a far better solution.”

Despite working for a company that is focused mostly on sensor innovation, Schultz agrees with Waggoner that we should be simultaneously pushing the dog as a technology. “No one makes the research investment to try to get an Apple approach to the dog,” he says. “What could he do for us 10 or 15 years from now that we haven’t thought of yet?”

On the other hand, dogs aren’t always the right choice; they’re probably a bad solution for screening airline cargo, for example. It’s a critical task, but it’s tedious work sniffing thousands of bags per day as they roll by on a conveyor belt. There, a sniffer mounted over the belt makes far more sense. It never gets bored.

“The perception that sensors will put dogs out of business—I’m telling you that’s not going to happen,” Schultz told me, at the end of a long conference call. Mark Fisher, who was also on the line, laughed. “Dogs aren’t going to put sensors out of business either.”

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On April 30, an MQ-9 Reaper drone landed on Highway 287, north of Rawlins, Wyoming. The landing was planned; it was a part of Exercise Agile Chariot, which drew a range of aircraft and saw ground support provided by the Kentucky Air National Guard. While US aircraft have landed on highways before, this was the first time such a landing had been undertaken by a Reaper, and it demonstrates the continued viability of adapting roads into runways as the need arises. 

In a video showing the landing released by the Air Force, the Reaper’s slow approach is visible against the snow-streaked rolling hills and pale-blue sky of Wyoming in spring. The landing zone is inconspicuous, a stretch of highway that could be anywhere, except for the assembled crowds and vehicles marking this particular stretch of road as an impromptu staging ground for air operations. 

“The MQ-9 can now operate around the world via satellite launch and recovery without traditional launch and recovery landing sites and maintenance packages,” said Lt. Col. Brian Flanigan, 2nd Special Operations Squadron director of operations, in a release. “Agile Chariot showed once again the leash is off the MQ-9 as the mission transitions to global strategic competition.”

When Flanigan describes the Reaper as transitioning to “global strategic competition,” that’s alluding to the comparatively narrower role Reapers had over the last 15 years, in which they were a tool used almost exclusively for the counter-insurgency warfare engaged in by the United States over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as elsewhere, like Somalia and Yemen. Reapers’ advantages shine in counter-insurgency: The drones can fly high over long periods of time, watch in precise detail and detect small movements below, and drone pilots can pick targets as the opportunity arises.

But Reapers have hard limits that make their future uncertain in wars against militaries with substantial anti-air weapons, to say nothing of flying against fighter jets. Reapers are slow, propeller-driven planes, built for endurance not speed, and could be picked out of the sky or, worse, destroyed on a runway by a skilled enemy with dedicated anti-plane weaponry.

In March, a Reaper flying over the Black Sea was sprayed by fuel released from a Russian jet, an incident that led it to crash. While Wyoming’s Highway 287 is dangerous for cars, for planes it has the virtue of being entirely in friendly air space. 

Putting a Reaper into action in a war against a larger military, which in Pentagon terms often means against Russia or China, means finding a way to make the Reaper useful despite those threats. Such a mission would have to take advantage of the Reaper’s long endurance flight time, surveillance tools, and precision strike abilities, without leaving it overly vulnerable to attack. Operating on highways as runways is one way to overcome that limit, letting the drone fly from whenever there is road. 

“An adversary that may be able to deny use of a military base or an airfield, is going to have a nearly impossible time trying to defend every single linear mile of roads. It’s just too much territory for them to cover and that gives us access in places and areas that they can’t possibly defend,” Lt. Col. Dave Meyer, Deputy Mission Commander for Exercise Agile Chariot, said in a release.

Alongside the Reaper, the exercise showcased MC-130Js, A-10 Warthogs, and MH-6M Little Bird helicopters. With soldiers first establishing landing zones along the highway, the exercise then demonstrated landing the C-130 cargo aircraft to use as a refueling and resupply point for the A-10s, which also operated from the highway. Having the ability to not just land on an existing road, but bring more fuel and spare ammunition to launch new missions from the same road, makes it hard for an adversary to permanently ground planes, as resupply is also air-mobile and can use the same improvised runways.

Part of the exercise took place on Highway 789, which forks off 287 between Lander and Riverton, as the setting for trial search and rescue missions. “On the second day of operations, they repeated the procedure of preparing a landing zone for an MC-130. Once the aircraft landed, the team boarded MH-6 Little Birds that had been offloaded from the cargo plane by Soldiers from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The special tactics troops then performed combat search-and-rescue missions to find simulated injured pilots and extract them from the landing zone on Highway 789,” described the Kentucky Air National Guard, in a statement.

With simulated casualties on cleared roads, the Air Force rehearsed for the tragedy of future war. As volunteers outfitted in prosthetic injuries were transported back to the care and safety of landed transports, the highways in Wyoming were home to the full spectrum of simulated war from runways. Watch a video of the landing, below.

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Early in the morning of May 3, local Moscow time, a pair of explosions occurred above the Kremlin. Videos of the incident appeared to show two small drones detonating—ultramodern tech lit up against the venerable citadel. The incident was exclusively the domain of Russian social media for half a day, before Russian President Vladimir Putin declared it a failed assassination attempt.

What actually happened in the night sky above the Russian capital? It is a task being pieced together in public and in secret. Open-source analysts, examining the information available in the public, have constructed a picture of the event and video release, forming a good starting point.

Writing at Radio Liberty, a US-government-funded Russian-language outlet, reporters Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov point out that a video showing smoke above the Kremlin was published around 3:30 am local time on a Moscow Telegram channel. Twelve hours later, Putin released a statement on the attack, and then, write Dobrynin and Krutov, “several other videos of the night attack appeared, according to which Radio Liberty established that two drones actually exploded in the area of ​​​​the dome of the Senate Palace with an interval of about 16 minutes, arriving from opposite directions. The first caused a small fire on the roof of the building, the second exploded in the air.”

That the drones exploded outside a symbolic target, without reaching a practical one, could be by design, or it could owe to the nature of Kremlin air defense, which may have shot the drones down at the last moment before they became more threatening. 

Other investigations into the origin, nature, and means of the drone incident are likely being carried out behind the closed doors and covert channels of intelligence services. Without being privy to those conversations, and aware that information released by governments is only a selective portion of what is collected, it’s possible to instead answer a different set of questions: could drones do this? And why would someone use a drone for an attack like this?

To answer both, it is important to understand gimmick drones.

What’s a gimmick drone?

Drones, especially the models able to carry a small payload and fly long enough to travel a practical distance, can be useful tools for a variety of real functions. Those can include real-estate photography, crop surveying, creating videos, and even carrying small explosives in war. But drones can also carry less-useful payloads, and be used as a way to advertise something other than the drone itself, like coffee delivery, beer vending, or returning shirts from a dry cleaner. For a certain part of the 2010s, attaching a product to a drone video was a good way to get the media to write about it. 

What stands out about gimmick drones is not that they were doing something only a drone could do, but instead that the people behind the stunt were using a drone as a publicity technique for something else. In 2018, a commercial drone was allegedly used in an assassination attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, in which drones flew at Maduro and then exploded in the sky, away from people and without reports of injury. 

As I noted at the time about gimmick drones, “In every case, the drone is the entry point to a sales pitch about something else, a prelude to an ad for sunblock or holiday specials at a casual restaurant. The drone was always part of the theater, a robotic pitchman, an unmanned MC. What mattered was the spectacle, the hook, to get people to listen to whatever was said afterwards.”

Drones are a hard weapon to use for precision assassination. Compared to firearms, poisoning, explosives in cars or buildings, or a host of other attacks, drones represent a clumsy and difficult method. Wind can blow the drones off course, they can be intercepted before they get close, and the flight time of a commercial drone laden with explosives is in minutes, not hours.

What a drone can do, though, is explode in a high-profile manner.

Why fly explosive-laden drones at the  Kremlin?

Without knowing the exact type of drone or the motives of the drone operator (or operators), it is hard to say exactly why one was flown at and blown up above one of Russia’s most iconic edifices of state power. Russia’s government initially blamed Ukraine, before moving on to attribute the attack to the United States. The United States denied involvement in the attack, and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said to take any Russian claims with “a very large shaker of salt.”

Asked about the news, Ukraine’s President Zelensky said the country fights Russia on its own territory, not through direct attacks on Putin or Moscow. The war has seen successful attacks on Putin-aligned figures and war proponents in Russia, as well as the family of Putin allies, though attribution for these attacks remains at least somewhat contested, with the United States attributing at least one of them to Ukrainian efforts.

Some war commentators in the US have floated the possibility that the attack was staged by Russia against Russia, as a way to rally support for the government’s invasion. However, that would demonstrate that Russian air defenses and security services are inept enough to miss two explosive-laden drones flying over the capital and would be an unusual way to argue that the country is powerful and strong. 

Ultimately, the drone attackers may have not conducted this operation to achieve any direct kill or material victory, but as a proof of concept, showing that such attacks are possible. It would also show that claims of inviolability of Russian airspace are, at least for small enough flying machines and covert enough operatives, a myth. 

In that sense, the May 3 drone incident has a lot in common with the May 1987 flight of Mathias Rust, an amateur pilot in Germany who safely flew a private plane into Moscow and landed it in Red Square, right near the Kremlin. Rust’s flight ended without bloodshed or explosions, and took place in a peacetime environment, but it demonstrated the hollowness of the fortress state whose skies he flew through.

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Last week, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) introduced the Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act alongside Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) and numerous other bipartisan co-sponsors. The bill’s objective is as straightforward as its name: ensuring AI will never have a final say in American nuclear strategy.

“While we all try to grapple with the pace at which AI is accelerating, the future of AI and its role in society remains unclear. It is our job as Members of Congress to have responsible foresight when it comes to protecting future generations from potentially devastating consequences,” Rep. Lieu said in the bill’s announcement, adding, “AI can never be a substitute for human judgment when it comes to launching nuclear weapons.”

He’s not the only one to think so—a 2021 Human Rights Watch report co-authored by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic stated that “[r]obots lack the compassion, empathy, mercy, and judgment necessary to treat humans humanely, and they cannot understand the inherent worth of human life.”

[Related: This AI-powered brain scanner can paraphrase your thoughts.]

If passed, the bill would legally codify existing Department of Defense procedures found in its  2022 Nuclear Posture Review, which states that “in all cases, the United States will maintain a human ‘in the loop’ for all actions critical to informing and executing decisions by the President to initiate and terminate nuclear weapon employment.’’ Additionally, the DOD said that no federal funds could be used to launch nukes by an automated system without “meaningful human control,” according to the bill’s announcement.

The proposed legislation comes at a time when the power of generative AI, including chatbots like ChatGPT, is increasingly part of the public discourse. But the surreal spectrum between “amusing chatbot responses” and “potential existential threats to humanity” is not lost on Lieu. He certainly never thought part of his civic responsibilities would include crafting legislation to stave off a Skynet scenario, he tells PopSci.

As a self-described “recovering computer science major,” Lieu says he is amazed by what AI programs can now accomplish. “Voice recognition is pretty amazing now. Facial recognition is pretty amazing now, although it is more inaccurate for people with darker skin,” he says, referring to long-documented patterns of algorithmic bias. 

The past year’s release of generative AI programs such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, however, is when Lieu began to see the potential for harm.

[Related: ‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google to talk openly about the dangers of the rapidly emerging tech.]

“It’s creating information and predicting scenarios,” he says of the available tech. “That leads to different concerns, including my view that AI, no matter how smart it gets, should never have operative control of nuclear weapons.”

Lieu believes it’s vital to begin discussing AI regulations to curtail three major consequences: Firs, the proliferation of misinformation and other content “harmful to society.” Second is reining in AI that, while not existentially threatening for humanity, “can still just straight-up kill you.” He references San Francisco’s November 2022 multi-vehicle crash that injured multiple people and was allegedly caused by a Tesla engaged in its controversial Autopilot self-driving mode.

“When your cellphone malfunctions, it isn’t going at 50 miles-per-hour,” he says.

Finally, there is the “AI that can destroy the world, literally,” says Lieu. And this is where he believes the Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act can help, at least in some capacity. Essentially, if the bill becomes law, AI systems could still provide analysis and strategic suggestions regarding nuclear events, but ultimate say-so will rest firmly within human hands.

[Related: A brief but terrifying history of tactical nuclear weapons.]

Going forward, Lieu says there needs to be a larger regulatory approach to handling AI issues due to the fact Congress “doesn’t have the bandwidth or capacity to regulate AI in every single application.” He’s open to a set of AI risk standards agreed upon by federal agencies, or potentially a separate agency dedicated to generative and future advanced AI. On Thursday, the Biden administration unveiled plans to offer $140 million in funding to new research centers aimed at monitoring and regulating AI development.

When asked if he fears society faces a new “AI arms race,” Lieu concedes it is “certainly a possibility,” but points to the existence of current nuclear treaties. “Yes, there is a nuclear weapons arms race, but it’s not [currently] an all-out arms race. And so it’s possible to not have an all-out AI arms race,” says Lieu.

“Countries are looking at this, and hopefully they will get together to say, ‘Here are just some things we are not going to let AI do.’”

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LIFE IS RARELY WORRY-FREE, but unprecedented angst has become a constant. Beyond the regular challenges of everyday existence—chaotic households, traffic jams, overbearing bosses—the looming presence of a deadly virus over the past three years has made even mundane decisions feel fraught.

Any number of things can spark stress, but they all share a common origin. “It’s when the demands on somebody outstrip the resources they have,” says Lynn Bufka, a senior director at the American Psychological Association (APA). The results of that are rarely good. Face a difficult situation, unrealistic expectation, or sudden conflict without the right skills or tools, and you risk melting down or freezing up. That danger increases when you are pressed for time or cannot influence a challenging variable. “The feeling of not having control is anxiety-provoking,” Bufka says. “It’s pretty overwhelming.”

Most people had no experience dealing with the kind of prolonged pressure that came along with the pandemic. But for those with some of the world’s most intense occupations, it’s all just part of the job. Losing their cool is simply not an option. The strategies they employ to keep calm while facing a classroom, saving a life, or defusing a bomb just might help the rest of us deal with whatever’s pushing us to the edge of reason.

The fishing boat captain

THE STRESSORS: In 2021, the people bringing in Dungeness crab, black cod, and other bounties of the earth—the workers in America’s fishing and hunting industries—had the second deadliest job in the United States, coming in just behind loggers, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “It is extremely hazardous,” says Richard Ogg, captain of the troller Karen Jeanne, which is based in Bodega Bay, California. The gale-force dangers he and his crew face include rough seas, miserable weather, and sleep deprivation. Pulling in a catch big enough to earn the money they need weighs heavily on his mind too. Above all else, though, Ogg feels a sense of guardianship over his team, and finds the biggest challenge can be coping with conflicts that arise among a crew corralled on a 54.5-foot boat miles from shore. That’s no easy feat when dealing with workers who don’t necessarily respect the hazards, the gear, or each other.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Effective communication is essential to keeping cool. Ogg tends to be egalitarian, even if he as the captain has the final say and will pull rank if he must. He often discusses problems or disagreements with everyone aboard, seeks their perspectives, and considers their viewpoints to zero in on the best solution. He finds that this approach, and accepting that things sometimes go sideways despite his best efforts, helps everyone stay on an even keel whenever things get choppy.

The air traffic controller

THE STRESSORS: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport hosted nearly 2,000 flights on average every day in 2022, making it the busiest hub in the world last year. “Almost every bit of airspace that we have, there’s going to be planes there,” says air traffic controller Nichole Surunis. Shepherding those thousands of passengers in and out safely requires tremendous concentration and the ability to process information quickly. Variables like bad weather or an unexpected move by a pilot can make an already challenging task even more dynamic at a second’s notice. There’s no time to dwell on what’s at stake. “You have to focus on all these pilots you’re talking to, with all these people on these planes,” Surunis says. In total, there are about 2.9 million travelers who fly into or out of the United States on a given day—and costly delays add to the strain of those minding the traffic. It’s only after the craft are safe that a controller might notice their racing heart and realize just how tense they were.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Training and experience are key to handling rapidly shifting situations, and Surunis, like all controllers, has lots of both. “You have your Plan A—but you also must have a Plan B and Plan C,” she says. The occupation requires practicing self-care too. Stepping away from her workstation is essential, and mandated: Controllers typically aren’t allowed to go more than two hours without a break. Surunis doesn’t hesitate to tap a union-run support service after an especially grueling day, and she makes a point of unwinding by making time for hobbies like baking. That helps ensure she’s rested and ready to focus on keeping the sky safe.

The trauma surgeon

THE STRESSORS: Doctors who specialize in emergency care rarely have two days that are alike. A routine case like a ruptured appendix can end up on their table as readily as massive trauma. “They can be injured all over their body,” says Daniel Hagler, a critical care surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens Hospital in New York. “What you do within seconds or minutes of them arriving can be the difference between life and death.” The tension ramps up if he must handle many patients simultaneously. Over time, the strain takes a toll: A study published in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that nearly one-quarter of doctors in Hagler’s shoes experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Keeping it together requires the ability to triage, focus on what’s important, and put lesser priorities aside. Hagler employs “deliberate and algorithmic thinking”: If you see this, do that. Trust your intuition, using past experience to guide you to the best decision—while accepting that you may be wrong. “Take a step to just ready yourself and settle your nerves, and do what needs to be done,” he says.

The bomb tech

THE STRESSORS: Pipe bombs are the most common homemade explosive devices on American soil, according to the Department of Homeland Security, but the people who specialize in preventing them from blowing up are rare. Techs like Carl Makins, formerly of the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina, often face incendiaries crudely fashioned in someone’s kitchen or basement, so the safest way of deactivating them isn’t always clear. It doesn’t help that the gear includes 85 pounds of hot, uncomfortable Kevlar, making it hard to move. But the biggest source of anxiety is not knowing if someone tampered with the suspicious package or tried to move it in an effort to be helpful before he arrived. “What did you do to it?” Makins often found himself wondering. “Did you make it mad?”

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Makins always tried to compartmentalize his feelings. “You can’t get angry,” he says. “That limits your ability to see everything that you need to see.” He also used humor to help defuse tense situations—pointing out that, say, handling a bomb next to that shiny new pickup might not end well for the truck. He also remained mindful of his limits. If he was too tired, too tense, or just not up to the task, he’d say so and let someone else on the team step in to do the job. “You just tap out,” he says.

The teacher

THE STRESSORS: Teachers—despite diminishing resources, growing technological distractions, and students who often want to be anywhere but the classroom—are nevertheless saddled with the responsibility of shaping the future. That’s a lot of pressure, which explains why Gallup polls put teaching in a dead heat with nursing for the most stressful profession in the country, and why a RAND Corporation survey shows stress is the number one reason educators quit. And that was before COVID-19 compounded their challenges. When Teresa BlackCloud’s high school students in West Fargo, North Dakota, began taking turns attending class in person and learning from home in the fall of 2020, for example, she had to divide her attention between the pupils in front of her and the “online kids” who might need tech support. “I felt like my brain was split in two,” she says. “If only there were two Miss BlackClouds.” Like many educators, she had to quickly pivot between helping the teens in the classroom and assisting those working remotely.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Setting clear boundaries is key to handling trying circumstances. BlackCloud had to put the kibosh on responding to pings from kids at all hours because it limited her ability to recharge. “I had to get really good at setting boundaries,” she says. She strives to practice mindfulness and sets aside specific parts of her day for mentally wandering into stressy places. “While I’m brushing my teeth is my time to worry about things,” she says.

The Alaska rescue pilot

THE STRESSORS: Flying a rescue helicopter in Alaska is so intense the Coast Guard requires pilots to complete a tour elsewhere before they can get the gig. The assignment often demands they travel long distances—​Air Station Kodiak monitors 4 million square miles of land and sea, an area larger than the entire lower 48 states—in the dark and through extreme conditions. Due to the environs, the Last Frontier has an aviation accident rate more than twice that of the rest of the country. “It is very challenging,” says Lt. Cmdr. Jared Carbajal, who flies MH-60 Jayhawks and often dons night-vision goggles to navigate the inky sky. The haste of operations compounds the tension: Pilots must be airborne within 30 minutes of getting the call to pull someone out of danger. That leaves little time to prepare and sometimes gives Carbajal scant knowledge of what he’ll find when he arrives at the scene. (Carbajal now flies out of US Coast Guard Air Station Sitka, also in Alaska.)

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Managing complex and uncertain scenarios requires focusing only on what you can control. Everything else is a distraction. Carbajal concentrates on one task at a time—​calculating flight distance, estimating how much fuel he’ll need, requesting the necessary gear, and so on—​that he tackles systematically. He avoids looking too far ahead on his to-do list or fixating on situations he cannot influence, like unusually turbulent waves. “If there’s something that you can’t make a contingency plan for, don’t even waste your time on it,” he says.

An earlier version of this article appeared on popsci.com in January 2021, and this feature first appeared in the Spring 2021 issue. It has been updated since that time.

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On April 4, Australia’s Department of Defence announced the award of $12.9 million to defense giant QinetiQ for a laser weapon. The move followed years of work and interest by Australia’s government in developing lasers for the battlefields of tomorrow. What is most ambitious about the Australian research into laser weapons is not the modest funding to QinetiQ, but a powerful goal set by the Department of Defence in 2020: Australia wants a laser weapon powerful enough to stop a tank.

Laser weapons, more broadly referred to as directed energy, are a science fiction concept with a profoundly mundane reality. Instead of the flashy beams or targeted phasers of Star Wars or Star Trek, lasers work most similarly to a magnifying lens held to fry a dry leaf, concentrating photons into an invisible beam that destroys with heat and time. Unlike the child’s tool for starting fires, modern directed energy weapons derive their power from electricity, either generated on site or stored in batteries. 

Most of the work of laser weapons, in development and testing, has so far focused on relatively small and fragile targets, like drones, missiles, or mortar rounds. Lasers are energy intensive. When PopSci had a chance to try using a 10-kilowatt laser against commercial drones, it still took seconds to destroy each target, a process aided by all the sensors and accouterments of a targeting pod. Because lasers are concentrated heat energy over time, cameras to track targets, and gimbals to hold and stabilize the beam against the target, all ensure that as much of the beam as possible stays focused. Once part of a drone was burned through, the whole system would crash to the ground, gravity completing the task.

Tanks, by design and definition, are the opposite of lightly armored and fragile flying machines. That makes Australia’s plan to destroy tanks by laser all the more daring.

Tanks for the idea

In the summer of 2020, Australia’s Department of Defence released a strategy called the 2020 Force Structure Plan. This document, like similar versions in other militaries, offers a holistic vision of what kinds of conflicts the country is prepared to fight in the future. Because the strategy is also focused on procurement, it offers useful insight into the weapons and vehicles the military will want to buy to meet those challenges.

The tank-killing laser comes in the section on Land Combat Support. “A future program to develop a directed energy weapon system able to be integrated onto [Australian Defence Forces] protected and armoured vehicles, and capable of defeating armoured vehicles up to and including main battle tanks. The eventual deployment of directed energy weapons may also improve land force resilience by reducing the force’s dependence on ammunition stocks and supply lines,” reads the strategy.

The latter part of the statement is a fairly universal claim across energy weapons development. While laser weapons are power-intensive, they do not need individual missiles, bullets, or shells, the same as what a chemical explosive or kinetic weapon might. Using stored and generated energy, instead of specifically manufactured ammunition pieces, could enable long-term operation on even field-renewable sources, if available. This could also get the shot per weapon use down below the cost of a bullet, though it will take many shots for that to equal the whole cost of developing a laser system.

But getting a laser to punch through the armor of a tank is a distinct and challenging task. A drone susceptible to melting by laser might have a plastic casing a couple millimeters thick. Tank armor, even for older versions of modern tanks, can be at least 600 mm thick steel or composite, and is often thicker. This armor can be enhanced by a range of add-ons, including reactive plating that detonates outward in response to impact by explosive projectiles.

Defeating tank armor with lasers means finding a way to not just hold a beam of light against the tank, but to ensure that the beam is powerful and long-lasting enough to get the job done. 

“One problem faced by laser weapons is the huge amount of power required to destroy useful targets such as missiles. To destroy something of this size requires lasers with hundreds of kilowatts or even megawatts of power. And these devices are only around 20% efficient, so we would require five times as much power to run the device itself,” wrote Sean O’Byrne, an engineering professor at UNSW Canberra and UNSW Sydney, in a piece explaining the promise and peril of anti-tank lasers.

O’Byrne continued: “We are well into megawatt territory here — that’s the kind of power consumed by a small town. For this reason, even portable directed energy devices are very large. (It’s only recently that the US has been able to make a relatively small 50kW laser compact enough to fit on an armoured vehicle, although devices operating at powers up to 300kW have been developed.)”

April’s announcement of a modest sum to develop a domestic laser weapon capability in Australia is a starting point for eventually getting to the scale of lasers powerful enough to melt tanks. Should the feat be accomplished, Australia will find itself with an energy-hunger tool, but one that can defeat hostile armor for as long as it is charged to do so.

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To fly at supersonic speeds is to punch through an invisible threshold in the sky. Rocketing through the air at a rate faster than sound waves can travel through it means surpassing a specific airspeed, but that exact airspeed varies. On Mars, the speed of sound is different from the speed of sound on Earth. And on Earth, the speed of sound varies depending on the temperature of the air an aircraft is traveling through. 

Breaking the so-called sound barrier in 1947 made Chuck Yeager famous. But today, if a person in a military jet flies faster than the speed of sound, it’s not a significant or even noticeable moment, at least from the perspective of the occupants of the aircraft. “Man, in the airplane you feel nothing,” says Jessica Peterson, a flight test engineer for the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. People on the ground may beg to differ, depending on how close they are to the plane. 

Here’s what to know about the speed of supersonic flight, a type of travel that’s been inaccessible to civilians who want to experience it in an aircraft ever since the Concorde stopped flying in 2003. 

Ripples in the water, shockwaves in the air 

Traveling at supersonic speed involves cruising “faster than the sound waves can move out of the way,” says Edward Haering, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center who has been researching sonic booms since the 1990s.

One way to think about the topic is to picture a boat in the water. “If you’re in a rowboat, sitting on a lake, not moving, there might be some ripples that come out, but you’re not going any faster than the ripples are,” he says. “But if you’re in a motorboat or a sailboat, you’ll start to see a V-wake coming off the nose of your boat, because you’re going faster than those ripples can get out of the way.” That’s like a plane flying faster than the speed of sound.

But, he adds, a supersonic plane pushes through those ripples in three-dimensional space. “You have a cone of these disturbances that you’re pushing through,” he says. 

The temperature of the air determines how fast sound waves move through it. In a zone of the atmosphere on Earth between about 36,000 feet up to around 65,600 feet, the temperature is consistent enough that the speed of sound theoretically stays about the same. And in that zone, on a typical day, the speed of sound is about 660 mph. That’s also referred to as Mach 1. Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, would be about 1,320 mph in that altitude range. However, since a real-world day will likely be different from what’s considered standard, your actual speed when attempting to fly supersonic may vary.

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

If you wanted to fly a plane at supersonic speeds at lower altitudes, the speed of sound is faster in that warmer air. At 10,000 feet, supersonic flight begins at 735 mph, NASA says. The thicker air takes more work to fly through at those speeds, though.

For the record books: the first supersonic flight

Chuck Yeager became the first documented person to fly at supersonic speeds on October 14, 1947. He recalled in his autobiography, Yeager, that he was at 42,000 feet flying at 0.96 Mach on that autumn day. “I noted that the faster I got, the smoother the ride,” he wrote. 

“Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach—then tipped right off the scale,” he recalled. “I thought I was seeing things! We were flying supersonic!” He learned afterwards that he had been going 700 mph, or 1.07 Mach. 

Over the radio, from below, Yeagar wrote that people in a “tracking van interrupted to report that they heard what sounded like a distant rumble of thunder: my sonic boom!” 

Sonic booms happen thanks to shock waves forming off different features on the aircraft. For example, the canopy of a fighter jet, or the inlet for its engine, can produce them. The problem occurs because of the way those various shock waves join up, coalescing into two. “When they combine, they just get higher and higher pressure,” says Haering. The way they combine is for one shock wave to come from the front of the plane, and one from the rear. People on the ground will detect a “boom, boom,” Haering says. 

Interestingly, the length of the aircraft matters in this case, affecting how far apart those booms are in time. The space shuttle, for example, measured more than 100 feet long. In that case, people would notice a “boom… boom,” Haering says. “And a very short plane, it’s booboom. And if it’s really short, and really far away, sometimes the time between those two booms [is] so short, you can’t really tell that there’s two distinct booms, so you just hear boom.” 

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

The issue with these booms is leading NASA to develop a new experimental aircraft, along with Lockheed Martin, called the X-59. Its goal is to fly faster than the speed of sound, but in a quieter way than a typical supersonic plane would. Remarkably, instead of a canopy for the pilot to see the scene in front of them, the aviator will rely on an external vision system—a monitor on the inside that shows what’s in front of the plane. NASA said that the testing wrapped up in 2021 for this design, which helps keep the aircraft sleek. The ultimate goal is to manage any shock waves coming off that aircraft through its design. “On the X-59, from the tip of the nose to the back of the tail, everything is tailored to try to keep those shock waves separated,” Haering says. 

NASA says they plan to fly it this year, with the goal of seeing how much noise it makes and how people react to its sound signature. The X-59 could make a noise that’s “a lot like if your neighbor across the street slams their car door,” Haering speculates. “If you’re engaged in conversation, you probably wouldn’t even notice it.” But actual flights will be the test of that hypothesis.

The X-59 has a goal of flying at Mach 1.4, at an altitude of around 55,000 feet. Translated into miles per hour, that rate is 924 mph. Then imagine that the aircraft has a tailwind, and its ground speed could surpass 1,000 mph. (Note that winds in the atmosphere will affect a plane’s ground speed—the speed the plane is moving compared to the ground below. A tailwind will make it faster and a headwind will make it slower.) 

Supersonic corridors 

At Edwards Air Force Base in California, supersonic corridors permit pilots to fly at Mach 1 or faster above certain altitudes. In one corridor, the aircraft must be at 30,000 feet or higher. In another, the Black Mountain Supersonic Corridor, the aircraft can be as low as 500 feet. Remember, the speed to fly supersonic will be higher at a low altitude than it will be at high altitudes, and it will take more effort to push through the denser air.

“From a flight-test perspective—so that’s what we do here at Edwards, and we’re focusing on testing the new aircraft, testing the new systems—we regularly go supersonic,” says Peterson, the flight test engineer at the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School. 

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The fact that one of the supersonic corridors is over the base means that sonic booms are audible there, although the aircraft has to be above 30,000 feet. “We can boom the base, and we hear it all the time,” she adds. 

She notes that in a recent flight in a T-38, when she broke the sound barrier at 32,000 feet, her aircraft had a ground speed of 665 mph. But at 14,000 feet, she was supersonic at a ground speed of 734 mph.

But there’s a difference between flying at supersonic speeds in a test scenario and doing it for operational reasons. Corey Florendo, a pilot and instructor also at the US Air Force Test Pilot School, notes that he’d do it “only as often as I need to,” during a real-world mission.

“When I go supersonic, I’m using a lot of gas,” he adds. 

Supersonic flight thus remains available to the military in certain scenarios when they’re willing to burn the fuel, but not so for regular travelers. A Boeing 787, for example, is designed to cruise at 85 percent the speed of sound. However, one company, called Boom Supersonic, aims to bring that type of flight back for commercial travel; their aircraft, which they call Overture, could fly in tests in 2027. You may not want to hold your breath. 

Joe Jewell, an associate professor at Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, reflects that supersonic flight still has a “mystique” to it. 

“It’s still kind of a rare and special thing because the challenges that we collectively referred to as the sound barrier still are there, physically,” Jewell says. Pressure waves still accrue in front of the aircraft as it pushes through the air. “It’s still there, just the same as it was in 1947, we just know how to deal with it now.”

In the video below, watch an F-16 overtake a T-38; both aircraft are flying at supersonic speeds, and a subtle rocking motion is the only indication that shock waves are interacting with the aircraft. Courtesy Jessica Peterson and the US Air Force Test Pilot School.

The post How fast is supersonic flight? Fast enough to bring the booms. appeared first on Popular Science.

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On April 11, the Department of Defense announced that it was allocating just over $8 million for 21 new delivery drones. These flying machines, officially called the TRV-150C Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft Systems, are made by Survice Engineering in partnership with Malloy Aeronautics. 

The TRV-150C is a four-limbed drone that looks like a quadcopter on stilts. Its tall landing legs allow it to take off with a load of up to 150 pounds of cargo slung underneath. The drone’s four limbs each mount two rotors, making the vehicle more of an octocopter than a quadcopter. 

The TRV drone family also represents the successful evolution of a long-running drone development program, one that a decade ago promised hoverbikes for humans and today is instead delivering uncrewed delivery drones.

The contract award is through the Navy and Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems program office, which is focused on ensuring the people doing the actual fighting on the edge of combat or action get the exact robotic assistance they need. For Marines, this idea has been put into practice and not just theorized, with an exercise involving drone resupply taking place at Quantico, Virginia, at the end of March.

The Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft System (TRUAS), as the TRV-150C is referred to in use, “is designed to provide rapid and assured, highly automated aerial distribution to small units operating in contested environments; thereby enabling flexible and rapid emergency resupply, routine distribution, and a constant push and pull of material in order to ensure a constant state of supply availability,” said Master Sergeant Chris Genualdi in a release about the event. Genualdi already works in the field of airborne and air delivery, so the delivery drone became an additional tool to meet familiar problems.

Malloy Aeronautics boasts that the drone has a range of over 43 miles; in the Marines’ summary from Quantico, the drone is given a range of 9 miles for resupply missions. Both numbers can be accurate: Survice gives the unencumbered range of the TRV-150 at 45 miles, while carrying 150 pounds of cargo that range is reduced to 8 miles. 

With a speed of about 67 mph and a flight process that is largely automated, the TRV-150C is a tool that can get meaningful quantities of vital supplies where they are needed, when they are needed. Malloy also boasts that drones in the TRV-150 family have batteries that can be easily swapped, allowing for greater operational tempo as the drones themselves do not have to wait for a recharge before being sent on their next mission.

These delivery drones use “waypoint navigation for mission planning, which uses programmed coordinates to direct the aircraft’s flight pattern,” the Marines said in a release, with Genualdi noting “that the simplicity of operating the TRUAS is such that a Marine with no experience with unmanned aircraft systems can be trained to operate and conduct field level maintenance on it in just five training days.”

Reducing the complexity of the drone to essentially a flying cart that can autonomously deliver gear where needed is huge. The kinds of supplies needed in battle are all straightforward—vital tools like more bullets, more meals, or even more blood and medical equipment—so attempts at life-saving can be made even if it’s unsafe for the soldiers to move towards friendly lines for more elaborate care.

Getting the drone down to just a functional delivery vehicle comes after years of work. In 2014, Malloy debuted a video of a reduced scale hoverbike designed for a human to ride on, using four rotors and a rectangular body. En route to becoming the basis for the delivery drone seen today, the hoverbike was explored by the US Army as a novel way to fly scouts around. This scout ultimately moved to become a resupply tool, which the Army tested in January 2017.

In 2020, the US Navy held a competition for a range of delivery drones at the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona. The entry by Malloy and Survice came in first place, and cemented the TRV series as the drones to watch for battlefield delivery. In 2021, British forces used TRV drones in an exercise, with the drones tasked with delivering blood to the wounded. 

“This award represents a success story in the transition of technology from U.S. research laboratories into the hands of our warfighters,” said Mark Butkiewicz, a vice president at SURVICE Engineering, in a release. “We started with an established and proven product from Malloy Aeronautics and integrated the necessary tech to provide additional tactical functionality for the US warfighter. We then worked with research labs to conduct field experiments with warfighters to refine the use of autonomous unmanned multirotor drones to augment logistical operations at the forward most edge of the battlefield.”

The 21 drones awarded by the initial contract will provide a better start, alongside the drones already used for training, in teaching the Marines how to rely on robots doing resupply missions in combat. Genualdi expects the Marines to create a special specialty to support the use of drones, with commanders dispatching members to learn how to work alongside the drone.

The drones could also see life as exportation and rescue tools, flying through small gaps in trees, buildings, and rubble in order to get people the aid they need. In both peace and wartime uses, the drone’s merit is its ability to get cargo where it is needed without putting additional humans at risk of catching a bullet. 

The post The Marines are getting supersized drones for battlefield resupply appeared first on Popular Science.

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On July 12, 2020, the USS Bonhomme Richard caught fire. The vessel is officially described as an “amphibious assault ship,” a name that doesn’t truly capture the Bonhomme Richard’s role as troop and vehicle transport; its flat top also lets it launch helicopters, V-22 tiltrotor aircraft, and special fighter jets. It was a complex, powerful machine—one that would be considered an aircraft carrier in any other nation’s navy—which makes the fact that a single fire was able to do over $3 billion in damage to it so remarkable. 

This month, the Government Accountability Office published a study into fire safety on Navy ships, which reached a clear and blunt conclusion: The US Navy needs to do more to study, track, analyze, and prevent future fires.  

What is particularly jarring about the accident that ultimately led to the decommissioning of the Bonhomme Richard is that it happened in port, in San Diego. The amphibious assault ship was docked so that it could receive about $250 million in upgrades to better let it accommodate F-35B jet fighters. Instead of upgrading the ship to serve for decades into the future, a poorly managed accident and a days-long firefighting response removed what had been a wholly functional ship from operational use.

The July 12, 2020 fire “started in the lower vehicle storage compartment onboard the USS Bonhomme Richard,” the report notes. “The fire burned for several days, spread to 11 of 14 decks, and reached temperatures in excess of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.”

The Bonhomme Richard fire was initially investigated as an arson, though the primary suspect was acquitted in court. The sailor’s defense made a compelling case that abundant other hazards on the ship, from poor lithium-ion battery storage to part of a lower deck being used like a junkyard, could be responsible for the fire.

Sparked, as it were, by Congressional inquiry into the destruction of the Bonhomme Richard, the GAO report set out to “review the Navy’s response to fire incidents aboard Navy ships as they undergo maintenance or modernization and to review the effects of the fires.” This inquiry specifically looked at how the Navy has responded to lessons learned, how the Navy has collected and analyzed data about such fires, what the Navy has done to manage staffing needs for fire response when ships are docked for maintenance, and how much of the Navy’s training for crew focuses on fire-safety for when the ship is docked for maintenance.

Such maintenance work is a dull inevitability of naval operations, and has been a fact of maritime life in some form or another for centuries. Sustainment work, the practice of ensuring long-lasting vehicles are able to actually function as desired, is far removed from the glamor and excitement of overseas patrol or active operation, but the consequences of leadership failures to maintain the ship can be just as severe as if the ship had been neglected in battle.

The GAO report cites several major incidents of fire on ships undergoing maintenance, starting with the USS Miami submarine in May 2012, up to the Bonhomme Richard in July 2020. While the Miami was docked in Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, a painter and sandblaster working on the submarine set a fire, which he later confessed to NCIS investigators was an action he took in order to get out of work. Such a small act ultimately led to the Miami’s full decommissioning, as the estimated cost to repair was over $700 million. Following the destruction of the Miami, the Navy reviewed its process for fire investigations, with the goal of preventing future such disasters.

What the GAO report finds, more than a decade after the devastation of the Miami, is that the Navy is unable to follow its own best advice for tracking and mitigating such risks. The report notes that “Navy organizations use processes that inconsistently collect, maintain, and share fire safety-related and damage control lessons and best practices to improve fire safety on ships undergoing maintenance.”

These reporting problems continue through work on ships, where workers may see evidence of past fire damage or signs of risk but do not know the most appropriate way to file and share that information. Data entry is a dull task, and one of the obstacles found by GAO is that the system used to log such risk is slow, making it less likely that fire risk is logged.

Another challenge is simply that a docked ship is crewed less than a ship deployed. At sea, the whole of a crew lives on and sustains a ship, corresponding to crisis with full strength as appropriate. In port, crew are assigned elsewhere, taking leave, deploying to other missions, or even just taking training courses on land. That means the baseline occupancy of a ship is reduced, often by 5 percent but in at least once incident cited by up to 30 percent. That makes having personnel on hand to spot and respond to fires as they happen harder.

Ensuring the ship doesn’t get burnt down while docked for repairs is an important job, and one that should be staffed adequately, even if most of the time it’s dull duty for the crew assigned to it.

Ultimately, the report notes, “If the Navy had a designated organization to use existing information to analyze and respond to Navy-wide effects of fire incidents, then the Navy could better understand the magnitude of risks associated with ship-fire incidents and their effects on Navy operations or the nation’s strategic resources.”

The post Watchdog sounds alarm on the Navy’s fire preparedness appeared first on Popular Science.

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On April 19, Nauticus Robotics announced that its work on the Terranaut, an amphibious machine designed to defeat explosive mines for the Defense Innovation Unit, had cleared its initial phase and was progressing to further development. The machine builds on Nauticus’ previous work with aquatic uncrewed vehicles. It fits into a holistic picture of untethered, autonomous underwater operations, where tools developed for commercial underwater work inform machines specifically built to tackle the special military needs below the ocean’s surface.

Nauticus teased this announcement of Terranaut on social media with a picture of tread lines on a beach leading into the ocean surface.

DIU, or the Defense Innovation Unit, is an organization within the larger Department of Defense designed to pull innovations from the commercial tech world into military use. Rather than reinventing the wheel, it is built to look at wagon wheels it could simply buy for its chariots.

“DIU gets intrigued when you have some commercial-facing technologies that they think they could orient towards a defense mission,” Nauticus CEO Nicolaus Radford tells Popular Science. “A lot of people focus on our big orange robots. But what’s between our robots’ ears is more important.” 

“So DIU is like, all right, you guys have made some commercial progress,” Radford adds. “You’ve got a commercial platform both in software and hardware. Maybe we can modify it a little bit towards some of these other missions that we’re interested in.”

In Nauticus’ announcement, they emphasized that Terranaut is being developed as an autonomous mine countermeasure robot, which can work in beaches and surf zones. These are the exact kind of areas where Marines train and plan to fight, especially in Pacific island warfare. Terranaut, as promised, will both swim and crawl, driven by an autonomous control system that can receive human direction through acoustic communication.

The Terranaut can navigate on treads and with powerful thrusters, with plans for manipulator arms that can emerge from the body to tackle any tasks, like disassembling an underwater mine.

“It’s able to fly through the water column and then also change its buoyancy in a way that it can get appreciable traction,” says Radford. “Let’s say you’re driving on the sub-sea bed and you encounter a rock. Well, you don’t know how long the rock is, it could take you a while to get around it, right?” The solution in that case would be to go above it. 

Much of the work that informed the creation and design of Terranaut comes from Nauticus’ work on Aquanaut, which is a 14.5-foot-long submersible robot that can operate at depths of almost 10,000 feet, and in regular versions at distances of up to 75 miles. Powered by an electric motor and carrying over 67 kilowatt hours of battery power, the aquanaut moves at a baseline speed of 3 knots, or almost 3.5 mph, underwater, and it can last on its battery power for over four days continuously. But what most distinguishes Aquanaut is its retractable manipulator arms that fold into its body when not needed, and its ability to operate without the direct communications control through an umbilical wire like another undersea robot.

The Aquanaut can perceive its environment thanks to sonar, optical sensors in stereo, native 3D cloud point imagery, and other sensors. This data can be collected at a higher resolution than is transmittable while deep undersea, with the Aquanaut able to surface or dock and transmit higher volumes and density of data faster

Like the Aquanaut, the Terranaut does not have an umbilical connecting it to a boat.

Typically, boats have umbilicals connecting them to robots “because you have to have an operator with joysticks looking at HD monitors, being able to drive this thing,” says Radford. “What we said is ‘let’s throw all that out.’ We can create a hybrid machine that doesn’t need an umbilical that can swim really far, but as it turns out, people just don’t want to take pictures. They want to pick something up, drop something off, cut something, plug something in, and we developed a whole new class of subsea machines that allows you to do manipulation underwater without the necessity of an umbilical.”

Removing the umbilical frees up the design for what kind of ships can launch and manage underwater robotics. It also comes with a whole new set of problems, like how to ensure that the robot is performing the tasks asked of it by a human operator, now that the operator is not driving but directing the machine. Communication through water is hard, as radio signals and light signals are both limited in range and efficacy, especially below the ocean’s surface.

Solving these twin problems means turning to on-board autonomy, and acoustic controls.  

“We have data rates akin to dial up networking in 1987,” says Radford. “You’re not gonna be streaming HD video underwater with a Netflix server, but there are ways in which you can send representative information in the 3D environment around you back to an operator, and then the operator flies the autopilot of the robot around.”

That means, in essence, that the robot itself is largely responsible for managing the specifics of its ballast and direction, and following commands transmitted acoustically through the water. In return it sends information back, allowing a human to select actions and behaviors already loaded onto the robot.

Like the Aquanaut before it, the Terranaut will come preloaded with the behaviors needed to navigate its environment and perform the tasks assigned to it. Once the Terranaut rolls through surfy shallows, onto beaches, and into visual range, it will apply those tools, adaptive autonomy and remote human guidance, to taking apart deadly obstacles, like underwater explosives.

“I think this is the beginning of a very vibrant portfolio of aquatic drones that I hope captures the public’s imagination on what’s possible underwater. I think it’s just as fascinating as space, if not more so, because it’s so much more near to us,” said Radford. “You know, five percent of the ocean seabed has been explored on any level. We live on an ocean planet stupidly called Earth.”

The post The Terranaut is a new mine-hunting bot designed for beaches appeared first on Popular Science.

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Reports from the Centers for Disease Control show gun violence is the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. In 2021, a separate study indicated over a third of its surveyed adolescents alleged being able to access a loaded household firearm in less than five minutes. When locked in a secure vault or cabinet, nearly one-in-four claimed they could access the stored gun within the same amount of time. In an effort to tackle this problem, a 26-year-old MIT dropout backed by billionaire Peter Thiel is now offering a biometrics-based solution. But experts question the solution’s efficacy, citing previous data on gun safety and usage.

Last Thursday, Kai Kloepfer, founder and CEO of Biofire, announced the Smart Gun, a 9mm pistol that only fires after recognizing an authorized user’s fingerprints and facial scans. Using “state-of-the-art” onboard software, Kloepfer claims their Smart Gun is the first “fire-by-wire” weapon, meaning that it relies on electronic signals to operate, rather than traditional firearms’ trigger mechanisms. Kloepfer claimed the product only takes “a millisecond” to unlock and said the gun otherwise operates and feels like a standard pistol, in a profile by Bloomberg. He hopes the Smart Gun could potentially save “tens of thousands of lives.”

In a statement provided to PopSci, Biofire founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer stated, “Firearm-related causes now take the lives of more American children than any other cause, and the problem is getting worse.” Kloepfer argued that accidents, suicides, homicides, and mass shootings among children reduced when gun owners have “faster, better tools that prevent the unwanted use of their firearms,” and claims the Smart Gun is “now the most secure option at a time when more solutions are urgently needed.”

[Related: A new kind of Kevlar aims to stop bullets with less material.]

Biometric scanning devices have extensive, documented histories of accuracy and privacy issues, particularly concerning racial bias and safety. Biofire claims that, to maintain the device’s security, the weapon relies upon a solid state, encrypted electronic fire control technology utilized by modern fighter jets and missile systems. Any biometric data stays solely on the firearm itself, the company says, which does not feature onboard Bluetooth, WiFi, or GPS capabilities. A portable, touchscreen-enabled Smart Dock also supplies an interface for the weapon’s owner to add or remove up to five users. The announcement declares the Smart Gun is “impossible to modify” or convert into a conventional handgun. The Smart Gun’s biometric capabilities are powered by a lithium-ion battery that purportedly lasts several months on a single charge, and “can fire continuously for several hours.” 

According to Daniel Webster, Bloomberg Professor of American Health in Violence Prevention and a Distinguished Scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Biofire may have developed an advancement in gun safety, but Webster considers Biofire’s longterm impact on “firearm injury, violence, and suicide” to be “a very open ended question.”

[Related: Two alcohol recovery apps shared user data without their consent.]

“I’d be very cautious about [any] estimated deaths and injuries advertised by the technology,” Webster wrote to PopSci in an email. While Biofire boasts its safety capabilities, “Many of these estimates are based on an unrealistic assumption that these personalized or ‘smart guns’ would magically replace all existing guns that lack the technology… We have more guns than people in the US and I doubt that everyone will rush to melt down their guns and replace them with Biofire guns.”

Webster is also unsure who would purchase the Biofire Smart Gun. Citing a 2016 survey he co-conducted and published in 2019, Webster says there appears to be “noteworthy skepticism” among gun owners at the prospect of “personalized” or smart guns. “While we did not describe the exact technology that Biofire is using… interest or demand for personalized guns was greatest among gun owners who already stored their guns safely and were more safety-minded,” he explains.

[Related: Tesla employees allegedly viewed and joked about drivers’ car camera footage.]

For Webster, the main question boils down to how a Biofire Smart Gun will affect people’s exposure to firearms within various types of risk. Although he concedes the technology could hypothetically reduce the amount of underage and unauthorized use of improperly stored weapons, there’s no way to know how many new guns might enter people’s lives with the release of the Smart Gun. “How many people [would] bring [Smart Guns] into their homes because the guns are viewed as safe who otherwise wouldn’t?” he asks. Webster also worries Biofire’s new product arguably won’t deal with the statistically biggest problem within gun ownership.

While some self-inflicted harm could be reduced by biometric locks, the vast majority of firearm suicides occur via the gun’s original owner—according to Pew Research Center, approximately 54-percent (24,292) of all gun deaths in 2020 resulted from self-inflicted wounds. Additionally, guns within a home roughly doubles the risk for domestic homicides, nearly all of which are committed by the guns’ owners.

“Biofire is strongly committed to expanding access to safe and informed gun ownership and emphasizes the importance of education and training to every current and future gun owner,” the company stated in its official announcement. The company plans to begin shipping their Smart Gun in early 2024 at a starting price of $1,499, “in adherence with all applicable state and local regulations.”

The post Startup claims biometric scanning can make a ‘secure’ gun appeared first on Popular Science.

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Body armor has a clear purpose: to prevent a bullet, or perhaps a shard from an explosion, from puncturing the fragile human tissue behind it. But donning it doesn’t come lightly, and its weight is measured in pounds. For example, the traditional Kevlar fabric that would go into soft body armor weighs about 1 pound per square foot, and you need more than one square foot to do the job. 

But a new kind of Kevlar is coming out, and it aims to be just as resistant to projectiles as the original material, while also being thinner and lighter. It will not be tailored into a John Wick-style suit, which is the stuff of Hollywood, but DuPont, the company that makes it, says that it’s about 30 percent lighter. If the regular Kevlar has that approximate weight of 1 pound per square foot, the new stuff weighs in at about .65 or .7 pounds per square foot. 

“We’ve invented a new fiber technology,” says Steven LaGanke, a global segment leader at DuPont.

Here’s what to know about how bullet-resistant material works in general, and how the new stuff is different. 

A bullet-resistant layer needs to do two tasks: ensure that the bullet cannot penetrate it, and also absorb its energy—and translate that energy into the bullet itself, which ideally deforms when it hits. A layer of fabric that could catch a bullet but then acted like a loose net after it was hit by a baseball would be bad, explains Joseph Hovanec, a global technology manager at the company. “You don’t want that net to fully extend either, because now that bullet is extending into your body.”

The key is how strong the fibers are, plus the fact that “they do not elongate very far,” says Hovanec. “It’s the resistance of those fibers that will then cause the bullet—because it has such large momentum, [or] kinetic energy—to deform. So you’re actually catching it, and the energy is going into deforming the bullet versus breaking the fiber.” The bullet, he says, should “mushroom.” Here’s a simulation video.

Kevlar is a type of synthetic fiber called a para-aramid, and it’s not the only para-aramid in town: Another para-aramid that can be used in body armor is called Twaron, made by a company called Teijin Limited. Some body armor is also made out of polyethylene, a type of plastic. 

The new form of Kevlar, which the company calls Kevlar EXO, is also a type of aramid fiber, although slightly different from the original Kevlar. Regular Kevlar is made up of two monomers, which is a kind of molecule, and the new kind has one more monomer, for a total of three. “That third monomer allows us to gain additional alignment of those molecules in the final fiber, which gives us the additional strength, over your traditional aramid, or Kevlar, or polyethylene,” says Hovanec.

Body armor in general needs to meet a specific standard in the US from the National Institute of Justice. The goal of the new kind of Kevlar is that because it’s stronger, it could still meet the same standard while being used in thinner quantities in body armor. For example, regular Kevlar is roughly 0.26 or .27 inches thick, and the new material could be as thin as 0.19 inches, says Hovanec. “It’s a noticeable decrease in thickness of the material.”  

And the ballistic layer that’s made up of a material like Kevlar or Twaron is just one part of what goes into body armor. “There’s ballistics [protection], but then the ballistics is in a sealed carrier to protect it, and then there’s the fabric that goes over it,” says Hovanec. “When you finally see the end article, there’s a lot of additional material that goes on top of it.”

The post A new kind of Kevlar aims to stop bullets with less material appeared first on Popular Science.

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ON THE WEBSITE Soar.Earth, you’ll find a map of the world that at first looks a lot like the one on Google Earth. But zoom in, and rectangles appear. Click on one, and you might find an image from a 1960s spy satellite showing a fresh crater from a nuclear-weapons test. Scoot to different coordinates, and see high-resolution satellite shots of last year’s floods in Western Australia. Northwest of that, there’s a map showing where Saudi Arabia has excavated for a futuristic, 110-mile-long city called The Line. 

The site’s founder, Amir Farhand, has big dreams for Soar: He hopes it will become the world’s biggest atlas, allowing users to see all the information that people have gathered about any point on Earth.

While achieving that dream is perhaps impossible, or at least a long way away, Soar already hosts oodles of historical maps, satellite shots from sources like NASA, and even cartography from scientific papers. Containing past and present maps while allowing users to also commission images from satellites, Soar can track the intersecting interests of many different groups: climate scientists, developers, intelligence analysts, mining experts, and defense contractors. 

The interests of the last two groups are, in fact, what spurred Soar’s creation.

Charted territory

Farhand, who lives in Australia, was always a plot-the-world kind of guy. He moved a lot as a kid, but wherever he was, he would ride his bike around his neighborhood and make maps of the surroundings.

After learning about satellite imagery and its relevance to Earth science in college, and then dropping out of a PhD program, Farhand became a consultant. He worked all over the world on geospatial projects. 

“Then I thought, You know what, I love atlases,” he says. “And I thought to myself, Why aren’t all the world’s atlases in one place?” 

Why wasn’t there a spot where he could overlay a leopard habitat range over a climatic map and so see the correlation? Why couldn’t he also see how someone had baroquely hand-drawn the area’s layout hundreds of years ago? Who wouldn’t want that?

Back then, around 2011, those were relatively idle questions for him. But in the years to come, Farhand would take them to work. In 2013, he created an application called Mappt—it contained the early seeds of what Soar would become. A few years after Mappt became available, a new customer took an interest: the US government. In 2017, a defense-centric version called Mappt Military appeared on the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s official app store. Verified Department of Defense or intelligence community members could use it for free. It’s still available today, allowing users to map hazards, plan logistics and transport, and plot place-based risks, among other things. 

Defense users and also people in the mining industry were interested in using the technology to build their own private atlases, storing all their geospatial data in one spot, accessible from anywhere. The contents of those atlases ranged from modern drone and satellite photos to pictures taken from airplanes in the 1960s, and they wanted it in the field, offline. 

“It was all based on that premise of flexibility of having mapping data on your hands,” Farhand says. 

Soar rose, in a way, out of Mappt’s iterations. On the site, users can create their own private atlases—as the defense and mining companies wanted to—and include proprietary data, like satellite images they buy through the site. Or they can upload content for everyone to see, as long as they own its copyright or do their best to attribute public domain and out-of-copyright images. Or they can do both. Interacting with the site is free, as is creating an account, although some features (like making a private atlas) do cost money. Today, both Mappt and Soar.Earth are part of the parent company, Soar. 

On the Soar site, users can whip across the screen to anywhere on the planet and see if someone has uploaded an aerial photo from the 1950s, maps of flooding, maps of drought, and plots of elevation—all of which are available for, say, the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. They can make measurements, add annotations, make different layers transparent and see how they overlap. 

The team is currently working through how best to moderate content on the platform to ensure it fits with Soar’s guidelines. Right now, anyone can upload maps in near real time if they agree their data fits with copyright and community guidelines. The Soar team generally logs in and checks on new uploads several times a day. Users can also report violations. Soon, though, the company will split users into two tiers: one of trusted power users who can automatically upload, and another that will have to await Soar’s approval before their maps appear. Farhand compares their policy to what you might find with Google Reviews or YouTube, noting that he’s “hopeful we can use precursor crowdsourcing platforms for directions on what to not to do, as much as what to do.”

If Soar doesn’t yet have the maps a user is looking for, they can request free NASA or Sentinel (a European satellite program) data of the area, buy brand-new shots from commercial satellites, or order archival images—all of which can be done through Soar and added to the public atlas of atlases. “They were very, very early into making it possible to just log into a website and buy satellite imagery,” says Joe Morrison, a vice president at Umbra, a company that takes radar-based data from space. 

Morrison writes a popular industry newsletter called “A Closer Look,” about “maps, satellites, and the businesses that create them,” and his analysis often laments the typical difficulty of buying shots from space: The pricing is opaque, the licensing is often restrictive, and actually opening the shutter can take so long the picture is no longer relevant. Soar aims to solve a lot of those problems. 

The combination and chronology of the data is interesting to people doing, say, climate research, tracking a conflict, or trying to suss out secret goings-on by using public data. Soar provides a platform on which users can do a form of what’s known as open-source intelligence, or OSINT, which can be a powerful way to track intra- or inter-country dynamics.

Morrison says what sets Soar apart from other geospatial endeavors is that it has focused on creating a community that publicly shares interactive maps. Most people aren’t going to pay for their own shiny satellite pictures, or spend all their free time aligning old National Geographic maps to the Soar lat-long grid, or adding daily updates on the big construction project across town. But some people will. 

Farhand thinks of the dynamic like that of YouTube: Many more people watch videos than create them. “We get this beautiful, enriching content from incredible specialists around the world,” he says of Soar’s homegrown influencers. “And then you’ve got these hordes of viewers that come on board.”

Spatial storytelling

One big-audience user who shares regular info on Soar goes by the handle War Mapper. They regularly post maps that consolidate updates on the conflict in Ukraine, showing the extent of territory controlled by Ukraine, or Russian-occupied territory, among other data. 

Another popular presence is Harry Stranger, a 23-year-old from Brisbane. “I would consider him an open-source analyst,” Morrison says. “He’s not really a journalist. He’s not really a military analyst. And he’s not just the normal amateur sleuth. He’s somewhere between.”

A while ago, Stranger, a space nerd, wanted to see a picture of a particular launchpad. Like so many interesting things, space infrastructure is hard to reach. You can’t just stroll up to a rocket’s spot on Cape Canaveral. And you definitely cannot do so at China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center. “People can’t just walk up to and take a picture of it,” he says of such secure spots. But space offers a view of it all. And there aren’t really restrictions—despite rumors to the contrary—on what civilians can nab shots of.  

At some point, Stranger heard that he could get satellite images of the launchpad, for free, from Sentinel. “I became addicted,” he says.

Stranger started to keep an eye on various aerospace places in the world, particularly those located in countries that don’t give much public notice of their activities, like China. Was there construction? Is there a rocket rocking on the pad? Sometimes he hears a rumor and starts monitoring the site via satellite. Without having any insider knowledge, he could know more than he ever had before. “Space from space,” he calls his endeavors now.

When you can’t go through, don’t go around: Go above and look down. It is, after all, what the intelligence apparatus has been doing since the satellites that took the photos were invented. 

Stranger’s interest in monitoring earthly activity from above mirrors the more automated interests of intelligence programs, like the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s SMART program, which aims to create software that can spot terrestrial changes, like heavy construction or new crop growth, from satellite imagery. 

Soon, Stranger was interested in what the intelligence types of the past had seen, which he was able to access through the lenses of old spy satellite systems whose images had since been cleared for public release. “I knew it existed out there,” he says of the declassified images. He didn’t think “out there” would end up being as easy as logging into the United States Geological Survey website, but it was.

If the formerly hushed images had already been scanned, he could download them for free, and he soon set up a GoFundMe to pay for the digitization of more. Soar, which Stranger hadn’t really used yet, donated $750.

“That’s where we kind of kicked off our relationship,” he says.

He started uploading the declassified imagery to Soar. Now, anyone can see US spy satellite shots of the Jiuquan Launch Center in China from the 1970s, along with a 2022 commercial-satellite image of a rocket test stand at the site, which was hit by an explosion the year before.

Guide to the planet

Right now, Soar hosts just under 100,000 different maps (excluding the shots from satellites like Sentinel, which add data all the time). Farhand estimates that this six-digit number is less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s total extant maps. “I don’t think that’s good enough,” he says. 

But if the company can get up to 1 or 2 percent of the total, he thinks, Soar could become as ubiquitous as Google Maps but with more context and community. That’s the dream anyway—a castle in the air that he’d like to tether to Earth. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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In the future, the US Air Force may employ drones that can accompany advanced fighter jets like the F-35, cruising along as fellow travelers. The vision for these drones is that they would be robotic wingmates, with perhaps two assigned to one F-35, a jet that’s operated by a single pilot. They would act as force multipliers for the aircraft that has a human in it, and would be able to execute tasks like dogfighting. The official term for these uncrewed machines is Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and the Air Force is thinking about acquiring them in bulk: It has said it would like to have 1,000 of them. 

To develop uncrewed aircraft like these, though, the military needs to be able to rely on autonomy software that can operate a combat drone just as effectively as a human would pilot a fighter jet, if not more so. A stepping stone to get there is an initiative called VENOM, and it will involve converting around a half dozen F-16s to be able to operate autonomously, albeit with a human in the cockpit as a supervisor. 

VENOM, of course, is an acronym. It stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model, with “Viper” being a common nickname for the F-16 Fighting Falcon, a highly maneuverable fighter jet.  

The VENOM program is about testing out autonomy on an F-16 that is “combat capable,” says Lt. Col. Robert Waller, the commander of the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

“We’re taking a combat F-16 and converting that into an autonomy flying testbed,” Waller adds. “We want to do what we call combat autonomy, and that is the air vehicle with associated weapons systems—radar, advanced electronic warfare capabilities, and the ability to integrate weapons—so you loop all of that together into one flying testbed.” 

The program builds on other efforts. A notable related initiative involved a special aircraft called VISTA, or the X-62A. Last year, AI algorithms from both DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory took the controls of that unique F-16D, which is a flying testbed with space for two aviators in it. 

[Related: Why DARPA put AI at the controls of a fighter jet]

The VENOM program will involve testing “additional capabilities that you cannot test on VISTA,” Waller says. “We now want to actually transition that [work from VISTA] to platforms with real combat capabilities, to see how those autonomy agents now operate with real systems instead of simulated systems.” 

At a recent panel discussion at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that touched on this topic, Air Force Maj. Gen. Evan Dertien said that VENOM is “the next evolution into scaling up what autonomy can do,” building on VISTA. Popular Science sibling website The War Zone reported on this topic last month. 

The project will see them using “about six” aircraft to test out the autonomy features, Waller tells PopSci, although the exact number hasn’t been determined, and neither has the exact model F-16 to get the autonomy features. “If we want the most cutting-edge radar or [electronic warfare] capabilities, then those will need to be integrated to an F-16C,” Waller says, referring to an F-16 model that seats just one person. 

The role of the human aviator in the cockpit of an F-16 that is testing out these autonomous capabilities is two-fold, Waller explains. The first is to be a “safety observer to ensure that the airplanes always return home, and that the autonomy agent doesn’t do anything unintended,” he notes. The second piece is to be “evaluating system performance.” In other words, to check out if the autonomy agent is doing a good job. 

Waller stresses that the human will have veto power over what the plane does. “These platforms, as flying testbeds, can and will let an autonomy agent fly the aircraft, and execute combat-related skills,” he says. “That pilot is in total control of the air vehicle, with the ability to turn off everything, to include the autonomy agent from flying anything, or executing anything.” 

Defense News notes that the Air Force is proposing almost $50 million for this project for the fiscal year 2024. 

“These airplanes will generally fly without combat loads—so no missiles, no bullets—[and] most, if not all of this, will be simulated capabilities, with a human that can turn off that capability at any time,” Waller says. 

Ultimately, the plan is not to develop F-16s that can fly themselves in combat without a human on board, but instead to keep developing the autonomy technology so it could someday operate a drone that can act like a fighter jet and accompany other aircraft piloted by people. 

Hear more about VENOM below, beginning around the 42 minute mark:

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Earlier this month, a new kind of electric boat was demonstrated in Colombia. The uncrewed COTEnergy Boat debuted at the Colombiamar 2023 business and industrial exhibition, held from March 8 to 10 in Cartagena. It is likely a useful tool for navies, and was on display as a potential product for other nations to adopt. 

While much of the attention in uncrewed sea vehicles has understandably focused on the ocean-ranging craft built for massive nations like the United States and China, the introduction of small drone ships for regional powers and routine patrol work shows just far this technology has come, and how widespread it is likely to be in the future.

“The Colombian Navy (ARC) intends to deploy the new electric unmanned surface vehicle (USV) CotEnergy Boat in April,” Janes reports, citing Admiral Francisco Cubides. 

The boat is made from aluminum and has a compact, light body. (See it on Instagram here.) Just 28.5 feet long and under 8 feet wide, the boat is powered by a 50 hp electric motor; its power is sustained in part by solar panels mounted on the top of the deck. Those solar panels can provide up to 1.1 kilowatts at peak power, which is enough to sustain its autonomous operation for just shy of an hour.

The vessel was made by Atomo Tech and Colombia’s state-owned naval enterprise company, COTECMAR. The company says the boat’s lightweight form allows it to take on different payloads, making it suitable for “intelligence and reconnaissance missions, port surveillance and control missions, support in communications link missions, among others.”

Putting sensors on small, autonomous and electric vessels is a recurring theme in navies that employ drone boats. Even a part of the ocean that seems small, like a harbor, represents a big job to watch. By putting sensors and communications links onto an uncrewed vessel, a navy can effectively extend the range of what can be seen by human operators. 

In January, the US Navy used Saildrones for this kind of work in the Persian Gulf. Equipped with cameras and processing power, the Saildrones identified and tracked ships in an exercise as they spotted them, making that information available to human operators on crewed vessels and ultimately useful to naval commanders. 

Another reason to turn to uncrewed vessels for this work is that they are easier to run on fully  electric power, as opposed to a diesel or gasoline. COTECMAR’s video description notes that the COTEEnergy Boat is being “incorporated into the offer of sustainable technological solutions that we are designing for the energy transition.” Making patrol craft solar powered and electric starts the vessels sustainable.

While developed as a military tool, the COTENERGY boat can also have a role in scientific and research expeditions. It could serve as a communications link between other ships, or between ships and other uncrewed vessels, ensuring reliable operation and data collection. Putting in sensors designed to look under the water’s surface could aid with oceanic mapping and observation. As a platform for sensors, the COTEnergy Boat is limited by what its adaptable frame can carry and power, although its load capacity is 880 pounds.

Not much more is known about the COTEnergy Boat at this point. But what is compelling about the vessel is how it fits into similar plans of other navies. Fielding small useful autonomous scouts or patrol craft, if successful, could become a routine part of naval and coastal operations.

With these new kinds of boat come new challenges. Because uncrewed ships lack humans, it can make them easier targets for other navies or possibly maritime criminal groups, like pirates. The same kind of Saildrones used by the US Navy to scout the Persian Gulf have also been detained, if briefly, by the Iranian Navy. With such detentions comes the risk that data on the ship is compromised, and data collection tools figured out, making it easier for hostile forces to fool or evade the sensors in the future.

Still, the benefits of having a flexible, solar-powered robot ship outweigh such risks. Inspection of ports is routine until it isn’t, and with a robotic vessel there to scout first, humans can wait to act until they are needed, safely removed from their remote robotic companions.

Watch a little video of the COTEnergy Boat below:

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On March 27, Gecko Robotics announced its hull-inspecting robots will be used to assess a US Navy destroyer and an amphibious assault ship, expanding work already done to inspect Navy ships. These robots map surfaces as they climb them, creating useful and data-rich models to better help crews and maintainers find flaws and fix them. As the Navy looks to sustain and expand the role of its fleet while minimizing the number of new sailors needed, enlisting the aid of robot climbers can guide present and future repairs, and help ensure more ships are seaworthy for more time.

Getting ships into the sea means making sure they’re seaworthy, and it’s as important to naval operations as ensuring the crew is fed and the supplies are stocked. Maintenance can be time-intensive, and the Navy already has a backlog of work that needs to be done on the over 280 ships it has. Part of getting that maintenance right, and ensuring the effort is spent where it needs to be, is identifying the specific parts of a ship worn down by time at sea.

Enter a robotic critter called Gecko.

“The Navy found that using Gecko achieved incredible time savings and improvement in data quantity and quality. Before Gecko, the Navy’s inspection process produced 6,000 data points. Gecko provides significantly more coverage by collecting over 3.3 million data points for the hull and over 463,000 data points for the outboard side of the starboard rudder,” Ed Bryner, director of engineering at Gecko Robotics, tells Popular Science via email.

Those data points are collected by a hull-climbing robot. Gecko makes several varieties of the Toka robot, and the Navy inspections use the Toka 4. This machine can crawl over 30 feet a minute, recording details of the hull as it goes. 

“It is a versatile, multi-function robot designed initially to help hundreds of commercial customers in the power, manufacturing and oil and gas industries. It utilizes advanced sensors, cameras, and ultrasonics to detect potential defects and damages in flight decks, hulls and rudders,” says Bryner.

To climb the walls, the Toka uses wheels with neodymium permanent rare earth magnets that work on the carbon steel of the ship’s hull. The sensors are used to detect how thick walls are, if there is pitting or other degradation in the walls, and then to plot a map of all that damage. This is done with computers on-board the robot as it works, and then also processed in the cloud, through a service offered in Gecko’s Cantilever Platform.

“The millions of data points collected by the Toka 4 are used to build a high-fidelity digital twin to detect damage, automatically build repair plans, forecast service life and ensure structural integrity,” says Bryner.

A digital twin is a model and map based on the scanned information. Working on that model, maintainers can see where the ship may have deteriorated—perhaps a storm with greater force or a gritty patch of ocean that pockmarked the hull in real but hard to see ways. This model can guide repairs at port, and then it can also serve as a reference tool for maintainers when the ship returns after a deployment. Having a record of previous stress can guide repairs and work, and over time build a portrait of what kinds of degradation happen where.

“Gecko’s Cantilever Platform allows customers to pinpoint & optimize precise areas of damage in need of remediation (rather than replacing large swaths of a flight deck, for example), track their physical assets over time to identify trends and patterns, prioritize and build repair plans, deploy repair budgets efficiently, and make detailed maintenance plans for the service life of the asset,” says Bryner.

The robot is a tool for guiding repairs, operated by one or two people while it inspects and maps. This map then guides maintenance to where it is most needed, and in turn shapes maintenance that comes after. It’s a way of modernizing the slow but important work of keeping ships ship-shape. 

So far, reports Breaking Defense, Gecko’s system has scanned six ships, with two more announced this week. Deck maintenance is a dull duty, but it’s vital that it be done, and done well. In moments of action, everyone on a ship needs to know they can trust the vessel they are standing on to work as intended. Finding and fixing hidden flaws, or bolstering weaker areas before going back out to sea, ensures that the routine parts of ship operation can operate as expected. 

Watch a video of the robot below: 

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Earlier this month, Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries showed off a new tool for fighting against drones. With an enclosed cabin on top of a four-wheel ATV frame, the system mounts a high-energy laser in the back, alongside the power needed to make it work. It is part of the growing arsenal of counter-drone weapons, and one that fits into the expanded role and arsenal of Japan’s modern military.

The laser and ATV combination was on display at the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) Japan conference, which ran from March 15 through 17 outside Tokyo. The exhibition is a place for various arms makers from around the world to gather and showcase their wares to interested collaborators or governments. This year’s conference, the second Japan-hosted iteration, had 66 countries and 178 companies represented.

The system, while funded by Kawasaki, was made at the request of Japan’s Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency (ATLA), a rough analog of DARPA that looks to integrate new tech into Japan’s self-defense forces. On display, the laser system included a tracker, a high-energy laser, a gimbal to balance and hold the laser’s focus, and a 2 kilowatt power source. It has a range of just 100 meters or 328 feet for destroying drones, though it can track targets at up to 300 meters, or 984 feet. It was mounted on a Mule Pro-FX, a three-seat all terrain vehicle that retails for $15,000.

“The system tracks targets with an infrared camera, and laser beams cause instantaneous damage to UAVs and mortar shells. ATLA and Kawasaki have been testing it for this purpose, plus they are researching whether it can also intercept missiles,” reports Shephard Media.

A 2019 document from the Ministry of Defense outlined Japan’s vision for how to use new technology to improve its defense forces. Lasers, or directed energy weapons, are mentioned as a tool to intercept incoming missiles through precise targeting. These weapons are seen as part of a comprehensive suite of tools that utilize the electro-magnetic spectrum, a category that includes sensors for watching enemy signals, as well as jammers and high-powered microwaves that can interfere with or harm enemy electronics.

“High-power directed energy weapons must be realized from the standpoint of low reaction time countermeasures for accelerated aircraft and missiles as well as low cost countermeasures for miniature unmanned aircraft, mortar shells, and other large-scale, low cost threats,” reads a 2020 strategy document from ATLA. This document explicitly argues for the damage and destruction by high-powered lasers as their most salient points. Against missiles, uncrewed ships, and drones, especially smaller cheaper drones, lasers can be an invaluable asset.

What sets Kawasaki’s displayed laser vehicle apart from others is the power level. At just 2 kilowatts, the vehicle is attempting to fry drones with an amount of power roughly comparable to what it takes to run a dishwasher. Raytheon’s counter-drone laser, which Popular Science got to fire first-hand in October 2022, fires a 10 kilowatt beam. Other laser weapons, designed to quickly burn through incoming artillery rounds or missiles, can use power in the tens or even low hundreds of kilowatts.

Drones, especially the commercial kind that have become an essential part of how armies in Ukraine fight, are small, weak targets. A laser does not necessarily need a ton of power if it is going to burn through the more vulnerable parts of a quadcopter. Tracking tools, which let lasers stay focused on a target, can let a lower-powered laser burn through plastic and metal in the same time as a more powerful but less locked-on laser might.

While the laser at DSEI was displayed on the back of an ATV, it could be mounted on other vehicles, a situation where its power requirements could be an added bonus. As a tool for hunting down drones, limited range and power hinder function, but as a defensive system mounted on vehicles that might come under attack by drone, a smaller laser that sips power could be enough to disable a drone. Drones can be deadly threats on their own by dropping bombs, but they are also used as spotters for other weapons, like artillery. If the spotter is incapacitated and the convoy moves on, artillery are left to fire at where they think the vehicles are, rather than where they know their targets to be. 

“Japan will also reinforce the capability to respond to small UAVs with weapons including directed-energy weapons,” reads a defense strategy published December 2022. “By approximately ten years from now, Japan will reinforce its integrated air and missile defense capabilities by further introducing research on capability to respond to hypersonic weapons in the gliding phase and interception by non-kinetic means to deal with assets such as small UAVs.”

Lasers like this are the start of an effective counter-drone strategy, one explicitly framed as a beginning approach while developing more and different powerful systems. These could include high-powered lasers and high-powered microwaves. As the threat from small drones has expanded, so too are the tools explored by countries to stop all manner of aerial threat, including small drones.

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On March 8, in the ocean between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, the US Navy tested out a new drone. Called the Aerovel Flexrotor, it rests on a splayed tail, and boasts a powerful rotor just below the neck of its bulbous front-facing camera pod. The tail-sitting drone needs very little deck space for takeoff or landing, and once in the sky, it pivots and flies like a typical fixed-wing plane. It joins a growing arsenal of tools that are especially useful in the confined launch zones of smaller ship decks or unimproved runways.

The March flights took place as part of the International Maritime Exercise 2023, billed as a multinational undertaking involving 7,000 people from across 50 nations. Activities in the exercise include working on following orders together, maritime patrol, countering naval mines, testing the integration of drones and artificial intelligence, and work related to global health. It is a hodgepodge of missions, capturing the multitude of tasks that navies can be called upon to perform.

This deployment is at least the second time the Flexrotor has been brought to the Persian Gulf by the US Navy. In December 2022, a Coast Guard ship operating as part of a Naval task force in the region launched a Flexrotor. This flight was part of an event called Digital Horizon, aimed at integrating drones and AI into Navy operations, and it included 10 systems not yet used in the region.

“The Flexrotor can support intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions day and night using a daylight or infrared camera to provide a real-time video feed,” read a 2022 release from US Central Command. The release continued: “In addition to providing ISR capability, UAVs like the Flexrotor enable Task Force 59 to enhance a resilient communications network used by unmanned systems to relay video footage, pictures and other data to command centers ashore and at sea.”

Putting drones on ships is hardly new. ScanEagles, a scout-drone used by the US Navy since 2005, can be launched from a rail and landed by net or skyhook. What sets the Flexrotor apart is not that it is a drone on a ship, but the fact that it requires a minimum of infrastructure to make it usable. This is because the drone is a tail-sitter.

What is a tail-sitter?

There are two basic ways to move a heavier-than-air vehicle from the ground to the sky: generate lift from spinning rotors, or generate lift from forward thrust and fixed wings. Helicopters have many advantages, needing only landing pads instead of runways, and they can easily hover in flight. But helicopters’ aerodynamics limit cruising and maximum speeds, even as advances continue to be made. 

Fixed wings, in turn, need to build speed and lift off on runways, or find another way to get into the sky. For rail-launched drones like the ScanEagle, this is done with a rail, though other methods have been explored.

Between helicopters and fixed-wing craft sit tiltrotors and jump-jets, where the the thrust (from either rotors/propellers or ducted jets) changes as the plane stays level in flight, allowing vertical landings and short takeoffs. This is part of what DARPA is exploring through the SPRINT program.

Tail-sitters, instead, involve the entire plane pivoting in flight. In effect, they look almost like a rocket upon launch, narrow bodies pointed to pierce the sky, before leveling out in flight and letting the efficiency of lift from fixed wings extend flight time and range. (Remember the space shuttle? It was positioned like a tail-sitter when it blasted off, but landed like an airplane, albeit without engines.) Early tail-sitters suffered because they had to accommodate a human pilot through all those transitions. Modern tail-sitter drones, like the Flexrotor or Australia’s STRIX, instead have human operators guiding the craft remotely from a control station. Another example is Bell’s APT 70.

The advantage to a tail-sitting drone is that it only needs a clearing or open deck space as large as its widest dimension. In the case of the Flexrotor, that means a rotor diameter of 7.2 feet, with at least one part of the launching surface wide enough for the drone’s nearly 10-foot wingspan. By contrast, the Seahawk helicopters used by the US Navy have a rotor diameter of over 53 feet. Ships that can already accommodate helicopters can likely easily add tail-sitter drones, and ships that couldn’t possibly fit a full-sized crewed helicopter might be able to take on and operate a drone scout.

In use, the Flexrotor boasts a cruising speed of 53 mph, a top speed of 87 mph, and potentially more than 30 hours of continuous operation. After takeoff, the Flexrotor pivots to fixed-wing flight, and the splayed tail retracts into a normal tail shape, allowing the craft to operate like a regular fixed-wing plane in the sky. Long endurance drones like these allow crews to pilot them in shifts, reducing pilot fatigue without having to land the drone to switch operators. Aerovel claims that Flexrotors have a range of over 1,265 miles at cruising speeds. In the air, the drone can serve as a scout with daylight and infrared cameras, and it can also work as a communications relay node, especially valuable if fleets are dispersed and other communications are limited.

As the Navy looks to expand what it can see and respond to, adding scouts that can be stowed away and then launched from cleared deck space expands the perception of ships. By improving scouting on the ocean, the drones make the vastness of the sea a little more knowable.

Watch a video below:

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The Air Force is asking Congress for 1,000 new combat drones to accompany planes into battle. The announcement, from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, came March 7, as part of a broader push for Air Force modernization. It fits into a broader plan to combine crewed fighters, like F-35s and new designs, with drone escorts, thus expanding the scope of what the Air Force can do without similarly increasing the demand for new pilots.

Kendall spoke at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. The speech focused on what the Air Force can and must do to remain competitive with China, which Kendall referred to as “our packing challenge.” While the Air Force can outline its expectations and desires in a budget, it is ultimately up to Congress to set the funding sought by the military. That means Kendall’s call for 1,000 drones isn’t just an ask, it has to be a sales pitch.

“The [Department of the Air Force] is moving forward with a family of systems for the next generation of air dominance, that will include both the NGAD platform and the introduction of uncrewed collaborative aircraft to provide affordable mass and dramatically increased cost-effectiveness,” said Kendall. By NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance), Kendall was referring to a concept for future fighter planning, where a new crewed fighter plane heads a family of systems that includes escort drones. One of these potential drone escorts is called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA.

This Collaborative Combat Aircraft fits with the broader plans of the Air Force to augment and expand the number of aircraft it has by having drones fly as escorts and accessories to crewed and piloted fighters. These fighters include the existing and expanding inventory of F-35A stealth jets, as well as the next generation of planes planned for the future.

Kendall broke down the math like this: “[General Charles Q. Brown] and I have recently given our planners a nominal quantity of collaborative combat aircraft to assume for planning purposes. That planning assumption is 1,000 CCAs,” said Kendall. “This figure was derived from an assumed two CCAs per 200 NGAD platforms [equalling 400 drones], an additional two for each of 300 F-35s, for a total of a thousand.” 

One reason for the Air Force to pursue drone escorts is because they can expand what the planes can do, without requiring another expensive craft of a vulnerable pilot. Stealth on an F-35A jet fighter protects the pilot and the $78 million plane. If a drone can fly alongside a plane, help it on missions, and costs a fraction of the crewed fighter, then it may make more sense for the drones to be, if not disposable, somewhat more expendable.

Previously, the Air Force referred to this as “attritable,” a term coined to suggest the drones could be lost to combat (attrition), without emphasizing that the drones were built specifically to be lost. In Kendall’s remarks on March 7, he instead used the term “affordable mass,” which emphasizes the way these drones will increase the numbers of aircraft an enemy has to defeat in order to stop an aerial attack.

“One way to think of CCAs is as remotely controlled versions of the charting pods, electronic warfare pods, or weapons now carried under the wings of our crude aircraft. CCAs will dramatically improve the performance of our crude aircraft and significantly reduce the risk to our pilots,” said Kendall.

In this way, a drone escort flying alongside a fighter is just an extra set of bombs, cameras, missiles, or jammers, all in a detached body flying as an escort to the fighter. In 2017, the Air Force announced an attritable drone escort, using the Valkyrie built for the task by target drone maker Kratos. 

The first Valkyrie is already a museum piece, but it represents a rough overview of the kind of cost and functions the Air Force may want in a Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Priced at around $2 million, a Valkyrie is not cheap, but it is much cheaper than the fighters it would fly alongside. As designed, it can fly for up to 3,400 miles, with a top speed of 650 mph. That would make it capable of operating in theater with a fighter, with escorts likely delivered to bases by ground transport and then synched up with the fighters before missions.

Getting drones to fly alongside crewed planes has been part of the Air Force’s Loyal Wingman program, which shifts the burden of flying onto onboard systems in the drone. Presently, drones used by the US, like the MQ-9 Reaper that crashed into the Black Sea, are labor-intensive, crewed by multiple shifts of remote pilots. To make drones labor-saving, they will need to work similar to a human compassion, receiving commands from a squad leader but independent enough to execute those commands without human hands on the controls. The Air Force is experimenting with AI piloting of jets, including having artificial intelligence fly a crewed F-16 in December.

Whatever shape these loyal wingmates end up taking, by asking for them in bulk, Kendall is making a clear bid. The age of fighter pilots in the Air Force may not be over, but for the wars of the future, they will be joined by robots as allies.

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ON THE COLORADO PLAINS just below the Rocky Mountains, near the quaint town of Berthoud, lies the headquarters of a space company called Ursa Major. There, just about an hour’s drive north of Denver, the company regularly test-fires rocket engines straight out the back of an onsite bunker. 

These engines, which are mostly 3D printed, aren’t just for launching satellites into space: They’re also of interest to the US military for propelling hypersonic vehicles. And their dual-use nature is a modern manifestation of the two faces that rocket technology has always had, which is that it is simultaneously useful for defensive and offensive purposes, and for cosmic exploration.

With this technology in hand, the company hopes to get both civilian and military projects off the ground.

3… 2…1… liftoff

Joe Laurienti, who founded Ursa Major in 2015, grew up not too far from Berthoud. His father worked for Ball Aerospace—the cosmic arm of the company that makes a whole lot of aluminum cans, and the former owner of Ursa Major’s current 90-acre site. “He was always working on satellites,” says Laurienti. But when Laurienti went to see one of his father’s payloads launch, he thought, “The thing my dad worked on is really important. It’s on top of this rocket. But the fire coming out the bottom is way more exciting.”

Laurienti has been chasing that fire ever since, his life consumed by propulsion: the technology that makes rockets go up fast enough to counteract gravity and reach orbit. As an adult, he joined SpaceX’s propulsion team, then slipped over to Blue Origin—hitting two of the trifecta of space-launch companies owned by famous billionaires. (The third is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.)

Soon, Laurienti saw others in the industry trying to start commercial rocket companies. He, perhaps biased, didn’t think that was a good idea: The heavy hitters that were founded first would obviously win, and the others would just be also-rans.

Nevertheless, he thought he had a startup to contribute to the mix: one that wouldn’t make entire rockets but just engines, to sell to rocket companies—much like General Electric makes engines that propel aircraft from Boeing or Airbus. “I spent my career on the engines, and that was always kind of a pain point” for the industry, says Laurienti.

Rocket engines, of course, are pretty important for heaving the space-bound vehicle upward. “A little over 50 percent of launch failures in the last 10 years are propulsion-related,” explains Bill Murray, Ursa’s vice president of engineering, who’s known Laurienti since they were both undergrads at the University of Southern California. You can take that to mean that half the complexity of a rocket exists inside the engines. Take that out of some rocket maker’s equation for them? Their job theoretically gets a lot easier.

“That’s the next wave of aerospace,” thought Laurienti. “It’s specialization.” 

With that idea, he sold his SpaceX stock in preparation for his new venture. “Instead of buying a house and starting a family, I bought a 3D printer, started the company, and made my mom cry,” he says.

3D printing engines—and entire rockets

The 3D printer was key to Laurienti’s vision. Today, 80 percent of a given Ursa engine is 3D printed with a metal alloy—and printed as a unit, rather than as separate spat-out elements welded together later. Most space companies use additive manufacturing (another way to refer to 3D printing) to some degree, but in general, they aren’t 3D printing the majority of their hardware. And they also aren’t, in general, designing their space toys to take advantage of 3D printing’s special traits, like making a complicated piece of hardware as one single part rather than hundreds.

That kind of mindset is also important at another company, Relativity Space, which has 3D printed basically an entire rocket—including the engines. Its Terran 1 rocket is the largest 3D printed object on Earth. The team attempted to launch the rocket on March 8 and 11, but it ultimately scrubbed the shots both times due to issues with ground equipment, fuel pressure, and automation systems.

Like Laurienti, Relativity founder Tim Ellis noticed a reluctance to fully embrace 3D printing tech at traditional space companies. At Blue Origin, his former employer, Ellis was the first person to do metal 3D printing; he was an intern desperate to finish creating a turbo pump assembly before his apprenticeship was over. Later, as a full employee, Ellis would go on to start and lead a metal 3D printing division at the company. 

But the way traditional space companies like Blue Origin usually do 3D printing didn’t work for him, because he felt that it didn’t always include designing parts to take advantage of additive manufacturing’s unique capabilities. “Every 3D printed part that Relativity has made would not be possible to build with traditional manufacturing,” says Ellis. The result of that approach has been “structures that ended up looking highly integrated, [because] so many parts of our rocket engine, for example, are built in single pieces.” Those one-part pieces would, in traditional manufacturing, have been made of up to thousands of individual pieces.

He thought more people would have come over to this side by now. “It’s been a lot slower than I’ve expected, honestly, to adopt 3D printing,” he says. “And I think it’s because it’s been slower for people to realize this is not just a manufacturing technology. It’s a new way to develop products.”

Five times the speed of sound

Initially, Ursa Major’s business model focused on space launch: getting things to orbit, a process powered by the company’s first engine, called Hadley. The design, currently still in production, slurps liquid oxygen and kerosene to produce 5,000 pounds of thrust. That’s about the same as the engines on Rocket Lab’s small Electron vehicle, or VirginOrbit’s LauncherOne spaceplane. 

But then an early customer—whose name Laurienti did not share—approached the company about a different application: hypersonics. These vehicles are designed to fly within Earth’s atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound. Usually, when people discuss hypersonics, they’re talking about fast-moving, maneuverable weapons. 

“Hey, we were buying rocket engines from someone else, but they’re not really tailored for hypersonics,” Laurienti recalls this customer saying. “You’re [in] early development. Can you make some changes?” 

They could, although it wouldn’t be as easy as flipping a switch. Hypersonic vehicles often launch from the air—from the bottom of planes—whereas rockets typically shoot from the ground on their way to space. Hypersonics also remain within the atmosphere. That latter part is surprisingly hard, in the context of high speeds.  

Just like rubbing your hand on fabric warms both up, rubbing a hypersonic vehicle against the air raises the temperature of both. “The atmosphere around you is glowing red, trying to eat your vehicle,” says Laurienti. That heat, which creates a plasma around the craft, also makes it hard to send communications signals through. Sustaining high speeds and a working machine in that harsh environment remains a challenge.

But the company seems to have figured out how to make Hadley, which is now in its fourth iteration, work in the contexts of both launching a rocket to space and propelling a hypersonic vehicle that stays within Earth’s atmosphere. As part of one of Ursa Major’s contracts, the military wanted the engine to power an aircraft called the X-60A, a program run by the Air Force Research Lab. The X-60A was built as a system on which hypersonic technologies could fly, to test their mettle and give engineers a way to clock the weapons’ behavior.

Hypersonic weapons—fast, earthbound missiles—aren’t actually faster than intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which carry nuclear warheads and arc up into space and then back down to their targets. But they’re of interest and concern to military types because they don’t have to follow trajectories as predictable as ICBMs do, meaning they’re harder to track and shoot down. Russia, China, India, France, Australia, Germany, Japan, both Koreas, and Iran all have hypersonic weapon research programs.

To intercept these fast-moving weapons, a country might need its own hypersonics, so there’s a defensive element and an offensive one. That’s partly why the Department of Defense has invested billions of dollars in hypersonics research, in addition to its desire to keep up with other countries’ technological abilities. That, of course, often makes other countries want to keep pace or get ahead, which can lead to everyone investing more money in the research.

A long-standing duality

Rocket technology, often touted as a way for humans to explore and dream grandly, has always had a military connection—not implicitly, but in a burning-bright obvious way. “[Nazi Germany’s] V-2 rocket was the progenitor to the intercontinental ballistic missiles,” says Lisa Ruth Rand, an assistant professor of history at Caltech, who focuses on space technologies and their afterlives.

Space-destined rockets were, at least at first, basically ballistic missiles. After all, a powerful stick of fire is a powerful stick of fire, no matter where it is intended to go. And that was true from the Space Age’s very beginning. “The R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik was one of the first operational ICBMs,” says Rand. The first American astronauts, she continues, shot to space on the tip of a modified Redstone ballistic missile. Then came Atlas rockets and Titan rockets, which even share the same names as the US missiles that were souped up to make them.

Rockets and flying weapons also share a kind of philosophical lineage, in terms of the subconscious meaning they impart on those who experience their fire. “They really shrunk the world, in a lot of ways, in time and space,” says Rand. “Accessing another part of the world, whether you were launching a weapon or a satellite, really made the world smaller.”

Today, in general, the development of missile technology has been decoupled from space-launch technology, as the rockets intended for orbit have been built specifically for that purpose. But it’s important not to forget where they came from. “They still all descend from the V-2 and from these military rockets,” says Rand. “And also most of them still launch DOD payloads.”

In a lot of ways, a 3D printed rocket engine that can both power a hypersonic vehicle and launch a satellite into orbit is the 21st-century manifestation of the duality that’s been there from the beginning. “Maybe it’s just saying the quiet part out loud,” says Rand. “What’s happening here—that was always kind of the case. But now we’re just making it very clear that, ‘Yeah, this has got to be used for both. We are building a company and this is our market and, yes, rockets are used for two main things: satellites and launching weapons.’”

‘A shock hitting your chest’ 

It’s no surprise that hypersonic capabilities have gotten their share of American hype—not all of it totally deserved. As defense researchers pointed out in Scientific American recently, the US has for decades put ballistic missiles on steerable maneuvering reentry vehicles, or MaRVs. Although they can only shift around toward the end of their flight, they can nonetheless change their path. Similarly, the scientists continued, while a lower-flying hypersonic might evade radar until it approaches, the US doesn’t totally rely on radar for missile defense: It also has infrared-seeking satellites that could expose a burning rocket engine like Hadley.

Still, the Air Force has been interested in what Ursa Major might be able to contribute to its hypersonic research, having funded seven programs with the company, according to the website USA Spending, which tracks federal contracts and awards. In fact, the Air Force is Ursa’s only listed government customer, having invested a few million in both the hypersonic and space-launch sides of the business. It’s also responsible for two of four of Relativity’s federal awards. 

Also of national security interest, of late, is decreasing the country’s reliance on Russian rocket engines for space launch. To that end, Ursa Major has a new engine, called Arroway, in development, which boasts 200,000 pounds of thrust. “Arroway engines will be one of very few commercially available engines that, when clustered together, can displace the Russian-made RD-180 and RD-181, which are no longer available to US launch companies,” the company said last June. It is also developing a third, in-between engine called Ripley, a scaled-up version of Hadley. 

Today, Ursa Major tests their 3D printed engines up to three times daily. On any given day, visitors in Berthoud might unknowingly be near six or nine high-powered experiments. When the static rocket engine begins its test, huge vapor clouds from the cryogenics can envelop an engineer. 

“When it lights, it’s just a shock hitting your chest,” says Laurienti. A cone of flames shoots from the back of the engine, toward a pile of sand in the field behind the bunker. Onlookers face the fire head-on, their backs to the mountains and their eyes on the prize.

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This article was originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Amid severe winter storms that have left parts of California flooded or trapped under feet of snow, the California National Guard is taking part in rescue efforts. That includes ongoing work to get supplies to people trapped in the snow covered San Bernardino Mountains, where many have been snowed in for two weeks.

Sixty California National Guard soldiers, part of Joint Task Force Rattlesnake, are deployed to the mountains, which include the towns of Lake Arrowhead, Crestline and Big Bear Lake. They’re helping local agencies as well as Caltrans and Cal Fire reach people who have been trapped for days. Heavy storms hit much of California hard last month. In the San Bernardino Mountains—with only limited access up and down, residents were unable to get down from their homes for days. Many were without power, and limited supplies. 

Snow plows only operated in a limited capacity, and it’s only in the last week that they have been able to get down the highway. Travel in and between mountain towns remains difficult, as roads remain blocked or partially blocked, and many people have to walk from their snow-covered homes in order to get to clear roads. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for the area on March 1 and the National Guard went into action. After more than a week of work, they and local partners have set up supply distribution centers spread out around the mountains (many stores remain closed; one grocery store in Crestline had its roof cave in from the weight of the snow). They’ve also been going house to house to try and reach people. 

“The primary goal was snow removal from private property from homes that had elderly individuals that were in danger of collapsing,” Chloe Castillo, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, told Task & Purpose. “They cleared off snow from critical infrastructure, including the Crestline post office, and a large hotel at Lake Arrowhead Village, the location that was housing a large number of first responders. They ended up removing […] 1.1 million lbs. of snow.”

Joint Task Force Rattlesnake typically deploys during the state’s fire season, helping to fight wildfires and evacuate people. The dozens of National Guard soldiers mobilized after the storms instead have to deal with floods and ice. 

The rescue efforts are expected to continue for several more days. Many residents still choose to walk to these places instead of driving as not only are side streets blocked but many cars remain trapped under layers of snow. It’s not clear exactly how many people in total have been injured or killed by the storm in the area.

An additional challenge is that since rescue efforts started, a new storm, driven by an atmospheric river, hit Southern California starting on Thursday, March 9. It is expected to last several days, dropping 1.5-2 inches of precipitation on the area. The added weight of rain on top of snow could add additional pressure on buildings, presenting structural risks. 

That need has been exacerbated by this week’s storms. Roughly 100 additional California National Guard soldiers are currently responding to flooding in other parts of the state, including Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, using high water vehicles to reach people in danger. In the last several days the National Guard has helped in 56 rescues, according to the force. They have also assisted in aid and supply efforts in the state as well. The latter has included airdropping hay for cows in northern Humboldt County.

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This post has been updated on March 16 to include video of the incident released by the US Department of Defense. The story was originally published on March 14, 2022.

At 7:03 am Central European Time on March 14, one of a pair of Russian Su-27 fighter jets flying over the Black Sea struck the propeller of an MQ-9 reaper drone piloted by the United States. According to US European Command, the strike against the propeller required the drone’s remote pilots to bring it down into international water. It is hardly the first takedown of a Reaper drone, nor is it even the first time Russian forces have caused the destruction of such a plane, but any confrontation between military aircraft of the world’s two foremost nuclear-armed states can understandably feel tense.

Since 2021, the United States has based MQ-9 Reaper drones in Romania, a NATO ally that borders both Ukraine and the Black Sea. These Reapers, as well as Reapers flown from elsewhere, were part of the overall aerial surveillance mission undertaken by the United States and NATO on the eve of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

What happened over the Black Sea?

The basics of the incident are as follows: “Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9,” said US Air Force general James B. Hecker, commander of US Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, in a statement about the incident published by US European Command. “In fact, this unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash. US and Allied aircraft will continue to operate in international airspace and we call on the Russians to conduct themselves professionally and safely.” (Watch video of the incident here.)

This is language that emphasizes the incident as a mistake or malfeasance by the two Russian Su-27 pilots. It is not, notably, a demand that the loss of a Reaper be met with more direct confrontation between the United States and Russia, even as the US backs Ukraine with supplies and, often, intelligence as it fights against the continued Russia invasion. In the years prior to Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine, Russian jets have harassed US aircraft over the Black Sea. It is a common enough occurrence that the think tank RAND has even published a study on what kind of signals Russia intends to send when it intercepts aircraft near but not in Russian airspace.

“Several times before the collision,” according to European Command, “the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defence also released a statement on the incident, claiming that the Reaper was flying without a transponder turned on, that the Reaper was headed for Russian borders, and that the plane crashed of its own accord, without any contact with Russian jets.

In a press briefing the afternoon of March 14, Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder noted that the Russian pilots were flying near the drone for 30 to 40 minutes before the collision that damaged the Reaper. Asked if the drone was near Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea that was part of Ukraine until Russia occupied it in 2014, Ryder said only that the flight was in international waters and well clear of any territory of Ukraine. Ryder also did not clarify when asked about whether or not the Reaper was armed, saying instead that it was conducting an ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) mission.

The New York Times reported that the drone was not armed, citing a military official.

What is an MQ-9 Reaper?

The Reaper is an uncrewed aerial vehicle, propelled by a pusher prop. It is made by General Atomics, and is an evolution of the Predator drone, which started as an unarmed scout before being adapted into a lightly armed bomber. The Reaper entered operational service in October 2007, and it was designed from the start to carry weapons. It can wield nearly 4,000 pounds of explosives, like laser guided bombs, or up to eight Hellfire missiles.

They measure 36 feet from tip to tail and have a wingspan of 66 feet, and in 2020 cost about $18 million apiece. 

To guide remote pilots for takeoff and landing, Reapers have a forward-facing camera, mounted at the front of their match-shaped airframes. To perceive the world below, and offer useful real-time video and imaging, a sensor pod complete with laser target designator, infrared camera, and electro-optical cameras pivots underneath the front of the drone, operated by a second crew member on the ground: the sensor operator. 

Reapers can stay airborne at altitudes of up to 50,000 feet for up to 24 hours, with remote crews guiding the plane in shifts and trading off mid-flight. The Reaper’s long endurance, not just hours in the sky but its ability to operate up to 1,150 miles away from where it took off, lets it watch vast areas, looking for relevant movement below. This was a crucial part of how the US fought the counter insurgency in Iraq and especially Afghanistan, where armed Reapers watched for suspected enemies proved an enduring feature of the war, to mixed results.

While Reapers have been used for well over a decade, they have mostly seen action in skies relatively clear of hostile threats. A Reaper’s top speed is just 276 mph, and while its radar can see other aircraft, the Su-27 air superiority fighter can run laps around it at Mach 2.35. In seeking a future replacement for Reapers, the US Air Force has stated an intention that these planes be able to defend themselves against other aircraft.

Have drones like the Reaper been shot down before?

The most famous incident of a US drone shoot-down is the destruction of an RQ-4 Global Hawk by Iran in June 2019. This unarmed surveillance drone was operating in the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz, a highly trafficked waterway that borders Iran on one side and the Arabian Peninsula on the other. Iran claimed the Global Hawk was shot down within Iran’s territorial waters; the United States argued instead that the drone was operating in international waters. While the crisis did not escalate beyond the destruction of the drone, it was unclear at the time that this incident would end calmly.

Reapers have been shot down by militaries including the US Air Force. In 2009, US pilots lost control of an MQ-9 Reaper over Afghanistan, so a crewed fighter shot it down proactively before it crashed into another country.

In 2017 and again in 2019, Houthi insurgent forces in Yemen shot down US Reapers flying over the country. Reapers have also been lost to jamming, when the signals between operators and drone were obstructed or cut, as plausibly happened to a Reaper operated by the Italian military over Libya in 2019.

Ultimately, the March 14 takedown of the Reaper by Russian fighters appears to be part of the larger new normal of drones as a part of regular military patrols. Like with the US destruction of a surveillance balloon in the Atlantic, the most interesting lesson is less what happened between aircraft in the sky, and more what is discovered by whoever gets to the wrecked aircraft in the water first.

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DARPA is inviting designers to reimagine aircraft that can fly fast and take off and land without runways. Earlier this month, DARPA announced an upcoming “Proposers Day,” to be held on March 23, when the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing will offer information to designers and companies about an initiative it calls SPRINT, which stands for the SPeed and Runway INdependent Technologies (SPRINT) X-Plane Demonstrator program. In 42 months, or three and a half years, DARPA hopes to have a demonstration flight of a new plane through the program.

As the name suggests, SPRINT is looking for a fast aircraft, or at least a plane capable of going fast over short stretches. The program is specifically seeking to develop an aircraft that can cruise at 400 knots, or 460 mph. That’s well below the cruising speed of a fighter like the F-16, though it’s much faster than the cruising speed of Black Hawk helicopters, which might be the more relevant consideration. That’s because the other aspect of SPRINT is that the aircraft should be able to hover in austere environments, like fields or deserts, without the specific paved infrastructure of a runway or a helipad.

“The objective of the SPRINT program is to design, build, certify and fly an X-plane to demonstrate enabling technologies and integrated concepts necessary for a transformational combination of aircraft speed and runway independence for the next generation of air mobility platforms,” reads DARPA’s announcement.

While the open sky is vast, runways remain one of the more demanding parts of the infrastructure of flight. Once built, a runway is relatively easy to repair after an attack, provided no planes were destroyed at the time of incoming bombs and missiles. But clearing the space for a runway and hangars, as well as maintaining crew and planes, creates a durable target visible from space. As the United States war planners explore options should a war break out in the Pacific region, the known and fixed locations of existing runways could leave aircraft vulnerable to surprise attack. Even without the surprise, once planes are in the air, they will need a runway to land, and losing that surface can lead to, at best, harsh landings on unprepared ground, which damage the plane and risk the pilot.

[Related: Bell wants to soup up tilt-rotor aircraft by adding jet engines]

DARPA announced SPRINT on March 1. The shape of the new vehicle is undetermined, reported Patrick Tucker of Defense One. “It could be a new form of helicopter, or perhaps a vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft that might fly even faster.” Tucker also noted that the director of DARPA “deliberately avoided calling the program a vertical-lift effort, and an accompanying slide displayed two artist’s concepts that were decidedly unhelicopter-like.”

Helicopters, of course, have long been the most reliable form of vertical takeoff, though their design comes with major constraints on speed and efficiency. Matching the runway independence of a helicopter with the speed and endurance of fixed-wing flight is a problem the military has tried to solve for decades. The most successful variants have followed one of two paths. There’s tilt-rotor planes, like the V-22 Osprey and upcoming V-280 Valor, which have high-mounted wings, and rotors that pivot parallel to the ground to take off, before turning to a different angle for forward flight. The Osprey can land in austere environments, provided there is clearance for the rotors, though in normal conditions the planes are flown and landed at dedicated pads on military bases.

The other path, seen in the Harrier Jump Jet and the F-35B stealth fighter, uses ducted exhaust from a jet engine to lift the plane into the sky, before pivoting to forward thrust. This tremendous amount of heat and power have caused speculation, especially in the development of the F-35, that the engine would destroy all but the most specially prepared landing pads. 

Neither of the designs shown by DARPA commit to these traditional Vertical Takeoff or Landing (VTOL) approaches. One, a silver-glossy image of a plane with jet-like ducts and folded blades on nacelles, has wings positioned like a tiltrotor. In the high-flight concept art, the engines used for vertical lift are drawn dormant, letting even more powerful systems propel the plane through the sky. The V-22 Osprey has a cruising speed of 310 knots, while the V-280 Valor has one just over 280 knots. Both planes have higher top speeds for, er, sprints, but getting to faster cruising speeds likely means ditching rotor engines as the primary form of propulsion, even if they can tilt.

In DARPA’s other concept drawing, the image appears as a rendering of a flying wing, reminiscent of the B-2 or B-21 bombers, but with a V-shaped tail. The engines are even more suggested than shown here, with space for ducted fans or rotors to provide vertical lift in the vehicle’s body, while jet intakes suggest means of forward propulsion. 

Such concept art is a type of vision board for what DARPA is trying to accomplish. Getting a new kind of plane that can fly without runways, helipads, or other external infrastructure could expand where planes operate. Ensuring that the plane flies fast could make it useful for more tasks than those already performed by helicopters, expanding the scope of what the military might do. And, ultimately, DARPA’s mission is not to design finished products—it is to explore new spaces, trusting that once the hurdle of technological demonstration is accomplished, others will figure out how to bend that new technology into useful form.

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On March 3, the Department of Defense announced it would be sending mobile bridges to Ukraine. The bridges are the signature part of the Pentagon’s 33rd offering of existing US equipment to supply Ukraine, since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. These vehicles that can place bridges, along with the other equipment sent, are reflections of the shape of the war so far, and offer a glimpse into the tools the Biden Administration expects Ukraine to need in the coming spring thaw.

An Armored Vehicle Launched Bridge, or AVLB, is essentially a portable and durable structure that is carried, placed, and then removed by a modified tank hull. The specific Armored Vehicle Launched Bridges that will be sent to Ukraine are ones based on an M60 tank chassis, our colleagues at The War Zone report. 

Rivers, chasms, and deep gaps in terrain can form impassable barriers to militaries, allowing defenders to concentrate forces at existing bridges or crossings. Getting over such a gap can necessitate flying to the other side, though that depends on an air transport force capable of massive movement and a cleared landing zone. It could mean physically building a new bridge, which can take time and is vulnerable to attack. Or it could mean bringing the bridge to the battlefield on the back of a tank and plopping it down as needed.

“These vehicles are designed to accompany armored columns and give them the ability to cross rivers, streams, ditches and trenches. The bridges are carried on the chassis of armored vehicles and launched at river or stream banks. Once the crossing is finished, the vehicle can pick up the bridge on the far bank and carry on,” the Department of Defense said in a release about this latest drawdown.

The exact number and model of the AVLBs sent to Ukraine is not yet known, though the general family is M60, or derived from the M60 Patton tank. That makes the models of a particular Cold War vintage, designed for the lighter armored vehicles and tanks of that era. Variants of the M60 AVLB have seen action in Vietnam, and have seen use in training exercises with NATO as well as in wars like Iraq.

The bridges are stored folded in half. When put in place by the vehicle, the bridges span 60 feet, can support up to 70 tons, and are 12.5 feet wide. Setting up the bridge takes between 2 and 5 minutes, and retrieving the bridge, which can be done at either end, takes about 10 minutes. 

Some heavier vehicles, including modern combat tanks, can only use the bridge at slower speeds and over narrower gaps. The US Army and Marine Corps are working on a new bridge and launcher capable of supporting Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks, to better meet the needs of the US military.

Even with limitations, the bridges will expand how and where Ukrainian forces can operate and move. Being able to rapidly span a narrow but otherwise impassable river dramatically expands how and where an army can move and attack, creating room for surprise. 

In addition, the announcement of the drawdown package notes that the US is sending Ukraine “demolition munitions and equipment for obstacle clearing,” which can facilitate both cleaner retreats and surprise advances. War leaves battlefields littered with craters, ruins, unexploded bombs, and deliberately set mines. Blasting a way through such hazards can restore movement to otherwise pinned forces.

Beyond the bridges and demolition equipment, the latest drawdown includes three kinds of artillery ammunition. The HIMARS rocket artillery systems, invaluable for Ukraine’s fall offensives, are getting resupplied with more rockets. The United States is also supplying Ukraine with 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds, for howitzers donated by the US and NATO allies to the country. These weapons use different ammunition than the Soviet-inherited stock that made up the bulk of Ukraine’s artillery before the war, and are still the overall majority of artillery pieces on hand today. But supplies for Soviet-pattern ammunition are scarce, as it’s also the size used by Russia, and Russia aggressively bought up existing stockpiles of the rounds around the world.

The fourth kind of ammunition included in the drawdown is 25mm, or the kind used by Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles. This tracked, turreted, and armed craft are more a form of fighting transport than a tanks, despite their appearance, but their 25 mm cannons are useful against all sorts of vehicles below the heavy armor of a tank. The package also includes tools for maintenance, vehicle testing and diagnostics, spare parts, and other of the less flashy but still invaluable work of ensuring vehicles can stay functional, or at least be repaired and brought back into use quickly.

Taken altogether, the latest drawdown of equipment fits the pattern of supplies to Ukraine this year. US supplies continue to give Ukraine the tools to fight existing artillery duels along grinding front lines, as well as building up the armored forces and accompanying features, like mobile bridges, needed for a future offensive.

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In the marina at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center, in the United Arab Emirates, floated a prototype submersible that looked like it might have been part of a GI Joe playset. With wide wings that dipped below the water line and a feature suggesting a bubble dome cockpit, the operational Kronos Submarine concept seemed as much spacecraft as submersible. The vessel was on display as part of the NAVDEX naval exhibition that ran from February 19 to 24.

Built by Desert Power Designs and Highland Systems in the UAE, the Kronos is pitched as a vehicle for military, rescue, and underwater engineering work. A brochure of the Kronos, available online, shows the 30-feet-long and 24-feet-wide submersible as capable of carrying six Italian-made Black Scorpion small torpedoes, aimed forward. (The resemblance to a toy submarine playset is uncanny.) With just one driver needed to operate the vessel, the Kronos has room for 10 passengers inside, making it potentially a useful transport for covert missions, needing to move special forces discreetly and under the surface.

“The ‘Kronos’ is the first world’s gliding submarine as it has wings/fins with ailerons and two shunting engines on each wing, which allows it to maneuver underwater like an airplane in the sky,” Khalit Khabibullin, director of Highland Systems, said in an email. Kronos “also has two maneuvering engines on each wing which allows for the sub to stay idle underwater at one place or make an instant U turn, also folding wings are made for easy transportation while onshore.”

Underwater glider design is primarily the domain of uncrewed vehicles, where the technology has been explored for decades. Wings lets gliders toggle buoyancy like lift on an airplane, leading to descents and ascents that look more like flights than dives.

With underwater speeds of over 30 mph and surface speeds of 50 mph, the Kronos offers a fast way through the water. Its promised speed is comparable to that of nuclear-powered attack submarines, and much faster than existing underwater-launched delivery craft for special forces.

Powering the Kronos is an electric engine, giving it up to 18 hours of power on batteries alone. The submarine also has a diesel generator, and the brochure lists the vehicle as being able to run on both diesel generated and stored electricity for over 50 hours. The vehicle promises an air supply that can last 36 hours, and a range of over 600 miles on a single fuel tank for the diesel generator. It is built to operate at 328 feet below the surface, though it can reach a maximum depth of 820 feet.

[Related: In the depths of this Idaho lake, the US Navy is testing out its submarine tech]

“Typical missions are military special operations as it could carry in the military version up to 10 men and one captain,” says Khabibullin. “Search and rescue, services for oil and gas companies to check underwater pipes, luxury ones that could be only for 6 people with all facilities inside.”

Various mock-ups and display images of the submarine interior promise something akin to a modest yacht or perhaps an update of the spacefaring shuttles common to Star Trek. The mock-ups also show a clear bubble cockpit, which the display model lacked. A video, shared by Khabibullin, offered a glimpse into the interior of the Kronos as it floated in the marina.

A slew of LCD screens, familiar in shape and possibly origin as computer monitors, are spread at eye level around the cabin. A curved display is visible on top of a navigational console, and in three distinct angles it shows the surface outside the craft. Spectators and visitors can be seen idling on the deck.

Kronos has an electronic periscope with 360 view with day and IR night cameras, and at least for the monitors that were working, that appears to be the case. The vessel very much gives the appearance of a work in progress, from the monitors displaying error messages to the exposed wires and cramped back of the vessel.

“The Kronos submarine on display at NAVDEX in Abu Dhabi was a full size operational prototype of the electric self charging submarine which was built in Dubai, UAE by a team of 7 engineers in 8 months from scratch,” says Khabibullin.

It remains to be seen if the prototype will move to a production version, though the promise is certainly present in the vehicle. At a minimum, if it does not find a buyer among the militaries of the world, it seems like a shoo-in a prop for the next James Bond film.

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Before the jet fuel that powers an aircraft’s engines can be burned, it begins its life in the ground as a fossil fuel. But the US military is exploring new ways of producing that fuel, synthetically, and on site, where it needs to be used. They’ve just announced a contract for as much as $65 million to Air Company, a Brooklyn-based company that has developed a synthetic fuel that doesn’t take its starting materials from the ground. 

In announcing the contract, the Department of Defense notes that it has an eye on both security concerns and the environment. Getting airplane fuel where it needs to go, the DoD notes, “often involves a combination of ships, tanker planes, and convoys.” And these same transport mechanisms, the military adds, can “become extremely vulnerable.” 

Here’s how the fuel works, why the military is interested, and what the benefits and drawbacks are of this type of approach. 

The chemistry of synthetic jet fuel 

This DOD initiative is called Project SynCE, which is pronounced “sense,” and clunkily stands for Synthetic Fuel for the Contested Environment. By contested environment, the military is referring to a space, like a battlefield, where a conflict can occur.

The building blocks of the fuel from Air Company involve hydrogen and carbon, and the process demands energy. “We start with renewable electricity,” says Stafford Sheehan, the CTO and co-founder of Air Company. That electricity, he adds, is used “to split water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, so we get green hydrogen.” 

But fuel requires carbon, too, so the company needs carbon dioxide to get that element. “For Project SynCE specifically, we’re looking at on-site direct-air capture, or direct ocean-capture technologies,” he says. But more generally, he adds, “We capture carbon dioxide from a variety of sources.” Currently, he notes, their source is CO2 “that was a byproduct of biofuel production.” 

So the recipe’s ingredients call for carbon dioxide, plus the hydrogen that came from water. Those elements are combined in a fixed bed flow reactor, which is “a fancy way of saying a bunch of tubes with catalysts,” or, even more simply, “tubes with rocks in them,” Sheehan says. 

[Related: Sustainable jet fuel is taking off with commercial airlines]

Jet fuel itself primarily consists of molecules—known as paraffins—made of carbon and hydrogen. For example, some of those paraffins are called normal paraffins, which is a straight line of carbons with hydrogens attached to them. There are also hydrocarbons present called aromatic compounds. 

“You need to have those aromatic compounds in order to make a jet fuel that’s identical to what you get from fossil fuels,” he says, “and it’s very important to be identical to what you get from fossil fuels, because all of the engines are designed to run on what you get from fossil fuels.”  

Okay, enough chemistry. The point is that this fuel is synthetically made, didn’t come out of the ground, and can be a direct substitute for the refined dinosaur juice typically used in aircraft. “You can actually make jet fuel with our process that burns cleaner as well, so it has fewer contrails,” he says. It will still emit carbon when burned, though.

Why the Department of Defense is interested 

This project involves a few government entities, including the Air Force and the Defense Innovation Unit, which acts as a kind of bridge between the military and the commercial sector. So where will they start cooking up this new fuel? “We plan to pair this technology with the other renewable energy projects at several joint bases, which include solar, geothermal, and nuclear,” says Jack Ryan, a project manager for the DIU, via email. “While we can’t share exact locations yet, this project will initially be based in the Continental US and then over time, we expect the decreasing size of the machinery will allow for the system to be modularized and used in operational settings.” 

Having a way to produce fuel in an operational setting, as Ryan describes it, could be helpful in a future conflict, because ground vehicles like tanker trucks can be targets. For example, on April 9, 2004, in Iraq, an attack known as the Good Friday Ambush resulted in multiple deaths; a large US convoy was carrying out an “emergency delivery of jet fuel to the airport” in Baghdad, Iraq, as The Los Angeles Times noted in a lengthy article on the incident in 2007. 

“By developing and deploying on-site fuel production technology, our Joint Force will be more resilient and sustainable,” Ryan says.

[Related: All your burning questions about sustainable aviation fuel, answered]

Nikita Pavlenko, a program lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit organization, says that he is excited about the news. “It’s also likely something that’s still quite a ways away,” he adds. “Air Company is still in the very, very initial stages of commercialization.” 

These types of fuels, called e-fuels, for electrofuels, don’t come in large amounts, nor cheaply. “I expect that the economics and the availability are going to be big constraints,” he says. “Just based off the underlying costs of green hydrogen [and] CO2, you’re probably going to end up with something much more expensive than conventional fuel.” In terms of how much fuel they’ll be able to make synthetically, Ryan, of the DIU, says, “It will be smaller quantities to begin with, providing resiliency to existing fuel supply and base microgrids,” and then will grow from there. 

[Related: Airbus just flew its biggest plane yet using sustainable aviation fuel]

But these types of fuels do carry environmental benefits, Pavlenko says, although it’s important that the hydrogen they use is created through green means—from renewable energy, for example. The fuel still emits carbon when burned, but the benefits come because the fuel was created by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the first place, or preventing it from leaving a smokestack. Even that smokestack scenario is environmentally appealing to Pavlenko, because “you’re just kind of borrowing that CO2 from the atmosphere—just delaying before it goes out in the atmosphere, rather than taking something that’s been underground for millions of years and releasing it.” (One caveat is down the line, there ideally aren’t smokestacks belching carbon dioxide that could be captured in the first place.) 

For its part, the Defense Innovation Unit says that they’re interested in multiple different ways of obtaining the carbon dioxide, but are most enthused about getting it from the air or ocean. That’s because those two methods “serve the dual purpose of drawing down CO2 from the air/water while also providing a feedstock to the synthetic fuel process,” says Matt Palumbo, a project manager with the DIU, via email. Palumbo also notes that he expects this period of the contract to last about two to five years, and thinks the endeavor will continue from there.

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Just a year after the United States reopened its embassy in Havana, Cuba, in 2015, some diplomats began experiencing a painful ringing in their ears. This “Havana syndrome” was first reported at that embassy in 2016, and included symptoms like dizziness and headaches, incapacitating diplomats and the spies who worked alongside them. It was reported across several embassies over multiple years.

One immediate hypothesis was that the symptoms were the result of a deliberate attack by another nation against the diplomats and spies of the United States. Today, that theory is as close to being fully dismissed as it has ever been. On March 1, the Washington Post reported that five US intelligence agencies determined that Havana syndrome was very unlikely to be the result of action by a foreign adversary. With the new reporting, while the actual origins of all injuries attributed to it cannot be pinned down, it is safe to say the majority of the intelligence community does not see the symptoms as resulting from malicious action by a hostile nation.

The intelligence community, as the collection of spy and surveillance agencies are known, includes better known agencies like the CIA, NSA, and the FBI, as well as long-running but lower-profile organizations like the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Seven of these agencies (the Post’s reporting does not specify which ones) conducted a review of around 1,000 cases broadly identified under the Havana syndrome banner.

The Post, citing two intelligence officials who remained anonymous, summarized the findings this way: “Five of those agencies determined it was ‘very unlikely’ that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as the result of purposeful actions — such as a directed energy weapon — or as the byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that unintentionally could have made people sick,” wrote Shane Harris and John Hudson. 

Of the remaining two agencies on the review, one determined that it was merely “unlikely,” not “very unlikely” that a foreign government was responsible, while that last agency did not offer a conclusion either way. Still, none of the agencies in the review offered a dissenting view from the conclusion. 

Congress has already mandated payments for those injured by the syndrome, which the Biden administration last summer said it would honor, even as no clear cause of the symptoms could be found. 

The previous leading explanation was an as-yet undiscovered advanced directed energy weapon.

How would such a weapon work?

Directed energy weapons have moved from the realm of science fiction to reality. These include, most commonly, high-powered lasers and microwaves, which operate in different ways. Laser weapons need a clear line of sight, and cause harm by heating up the surface of the drone or other object they are in contact with, until that object burns or breaks. Popular Science even had the chance to try one.

Because Havana syndrome sufferers lacked visible marks, it is easy to rule out a laser as the origin. Other directed energy weapons, like high-power microwaves, or sound beyond what humans can consciously perceive, have also been considered and then dismissed as possible causes. 

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

“The officials said that as analysts examined clusters of reported cases, including at U.S. embassies, they found no pattern or common set of conditions that could link individual cases. They also found no evidence, including forensic information or geolocation data, that would suggest an adversary had used a form of directed energy such as radio waves or ultrasonic beams,” the Post reports. “In some cases, there was no ‘direct line of sight’ to affected personnel working at U.S. facilities, further casting doubt on the possibility that a hypothetical energy weapon could have been the culprit, one of the officials said.”

The Post’s reporting of this conclusion contradicts an earlier independent study of possible causes. A 2020 study by a committee from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine “felt that many of the distinctive and acute signs, symptoms, and observations reported by [Department of State] employees are consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy.”

This is the kind of energy used in less-lethal millimeter-wave weapons like the Active Denial System employed by the US military. This weapon takes a massive amount of power to operate, and it can cause second degree burns on people in the beam’s path if it is held for long enough. The weapon is used to disperse crowds, making the pain felt immediately and in a way that dissipates as people leave the area of the beam. For people who do stay in the beam’s path, spots can become visible on their skin.

[Related: The US military’s heat weapon is real and painful. Here’s what it does.]

The people suffering Havana syndrome symptoms lacked injuries that would match how a microwave weapon works.

“There’s a persistent myth that microwaves heat things from the inside out. Anyone who has heated a frozen dinner knows that this is not true. The outer part of the frozen food thaws first, because it absorbs the microwaves before they can reach the inner part,” wrote Cheryl Rofer, retired Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist, in response to the NAS study. She added: “if a directed microwave beam hit people’s brains, we would expect to see visible effects on the skin and flesh. None of that has accompanied Havana syndrome.”

The new report suggests that, while there may be no single explanation for the symptoms, there are likely other, identifiable causes. One possibility, instead of a weapon causing the harm, was simply the conditions of people in an embassy breathing air passing through clogged ducts, reports the Post. 

Embassy work can be difficult and stressful, to say nothing of the decades when US embassies were regularly violently targeted by insurgencies and terror groups. This includes the US Embassy in South Vietnam in 1965 by the Viet Cong, the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy by Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon, and attacks on the US Embassy in Afghanistan in 2011, 2012, and 2019, among others. In light of that history, it can be easy to understand how worsening health might feel like symptoms of an invisible siege. While the report likely rules out known weapons and deliberate attack, it doesn’t negate the fact that people can experience harmful symptoms from sources other than weapons.

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On February 14, geostationary communications satellite company Astranis announced that it had been awarded a contract with the US Space Force worth over $10 million. The contract is to first demonstrate a secure comms technique on the satellite hardware in a terrestrial test setting, and also includes the possibility of testing it in space. 

Space remains a useful place for countries to place sensors that look down on other nations. Many of these satellites reside in low Earth orbit, or about 1,200 miles above the surface, which is easier for satellites to reach and lets satellites circle the globe rapidly. Geostationary orbit, which is 22,200 miles above ground, is harder to get to. Plus, satellites at all altitudes risk having signals jammed, or being disrupted by other objects in orbit, which has led the US military to pursue satellite constellations, or formations of smaller satellites, as a way to ensure that some functionality persists in the event of attack or disaster. 

“We build small satellites for higher orbits, starting with geostationary orbit, which is quite a higher orbit,” says Astranis co-founder and CEO John Gedmark. “It’s the special orbit where you can park a single satellite over a part of the world or over a country and provide continuous service with just that one satellite.”

Over Alaska and Peru

Geostationary satellites have been used to provide communications and television broadcasts, and Astranis’ primary aim for both commercial and military customers is to use smaller geostationary satellites to provide continuous broadband-level internet connections. For two demonstrations of commercial uses, Gedmark points to upcoming launches placing satellites above Alaska (scheduled for early April), and one later this year that will put a satellite above Peru.

“This is a satellite that’ll go up over Peru and also provide some coverage in Ecuador. We will basically allow them to go and deploy and upgrade a number of cell towers out in some of the most remote parts of the country,” said Gedmark. “There’s a lot of parts of Peru where the terrain is just super rough and pretty extreme in the jungles, they have Andes mountains, they have a lot of things that make it very hard to get connectivity out to some of these remote areas.”

In both these places, the satellites will augment existing telecommunications infrastructure on the ground, letting remote towers connect through space instead of over land. Peru, like Alaska, contains vast stretches of varying terrain, where infrastructure such as wires, cables, or fiber internet connections can be hard to place. Freestanding cell phone towers can be set up, powered locally, and then route their communications through satellites instead of over-land wires, bringing 3G and 4G levels of internet to places people could not previously access it.

For military use

Those same traits, for connecting local rural infrastructure to wider data networks through space, are part of what makes Astranis satellites so appealing to the military.

“We realized that the military has this real problem right now for milsatcom and for some other capabilities around resiliency, right? They are really dependent on a small handful of these giant geo satellites, some of which cost billions of dollars. And those satellites are, as we like to quote General Hyten on this, big fat and juicy targets,” said Gedmark.

In 2017, Air Force General John Hyten was the head of US Strategic Command, and announced that he would no longer “support the development any further of large, big, fat, juicy targets,” referring to those types of satellites. Hyten retired in 2021, but the Department of Defense has continued to push for smaller satellites to fill the skies, as a more resilient option than all-in-one massive satellites of the present. Many of these constellations are aimed at low earth orbit.

“Without getting into specific pricing, we could put up about a dozen or more of our satellites for the cost of one of the big ones,” says Gedmark. Since 2018, Astranis has attracted venture funding on its premise to put satellites into geostationary orbit. 

“It’s hard to design all the electronics for the harsh radiation environment of geo, you’re right in the thick of the Van Allen belts,” says Gedmark. The Van Allen belts contain charged particles that can damage satellites, so anything built to survive has to endure the heavy ion strikes and radiation dosages inherent to the region. “These higher orbits are harder to get to, so you have to solve that with some clever onboard propulsion strategies. We solve that by having an electric propulsion system, and having an ion thruster on board.”

When launched, the satellites are aimed towards geostationary orbit, and then use their own power to reach and maneuver in space. Gedmark says the satellites are designed to stay in geostationary orbit for between 8 and 10 years, with the ability to relocate up to 30 times in that period.

The speed at which the satellites can be maneuvered from one orbit to another depends on how much fuel the satellite operators are willing to expend, with repositioning possible in days, though Gedmark expects moving to a new location in weeks will be the more typical use case. 

Once in orbit, the satellites need to communicate securely. The Protected Tactical Waveform is a communications protocol and technique developed by the US military, which Astranis aims to demonstrate can be run on the software-defined radio of its satellites. (A software-defined radio  is a computer that can change its parameters for transmitting and receiving information with code, while a more traditional radio requires analog hardware, like modulators and amplifiers, to encode and decode information from radio signals.) 

The Protected Tactical Waveform is “a set of techniques that are programmed into the radio so it can automatically avoid jamming and interference,” says Gedmark. “We’re gonna start by doing that as a demo in our lab, and then with the future satellites do that as an on orbit demo.”

Because this protocol will run on software radio, rather than hardware that is fixed on form once launched, it likely means that should the need arise, Astranis could adapt existing commercial satellites to carry the Protected Tactical Waveform, while it remains in orbit, facilitating the surge communications as events arise and to meet military need.

For now, the promise is that private investment in communication tech can yield a tool useful both for expanding internet connectivity across the globe, and for providing communications to US military forces in the field faster than it would take to set up ground-based infrastructure. For the Space Force, which is tasked with ensuring reliable communications across the heavens, more durable satellites that can be maneuvered as needed would allow it to redeploy assets across the skies to win wars on Earth.  

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A striking photo released on February 22 by the Department of Defense reveals a unique aerial scene: The image shows the Chinese surveillance balloon as seen from the cockpit of a U-2 spy plane on February 3, along with the pilot’s helmet, the aircraft’s wing, and even the shadow of the plane itself on the balloon. 

While the subject of the photo is the balloon, which was later shot down by an F-22, the aircraft that made the image possible is referenced in the image’s simple title: “U-2 Pilot over Central Continental United States.” Here’s a brief primer on that aircraft, a high-flying spy plane with a reputation for being tough to operate and land.  

The U-2 aircraft is designed to operate at “over 70,000 feet,” according to an Air Force fact sheet. That very high altitude means that it flies way higher than commercial jet aircraft, which tend to cruise at a maximum altitude in the lower end of the 40,000-foot range. 

The U-2’s ability to climb above 70,000 feet in altitude “makes it, I believe, the highest flying aircraft that we know about in the Air Force inventory,” says Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with Metrea, a firm formerly known as Meta Aerospace. “That becomes important for a mission like this, where the balloon was operating around 60,000 feet.”

[Related: Why the US might be finding more unidentified flying objects]

The plane features wings that stretch to a width of 105 feet, which is about three times longer than the wingspan of an F-16. “It is designed for very high altitude flight, and it has a very efficient wing—[a] very high aspect ratio wing, so that makes it very long and slender,” Harrison says. Long, slender wings are indeed more efficient than shorter, stubbier ones, which is one of the reasons NASA and Boeing are planning to have truss-supported skinny wings on an experimental commercial aircraft called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator that would be more fuel efficient than existing models. 

On the U-2, those long wings, which are an asset in the sky, make for a real challenge when trying to get it back down on the ground. “This jet does not want to be on the ground, and that’s a real problem when it comes to landing it,” Matt Nauman, a U-2 pilot, said at an Air Force event in 2019 that Popular Science attended. To land it, “we’ll actually slow down, and that nose will continue to come up until the plane essentially falls out of the sky,” at just about two feet off the ground.  

[Related: Biden says flying objects likely not ‘related to China’s spy balloon program’]

A few other aspects figure into the landing. One is that the aircraft has what’s known as bicycle-style landing gear, as opposed to the tricycle-style landing gear of a regular commercial plane. In other words: It has just two landing gear legs, not three, so is tippy, side-to-side, as it touches down. To help with those landings, a chase car literally follows the plane down the runway as it’s coming in to land, with its driver—a U-2 pilot as well—in radio contact with the pilot in the plane to help them get the bird on the tarmac. This video shows that process. 

Because the plane is designed to fly at such high altitudes, the pilot dons a heavy space suit like this daredevil wore in 2012, while the cockpit is pressured to an altitude of about 14,000 or 15,000 feet. Having that gear on makes landing the plane even more challenging, as another U-2 pilot said in 2019, reflecting: “You’re effectively wearing a fishbowl on your head.” But having the suit means the pilot is protected from the thin atmosphere if the plane were to have a problem or the pilot had to eject.  

[Related: Everything you could ever want to know about flying the U-2 spy plane]

The point of the aircraft is to gather information. “It is used to spy, and collect intelligence on others,” says Harrison. “It has been upgraded and modernized over the years, with airframe modernization, obviously the sensors have gotten better and better.” The U-2 famously used to shoot photographs using old-school wet film with what’s called the Optical Bar Camera, and stopped doing so only in the summer of 2022. 

As for the recent photo of the surveillance balloon from the U-2, a reporter for NPR speculates that it was taken specifically “just south of Bellflower” Missouri, as did a Twitter user with the handle @obretix. 

“It’s a pretty incredible photo,” Harrison reflects. “It does show that the US was actively surveilling this balloon up close throughout its transit of the United States. It’s interesting that the U-2 pilot was actually able to capture a selfie like that while flying at that altitude.”

On February 6, a Popular Science sibling website, the War Zone, reported that the US had employed U-2 aircraft to keep tabs on the balloon. And on February 8, CNN reported before this photo’s official release that a “pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself,” citing US officials.

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Today, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that the country would suspend participation in New START, the last standing major arms control treaty between the country and the United States. Putin clarified that the suspension was not a withdrawal—but the suspension itself represents a clear deterioration of trust and nuclear stability between the countries with the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. 

Putin’s remarks precede by a few days the anniversary of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, an entirely chosen war that has seen some concrete Russian gains, while many of Russia’s biggest advances have been repulsed and overtaken. At present, much of the fighting is in the form of grinding, static warfare along trenches and defended positions in Ukraine’s east. It is a kind of warfare akin to the bloody fronts of World War I, though the presence of drones and long-range precision artillery lend it an undeniably modern character.

Those modern weapons, and the coming influx of heavy tanks from the United States and other countries to Ukraine, put Putin’s remarks in some more immediate context. While New START is specifically an agreement between the United States and Russia over nuclear arsenals, the decision to suspend participation comes against the backdrop of the entirely conventional war being fought by Russia against Ukraine, with US weapons bolstering the Ukrainian war effort.

A follow-up statement from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified that the country would still notify the United States about any launches of Intercontinental or Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs and SLBMs), and would expect the same in reverse, in accordance with a 1988 agreement between the US and the USSR. That suggests there is at least some ongoing effort to not turn a suspension of enforcement into an immediate crisis.

To understand why the suspension matters, and what future there is for arms control, it helps to understand the agreement as it stands.

What is New START?

New START is an agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, which carries a clunky formal name: The Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The short-form name, which is not really a true acronym, is instead a reference to START 1, or the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, was in effect from 1991 to 2009, and which New START replaced in 2011. New START is set to expire in 2026, unless it is renewed by both countries.

New START is the latest of a series of agreements limiting the overall size of the US and Russian (first Soviet) nuclear arsenals, which at one point each measured in the tens of thousands of warheads. Today, thanks largely to mutual disarmament agreements and the limits outlined by New START, the US and Russia have arsenals of roughly 5,400 and 6,000 warheads, respectively. Of those, the US is estimated to have 1,644 deployed strategic weapons, a term that means nuclear warheads on ICBMs or at heavy bomber bases, presumably ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Russia is estimated to have around 1,588 deployed strategic weapons.

As the Start Department outlines, the treaty limits both countries to 700 total deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. (Bombers are counted under the treaty in the same way as a missile with one warhead, though nuclear-capable bombers like the B-52, B-2, and soon to be B-21 can carry multiple warheads.) In addition, the treaty sets a limit of 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments, as well as 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments

In its follow-up statement to the suspension of New START, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified it would stick to the overall cap on warheads and launch systems as outlined in the treaty.

What will change is the end of inspections, which have been central to the “trust but verify” structure of arms control agreements between the US and Russia for decades. The terms of New START allow both countries to inspect deployed and non-deployed strategic systems (like missiles or bombers) up to 10 times a year, as well as non-deployed systems up to eight times a year. These on-site inspections were halted in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their resumption is the most likely act threatened by this change in posture.

It is unclear, yet, if this suspension means the end of the treaty forever, though Putin taking such a step certainly doesn’t bode well for its continued viability. Should New START formally end, some analysts fear it may usher in a new era of nuclear weapons production, and a rapid expansion of nuclear arsenals.

While that remains a possibility, the hard limits of nuclear production, as well as decades of faded production expertise in both Russia and the United States, mean such a restart may be more intensive, in time and resources, than immediately feared. Both nations have spent the last 30 years working on production of conventional forces. Ending an arms control treaty over nuclear weapons would be a gamble, suggesting nuclear weapons are the only tool that can provide security where conventional arms have failed. 

The post Putin is backing away from New START—here’s what that nuclear treaty does appeared first on Popular Science.

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In December, a special fighter jet made multiple flights out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. The orange, white, and blue aircraft, which is based on an F-16, seats two people. A fighter jet taking to the skies with a human or two on board is not remarkable, but what is indeed remarkable about those December flights is that for periods of time, artificial intelligence flew the jet. 

As the exploits of generative AI like ChatGPT grip the public consciousness, artificial intelligence has also quietly slipped into the military cockpit—at least in these December tests.  

The excursions were part of a DARPA program called ACE, which stands for Air Combat Evolution. The AI algorithms came from different sources, including a company called Shield AI as well as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Broadly speaking, the tests represent the Pentagon exploring just how effective AI can be at carrying out tasks in planes typically done by people, such as dogfighting. 

“In total, ACE algorithms were flown on several flights with each sortie lasting approximately an hour and a half,” Lt. Col. Ryan Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE, notes to PopSci via email. “In addition to each performer team controlling the aircraft during dogfighting scenarios, portions of each sortie were dedicated to system checkout.”

The flights didn’t come out of nowhere. In August of 2020, DARPA put artificial intelligence algorithms through their paces in an event called the AlphaDogfight Trials. That competition didn’t involve any actual aircraft flying through the skies, but it did conclude with an AI agent defeating a human flying a digital F-16. The late 2022 flights show that software agents that can make decisions and dogfight have been given a chance to actually fly a real fighter jet. “This is the first time that AI has controlled a fighter jet performing within visual range (WVR) maneuvering,” Hefron notes.

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

So how did it go? “We didn’t run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live,” Hefron said in a DARPA press release. 

Andrew Metrick, a fellow in the defense program at the Center for New American Security, says that he is “often quite skeptical of the applications of AI in the military domain,” with that skepticism focused on just how much practical use these systems will have. But in this case—an artificial intelligence algorithm in the cockpit—he says he’s more of a believer. “This is one of those areas where I think there’s actually a lot of promise for AI systems,” he says. 

The December flights represent “a pretty big step,” he adds. “Getting these things integrated into a piece of flying hardware is non-trivial. It’s one thing to do it in a synthetic environment—it’s another thing to do it on real hardware.” 

Not all of the flights were part of the DARPA program. All told, the Department of Defense says that a dozen sorties took place, with some of them run by DARPA and others run by a program out of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The DOD notes that the DARPA tests were focused more on close aerial combat, while the other tests from AFRL involved situations in which the AI was competing against “a simulated adversary” in a “beyond-vision-range” scenario. In other words, the two programs were exploring how the AI did in different types of aerial contests or situations. 

Breaking Defense reported earlier this year that the flights kicked off December 9. The jet flown by the AI is based on an F-16D, and is called VISTA; it has space for two people. “The front seat pilot conducted the test points,” Hefron explains via email, “while the backseater acted as a safety pilot who maintained broader situational awareness to ensure the safety of the aircraft and crew.”

One of the algorithms that flew the jet came from a company called Shield AI. In the AlphaDogfight trials of 2020, the leading AI agent was made by Heron Systems, which Shield AI acquired in 2021. Shield’s CEO, Ryan Tseng, is bullish on the promise of AI to outshine humans in the cockpit. “I do not believe that there’s an air combat mission where AI pilots should not be decisively better than their human counterparts, for much of the mission profile,” he says. That said, he notes that “I believe the best teams will be a combination of AI and people.” 

One such future for teaming between a person and AI could involve AI-powered fighter-jet-like drones such as the Ghost Bat working with a crewed aircraft like an F-35, for example. 

It’s still early days for the technology. Metrick, of the Center for New American Security, wonders how the AI agent would be able to handle a situation in which the jet does not respond as expected, like if the aircraft stalls or experiences some other type of glitch. “Can the AI recover from that?” he wonders. A human may be able to handle “an edge case” like that more easily than software.

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Since February 4, United States aircraft have shot down four objects passing over North American skies. The first of these, a massive high-altitude surveillance balloon traced to China, meandered over the country for four days before becoming the first air-to-air kill for the high-end F-22 stealth jet fighter. The other three, however, have not yet been identified, except for their size, altitude, and ability to stay aloft seemingly on wind power alone.

President Joe Biden addressed the topic in remarks delivered today. “Last week, in the immediate aftermath of the incursion by China’s high altitude balloon, our military, through the North American Aerospace Defense command, so called NORAD, closely scrutinized our airspace, including enhancing our radar to pick up more slow-moving objects above our country and around the world,” he said. “In doing so they tracked three unidentified objects—one in Alaska, Canada, and over Lake Huron in the Midwest.” 

“They acted in accordance with established parameters for determining how to deal with unidentified aerial objects in US airspace,” he added. “At their recommendation, I gave the order to take down the three objects, due to hazards to civilian commercial air traffic, and because we could not rule out the surveillance risk of sensitive facilities.”

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

Given the short timeline between the tracking of China’s high altitude balloon and the following shootdowns, expanding the aperture of existing sensors was the most expected way to widen what swaths of the sky could be observed. One effect of that is suddenly detecting objects previously unobserved. Notably, Biden highlighted that the newly found objects were slow-moving. NORAD’s sensors, for decades trained to track fast moving planes and missiles, are not calibrated by default to look for balloons, which drift through the sky.

“Our military, and the Canadian military, are seeking to recover the debris so we can learn more about these three objects,” said Biden. “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.”

Minutes before Biden gave his remarks, Aviation Week published a plausible explanation of the objects. The story notes that the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a hobbyist club, had tracked a high-altitude pico balloon they had launched to the coast of Alaska at just under 40,000 feet on February 10. Predicted wind direction would have brought that balloon over the Yukon on February 11.

That, notes Aviation Week, was “the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.”

“Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade,” continues the story. “At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.”

While Biden did not name what the downed objects were, he said that the intelligence community’s most likely estimate was that these three objects were most likely balloons with ties to private companies, recreation, or research institutions.

“I want to be clear: We don’t have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky, we’re now just seeing more of them partially because of the steps we’ve taken to increase our radar, and we have to keep adapting to dealing with these challenges,” he said.

While the larger surveillance balloon from China was easier to track based on its mass alone, the existence of small, potentially hobbyist or commercial balloons riding high-altitude winds appears to come as something of a surprise. 

“In the U.S., academic and commercial balloons have to include transponders that let the FAA know where they are at all times,”Jeff Jackon, a US representative from North Carolina, shared in his notes on a congressional briefing with NORAD on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). “These UAPs did not appear to have transponders, and that was also a factor in the decision to shoot them down.”

Transponders are a key tool for larger aircraft, as they make air traffic visible to people in the sky and on the ground. For something as light as a hobbyist research balloon aiming at high altitude, the weight of a transponder and the batteries to power it could strain the craft. Finding a different solution, one that allows air traffic controllers and pilots to avoid such balloons, is a likely first step to ensuring the skies remain safe and the objects don’t go unidentified. 

Transponders wouldn’t solve the problem of balloons sent with malicious intent, but it does at least allow those with purely peaceful purposes to be affirmatively identified as safe. Biden outlined a set of policies to avoid shootdowns like those experienced this month. One improvement would be an accessible inventory of objects in the airspace above the US, kept up to date. Another would be improving the ability of the US to detect uncrewed objects, like small high-altitude balloons. Changing the rules for launching and maintaining objects would also help the US get hobbyist launches, like that from the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, on its radar, metaphorically and perhaps literally. Finally, Biden suggested the US work with other countries to set out better global norms for airspace.  

“We’re not looking for a new Cold War,” said Biden. “But we will compete, and we will responsibly manage that competition so it doesn’t veer into conflict.”

In the history of high-altitude surveillance from the last Cold War, efforts to spy by balloon and plane led to crisis. The rules and norms allowing countries to share space, instead, allowed countries to keep spying on each other, while also fostering tremendous economic and scientific developments alongside the spycraft.

Watch the address, below:

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YOU COULD PLAY Elden Ring, or maybe you’d rather try out God of War Ragnarok. Perhaps you’re more of a Candy Crush connoisseur. But if you want researchers to gather data on your gaming strategy, and what that might mean for real-world nuclear war, you might instead check out SIGNAL, courtesy of the Project on Nuclear Gaming (PoNG). The academic group behind the game wanted to show that video games could be used to gather large-scale data on human behavior and military strategy. Perhaps, they speculate, this digital tool could even hang on the belt along with traditional military research and formal war games.

In a pilot analysis, whose results were published a few months ago in the Journal of Peace Research, scholars analyzed more than 400 SIGNAL matches to see how the existence of tailored nuclear weapons—more on what those are in a moment—affected the likelihood that some world leader (or, in this case, a player pretending to be a world leader) might start an atomic war. 

For the uninitiated, tailored is a term that in this context refers to nuclear bombs that don’t just detonate with many megatons of energy. Tailored nuclear weapons may include boosted electromagnetic pulses—the grid-killing bursts of radiation that blast out right after explosions. They may be neutron bombs, which produce more radiation compared to their blast than other weapons. Or they may be bombs that are smaller and less destructive than their traditional counterparts, a category commonly called tactical nuclear weapons. 

For a while, such tactical weapons were a key part of the US arsenal: nuclear torpedoes, nuclear artillery shells, nuclear land mines. “Name a conventional weapons system today, and there used to be a nuclear weapon to fit that role,” says Geoff Wilson, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight.

In the early 1990s, the US largely phased these weapons out, although it currently has a couple hundred on hand. Russia has a couple thousand. Recently, and not unrelatedly, they’ve reentered American military discourse too. In 2018, the Nuclear Posture Review made way for a new low-yield weapon called the W76-2; the Biden administration’s 2022 review kept it on the table. 

Although the precise characteristics that make a nuclear weapon tactical, aka nonstrategic, are debatable, University of Southern California international relations professor Nina Rathbun recently wrote that “tactical nuclear weapons vary in yields from fractions of 1 kiloton to about 50 kilotons, compared with strategic nuclear weapons, which have yields that range from about 100 kilotons to over a megaton, though much more powerful warheads were developed during the Cold War.” A kiloton is the amount of energy that 1,000 tons of dynamite would release. For the record, both bombs that the US dropped on Japan during World War II would now be considered tactical. Estimates hold that those bombings killed anywhere between 110,000 and 210,000 people.

There are many issues related to the existence of tactical nuclear weapons, and here’s one of the biggest: Experts don’t agree on whether they make the world more stable or less stable, or whether they make nuclear war more or less likely. Maybe these bombs provide an eye-for-an-eye deterrent against other countries’ similarly sized weapons, meaning everyone is threatened away from launching any. But maybe these weapons make countries more willing to launch—and thus to break what Brown University’s Nina Tannenwald calls the “nuclear taboo”—because the consequences on the ground are less apocalyptic than what comes with the use of traditional, more powerful nuclear weapons. Wilson, of the Project on Government Oversight, falls into the latter camp.

Most troublingly, though, no one knows if a “limited” nuclear war, fought with comparatively small nuclear weapons, would actually stay limited and little. “Once you decide to let one of these things off the chain somewhere, the threat of using more of them increases,” says Wilson. 

Can data from a game be helpful?

There isn’t actually ground-truth data to support theories on how any kind of tailored nuclear weapon affects the course of war, because only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war, and it did so back when no other nation had any. The physical data set has a sample size of one. “We certainly don’t want to have any kind of [real world] experimental data around the nuclear use,” says Bethany Goldblum, a co-author on the recent SIGNAL results paper who currently holds positions at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. 

In the absence of such evidence, Goldblum and collaborators hoped that an online war game might provide significant fictional data—enough that it could be analyzed statistically. With a sample size of more than 400 games, they succeeded at that part.

War games in general are a longstanding means used by defense wonks and military leaders to figure out what other humans, beyond their borders, might do, and what they themselves might do in response or preemptively. “People role-playing together in a room is a type of war game that is often referred to as a tabletop exercise,” says Goldblum. It’s a common practice in think tanks and in government. “There are also war games in the form of strategic board games,” she continues. Some studies are surveys, which aren’t quite games but which present people with various written scenarios, to which people respond with what they would do. Usually, participants in these kinds of efforts are experts or practitioners in the relevant field. Digital simulations also exist to explore decision-making in different scenarios.

PoNG scientists, though, wanted their offering to be a little different: to live inside computers, be larger-scale, involve a wider and larger swath of people, immerse players in an environment where they have to live with their choices, and allow for iteration and experimentation. (PoNG comes from the University of California, Berkeley; the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium; and Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories, and the analysis in the Journal of Peace Research came from two of its members.)

So they came up with the “Strategic Interaction Game between Nuclear Armed Lands,” or SIGNAL, which was designed to investigate what Andrew Reddie, a cybersecurity professor at Berkeley and co-author on the results paper, calls their “toy problem”: Does adding tailored weapons to the arsenal increase the likelihood of nuclear use?

To test it out, the project team gathered players through social media, mailing lists, meetups, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and campus events, and also through the chance interest of internet passersby. 

Shall we play a game?

SIGNAL went live in May 2019, and it’s still up today. You can play if you convince two friends to log in at the same time as you, learn the somewhat complicated rules, and then stick it out till you nuke each other or don’t. Players are welcomed to a digital board filled with hexagonal tiles arranged in the shapes of three (fictional) countries, each of which is delineated by the color of its tiles: purple, green, or orange. The research team chose the unrecognizable national borders and non-triggering colors (no red, for instance) to decrease people’s tendency to read real-world situations into this fictional universe. “Minor states” are neutral in gray and can become allies.

A swelling soundtrack accompanies the game’s loading. Before you can make any moves, you first have to signal that you are about to do something by putting a generic marker on a hex, thus telling everyone that you might act on that piece of territory. If it’s a hex that belongs to another playing country, the two of you can negotiate in the chat box. Then, you can act—or not—on that tile: conventionally striking it with infantry or a missile, cyber attacking it, or navally attacking it. You may defend your own territory, build cities or military bases, or, of course, go nuclear. 

In SIGNAL, the scientists created a setup where two players were nuclear-armed countries and one was conventionally armed. But that setup had two different varieties: In one, which accounted for 209 of the matches in their analyzed dataset, the nuclear-armed countries had only traditional nuclear weapons. In the other, which represented 216 games, the nuclear nations had both traditional and tailored nuclear weapons. It is, the authors boasted, “the largest wargaming dataset collected to date,” at least “to the best of [their] knowledge.”

Players win by increasing their infrastructure and resources and defending their territory—pretty standard for strategy games like Civilization. The question the researchers had in mind related to who uses nuclear firepower to help them with those objectives.

It sounds robust, but there are some problems with SIGNAL. “Our game is hard to orient to,” admits Goldblum. “It’s a complex environment, by design, because you have to add enough complexity in order for it to be realistic.” And the graphics are… not stunning. They resemble, admits Reddie, a year-2000 version of Civilization. 

In addition, players can’t just log on and jump in: They have to have three people handy, or the game will just wait for others to join. 

In fact, reasonable skepticism about SIGNAL’s utility and biases, standard for a group of scientists, led the team to also create a survey-based war game, mimicking situations found in the video game, so they could compare people’s behavior in the two.

The results? The presence of tailored nuclear weapons does indeed seem to increase the likelihood that a player will take the conflict radioactive. The results also indicated that if tactical weapons are available, people are more likely to use them than the more destructive traditional ones.

The aftermath 

Those seem like neat conclusions, but that’s not the whole story: Despite the large amount of data gathered from the SIGNAL video game, the results from looking at the game-level trends weren’t actually statistically significant. They just trended toward supporting the survey’s findings—those listed above. Considering the game alone, though, the presence of tailored weapons only increased the likelihood of nuclear conflict by 2 percent with a margin of error of “plus or minus 20 percent, so we really can’t say much and need more data to reduce this error bar,” notes Goldblum. The effect was more pronounced, though still not with statistical significance, when the analysis removed the final round of play, in which players may have thrown their weapons “without fear of reciprocal action,” according to the paper. 

Demographic findings—about female players, college graduates, people over 29, people with national-security expertise or jobs—also didn’t rise to the level of statistical significance in a game-level analysis, though the potential trends warrant further study, in Goldblum’s view. 

That’s kind of disappointing for a game meant, in part, to get a big sample number. But the specific results of this game set’s conditions weren’t the point, says Reddie: PoNG’s creators wanted to prove that experimental war-gaming could be a thing, and he hopes to make that thing simpler for future researchers. “My primary interest is supporting the creation of a sandbox toolkit to actually make it easier to deploy this stuff in the absence of a million dollars of funding,” says Reddie. 

Goldblum sees it in a similar way. “The biggest takeaway is that experimental war-gaming offers this new tool for study,” she says. And, she adds, the fact that the results from the two different methods didn’t match up precisely provides a note of caution for other researchers: The tool you’re using likely has its own biases that influence players’ behavior.

Some tend to see this particular new tool as useful. Others, like a set of scholars from the RAND Corporation who wrote a letter to Science after the magazine published a 2018 piece about PoNG’s plans, definitely do not agree. The RAND team argued in part that data sets gathered from the public weren’t useful: To understand behavior in international conflict, you need players who are experts in geopolitics. “I’m not necessarily sure that’s wrong, right?” says Reddie. “But it’s a testable theory. They don’t have any data to suggest that they’re right.” 

They could gather some, though, if they compared such experts’ SIGNAL gameplay to that of a group of non-experts. In a lot of ways, though, all those human unpredictabilities—the possible dependence on experience, individual difference, inability to get behaviors to cohere or coalesce, strategy alterations based on whether an interaction is occurring on-screen or with a sheet of paper—are also part of the point. “Nuclear decisions would likely be made and influenced by fallible individuals acting under a tremendous amount of stress and time pressure,” says Wilson. In fact, he thinks war games are mostly useful for the pesky personhood that plagues them all. 

“The value of war games is, I think,” says Wilson, “that they show how unpredictable and often wrong our assumptions about humans are.”

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So far in February, the United States has shot down four objects in territorial skies. The first of these was a balloon, traced to the People’s Republic of China, which entered US airspace over Montana on February 1 and was shot down off the coast of South Carolina February 4. Since then, three other objects have been spotted and destroyed, including most recently an octagon-shaped flying object above Lake Huron. The new frequency of sightings, as well as the unknown uses and origins of several of the craft, have led to public confusion, and two big questions: What exactly are the objects, and why were they not detected until now?

“I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no — again, no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity — (laughter) — with these recent takedowns,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a February 13 briefing. “Again, there is no indication of aliens or [extra]terrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.  Wanted to make sure that the American people knew that, all of you knew that. And it was important for us to say that from here because we’ve been hearing a lot about it.”

That the objects remain unknown but terrestrial in origin fits into the broader pattern of Unidentified Flying Objects and, more recently, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Pilots and sensors have certainly been observing mysterious items in flight, but the challenges of discerning what, exactly, they are seeing, is real, as sensors are only built to study known objects. 

In the late 1940s, following the first Flying Saucer panic in the United States, the Department of Defense even reached out to film-and-camera maker Eastman Kodak, to try and develop a plane-mounted camera specifically for photographing unidentified objects. The program was ultimately abandoned because the task was a bad fit for the technology: it’s hard to design a new sensor around detecting objects with unknown properties. Better to use existing sensors, and try and discern the reality of observations from what is already on hand.

One way to increase coverage is by expanding the aperture of what sensors flag as worth of alert. This is, at least in part, likely related to the detection of the three other objects identified by the US and Canada and shot down over the US this month.

“Now, in light of the Chinese balloon program and this recent incursion into our airspace, the United States and Canada, through NORAD, have been more closely scrutinizing that airspace, including enhancing our radar capabilities, which — as the Commander of NORTHCOM and NORAD, General VanHerck, said last night — may at least partly explain the increase in the objects that have been detected,” said John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council, at the same February 13 briefing. 

Increasing sensor sensitivity means expanding the scope of what a system, like a radar, is trained to detect. The change will allow it to include other signals that it has been set to filter out as irrelevant previously. Often, there is a good reason for this. In 2015, after an activist flew a gyrocopter onto the east lawn of the US Capitol, Congress held hearings to understand why his small flying machine wasn’t detected. Toggling area radar to be sensitive enough to see a gyrocopter would also mean getting alerts from flocks of birds, or low-lying rainclouds. What radar “sees” is reflected radio signals, and making that useful means prioritizing for known threats, like jets and missiles.

NORAD, or the North American Aerospace Defense Command, is a joint undertaking by the United States and Canada to watch for potential attacks coming from over the horizon, especially from the North Pole but including skies more broadly. NORAD was started in 1958, in the early Cold War, to watch skies for Soviet bombers loaded with atomic warheads, and expanded to focus on watching for missiles and other threats.

In the popular imagination, NORAD is best known for annually tracking the imagined flight path of Santa Claus every December 24th, a long-running public relations coup that finally found a palatable way to sell ever-watchful aerial defenses to a public worried about nuclear armageddon. In October, the National Park Service nominated a former Defense Early Warning line site, or early NORAD radar station, to be a national landmark.

It was NORAD who tested the security of DC airspace after the 2015 gyrocopter incident, and it was NORAD that tracked and alerted US fighters to the aerial object off the coast of Alaska, before fighters shot it down. 

“There are no active tracks today, but the professionals at NORAD will continue to do their important work,” said Kirby. The three objects detected after the first balloon were assessed by the White House to lack a “kinetic threat” to people on the ground, as it was determined to not be sending communications signals, and to lack an onboard crew.

Kirby did not rule out the possibility that the objects were surveillance tools, but noted that “They weren’t being maneuvered. It was basically — they were been being driven by the wind.”

The recent spate of shoot-downs, and expanded sensitivity of sensors, means it may be possible that more are still to come. If these are deliberately wind-born craft lofted into US skies, ones already launched before the shoot-down may still be meandering over. Given the fate of the known large balloon and the threat other wind-borne objects, it might be reasonable to expect a pause in launches, as anyone previously putting balloons up on the premise they’ll be undetected confronts the reality of a more expansive surveillance aperture for aerial objects.

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A plane drawing a white contrail line across a blue sky is clearly thousands of feet above the ground, but how high is it flying exactly? It turns out that the precise altitude an airliner has at any given point in the flight has to do with a variety of factors, such as the plane’s weight, the temperature and weather, what the pilot requests, a protocol involving what direction the plane is headed, and of course what air traffic control says to do. 

When it comes to aircraft altitudes, here’s what’s up. 

On another plane

“In most cases, airliners will fly in the middle 30,000s [in terms of feet],” says John Cox, a retired commercial airline pilot who now heads a consulting firm called Safety Operating Systems. “They may be as high as 40 to 41,000, but that’s relatively rare.” 

Tom Adcock, a retired air traffic controller and now the director of safety and technology for the labor union National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), gives a similar estimate, pegging most traffic as occurring in the “upper 30s” and some of it reaching altitudes of 41,000 or 43,000. A Boeing 757 can fly as high as 42,000 and a 767 at 43,000; 747-400s can go higher. Various aircraft types have different maximum service ceilings.

[Related: The illuminating tech inside night vision goggles, explained]

Controllers take into account the compass direction an aircraft is flying in when giving a pilot an altitude. Although altitudes like 38,000 and 39,000 are both even numbers, “38” and “39” are even and odd. Westbound flights get even numbers like 38,000 feet, while eastbound flights receive odd numbers like 39,000. That way, aircraft traveling in opposite directions have a built-in amount of vertical spacing between them. Aircraft heading northeast or southeast would still travel at an odd altitude, while northwest or southwest would be even. “There are exceptions to the rule,” says Cox, noting that hypothetically, if he was heading east at night and wanted 32,000 feet, he’d still request it. “Worse they can do is say no.” 

In a way, that odd-even system mirrors a pattern on the ground far below, where interstate highways historically received numbers that reflect their directions: Interstates that run east-west got even numbers (Route 80, for example), with the lowest numbers toward the south of the country, and the north-south interstates got odd numbers, with the lowest numbers beginning in the west (Route 5). Here’s more on that road number system.

Getting a better altitude 

A number of variables go into determining the precise altitude an aircraft occupies at any given time, and Cox says generally higher altitudes are better. “You want to be pretty much as high as you can,” he says. “The jet engines are more efficient at higher altitudes, and there’s less air resistance.” A pilot is incentivized to burn less fuel because they would prefer to conclude their flight with more fuel in reserve, rather than less, to give them more options in case of delays while airborne, Cox says. 

He says that higher-is-better rule of thumb holds true on brief hops, too. “You’d be amazed—even on short flights, the most [fuel] efficient way to do it is climb the airplanes up to high altitude, pull the power back, and then start back down,” he says. “I may run up to 31,000 feet and I won’t be there five minutes.”

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The flight management computer gives a pilot information about the plane’s optimal altitude as well as their maximum altitude, taking into account the aircraft’s weight and the temperature of the air. An aircraft can climb higher after it burns off fuel and becomes lighter. 

“Pilots will stay as close to either optimum altitude or max altitude as they can,” Cox says. The goal is smooth air, and low headwinds if flying west—and climbing high can accomplish that. Meanwhile, an air traffic controller may ask a plane to climb to a higher altitude than the aircraft can manage at that time, so the pilot will need to decline the request. 

Commercial jets aren’t the only planes in the skies. A pilot in a Cessna 172 out for a Sunday jaunt will be below 10,000 feet (the planes aren’t pressurized), perhaps puttering around at 5,000 feet or so. A commercial turboprop would be above those aircraft but below the jets—a Bombardier Q400 like Alaska Airlines flies isn’t made to fly above 25,000 feet, for example. Turboprops like those might be in the “low 20s,” says Adcock, of NATCA. 

At the tippy top are the jewelry-encrusted people in private jets, where Learjets and Gulfstreams occupy the rarefied air at around 45,000 or higher, even up to 51,000 feet.

Something special happens even higher. Cox recalls that the supersonic Concorde flew at 60,000 feet. “When you get that high, the sky gets real, real, real dark blue, and you can see the curvature of the Earth,” he says. (Space itself doesn’t technically start until you get much, much higher.) “Having been on Concorde, and been at 60,000 feet, you can see it pretty clearly there.”

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On February 3, Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder confirmed that the United States was sending a type of munition called Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs to Ukraine, among other equipment and weapons. The bombs will expand what Ukraine can do with existing weapons, and will fit into an overall buildup of armaments that should allow Ukraine to more effectively pursue its war to repel the Russian invasion, which began in February of last year.

“This gives them a longer-range capability,” said Ryder, who added that the weapons will help Ukraine “conduct operations in defense of their country and to take back their sovereign territory in Russian-occupied areas.”

The GLSDB, developed by American defense giant Boeing and Swedish defense manufacturer Saab, is a combination of a bomb with wings and a rocket engine. The rocket engines are the same as those used for boosters in an artillery rocket called the M26 Multiple Launch Rocket System. What the GLSDB adds on top of that rocket booster is a 250-pound bomb with a winged guidance system. Those wings fold out in flight, taking the weapon from a diameter of 9.5 inches to a flying bomb with a wingspan over 5 feet. 

In other words, this bomb launches from a tube like a rocket, flies like a little plane, and then explodes like a bomb. That sets it apart from other bombs, which are dropped out of planes, or other artillery rounds, which arc back to the ground after launch. 

The bomb features inertial guidance, which can plot the bomb’s path based on distance and direction traveled since launch, as well as GPS guidance. To protect against electronic interference, the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs include features to block jamming, and to block spoofing, or the injection of false coordinates into its navigation. Against sophisticated Russian electronic warfare tools, ensuring that bombs travel the paths intended is important.

But what really sets the GLSDB apart from other artillery rounds is the range: 93 miles, or 150 kilometers. Firing guided rockets, HIMARS have a range of 43 miles. The GLSDB more than doubles that range. Artillery can be useful for winning fights on static fronts, as it punishes hostile advances and can counter enemy artillery. Longer range artillery also lets Ukrainian forces attack positions further away from the front lines, especially supply depots and ammunition stockpiles. When Ukraine launched its counter-offensives in fall 2022, the increased range of HIMARs made it hard for Russian defenders to hold territory, and also denied supplies to other reinforcing Russian units. 

“We’ve been focused on several key areas in the last few months to support Ukraine, specifically air defense capabilities, armor capabilities, long-range fires capabilities, and then combined with training in order to enable them to have the ability to conduct combined arms operations,” said Ryder.

The announcement of the GLSDB, described plainly as “precision-guided rockets,” came with a longer list of further material aid to the war from the United States. This includes ammunition for HIMARS, for other artillery, and for mortars, a small, soldier-portable weapon that can hurl bombs over obstacles and into trenches. The notice included anti-personnel weapons like Claymores, a close cousin of land mines, and heavy machine guns. Apart from the rockets, these weapons would all be familiar in form, generally speaking, to soldiers fighting in the trenches of World War I. (Rocket artillery dates to World War II.) Given the static fronts and held trenches in the Donbas, and especially around the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, it is a familiar style of warfare.

What is newer are tools like thermal imagery sights paired to machine guns, which give users a powerful edge in night battles. Then there are MRAPs, or Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, which were heavily used by the United States to protect soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan from roadside bombs; those are being sent to Ukraine where they can serve as useful transports especially in areas that might have landmines or unexploded bombs.

Counter-drone tools and ammunition, designed to spot the small flying scouts from observing soldiers in the field, are a modern reality paired with an older style of warfare. These, alongside anti-tank missiles and anti-air weapons, fit into the broader combined arms package prepared by the US and other countries for Ukraine. Following on the heels of January’s big push to commit heavy armored tanks to Ukraine, the nation should be in a better position to launch counter-offensives and drive back the invading forces.

Weapons like the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb, which extend the range of how and where Ukraine can strike, should give its military added depth and punch as it chooses battles in the coming months.

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On February 4, a pilot in an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet scored the plane’s first air-to-air kill, firing a missile at the Chinese surveillance balloon drifting off the coast of South Carolina. The shot, an AIM-9X Sidewinder fired from 58,000 feet above the ground, hit the balloon at an altitude of up to 65,000 feet, and ended a week-long incident in which the military, the public, and Congress all followed the course of the balloon with great interest.

“The balloon, which was being used by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States, was brought down above US territorial waters,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a written statement. 

The balloon entered the sky above Montana on February 1, where it caused a halt to flights in and out of Billings International Airport. For four days, from Wednesday to Saturday, the balloon followed the wind across the US, until ultimately meeting its missile-induced end over the ocean. 

At a press conference February 2, a senior defense official noted that the US had tracked the balloon and “had custody” of it ever since it entered the country’s airspace. This includes previous fly-bys of the balloon with F-22s over Montana, although the decision was made not shoot it down then out of a concern for risk to those below.

The defense official repeatedly identified the balloon as created and operated by China, acknowledging when a reporter highlighted that Montana houses siloed nuclear ICBMs. The location of the silos is by design not secret—part of Cold War nuclear strategy that dictated the placement of the silos set them far away from dense urban centers, in part to ensure some incoming nuclear missiles would aim for the silos instead of cities. The day-to-day operation of missile silos can still contain some fresh information, so it is possible that is what was targeted by the balloon’s sensors.

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

“Our best assessment at the moment is that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added over and above what the [People’s Republic of China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low-Earth orbit,” said the official. “But out of an abundance of caution, we have taken additional mitigation steps.  I’m not going to go into what those are.  But we know exactly where this balloon is, exactly what it is passing over. And we are taking steps to be extra vigilant so that we can mitigate any foreign intelligence risk.”

At the same briefing, the official noted that this was not the first time “that you had a balloon of this nature cross over the continental United States.  It has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this administration.”

While this event garnered widespread national fascination—it was even fodder for a skit on Saturday Night Live—the use of balloons for gathering intelligence dates back centuries. Here’s what to know about their history. 

Trial balloons

Balloons have been used in military surveillance since 1794, when revolutionary France employed them to watch movements of people and cannons from above. In the US Civil War, the Union and Confederate forces used balloons, flying as high as 1,000 feet, to document activity below. Communication with balloons then was tricky, with balloonists using either signal flags or telegraph wires to report what they observed. These balloons were tethered, allowing crews on the ground to draw the balloons back into place. In this sense, the balloons were more like deployable observation towers, rather than true scouting vehicles.

Later, World War I saw balloons used to photograph battlefields below. While film took time to develop, the long static fronts of the Great War ensured that such information was useful, or at least useful if the balloonists collecting it were not shot down by early fighter planes. In World War One, Frank Luke Jr was a US Army pilot who earned the nickname “Arizona Balloon Buster” for shooting down 18 German observation balloons. 

World War I also saw the use of dirigibles, or rigid airships, which flew as bombers as well as spotters. Airships could move under their own power and without tethers, allowing them deadly access to the skies above enemy lines. 

In World War II, Japan built high-altitude balloons that were lofted into the newly discovered jet stream, and then carried by the high-altitude wind across the pacific. More than 9,000 FuGo balloons were launched into the jet stream, complete with incendiary bombs designed to burn down cities and forests. The FuGo attacks were limited in effectiveness because they relied on winds that were strongest in November through March, when the Pacific Northwest was wet and cold, limiting the ability of fires to spread. Indeed, apart from fires, the only deaths directly attributed to FuGo attacks were that of a picnicking family, investigating a mysterious device.

Eyes floating in the sky

Long-range balloon surveillance is limited by how the balloon can be directed and what information it can communicate. Weather balloons, launched hourly, record atmospheric conditions. The famous 1947 balloon crash at Roswell, New Mexico, was of an instrument carrying acoustic sensors, designed to listen for the sounds of Soviet nuclear detonations.

[Related: Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report.]

One reason to use balloons is that they can carry large payloads, as a lighter-than-air body of sufficient size floats in the sky, instead of needing to generate lift. The US general responsible for North America described the balloon as “up to 200 feet tall, with a payload the size of a jetliner.”

As for what the balloon was actually recording, that remains to be seen. It is possible that its high-altitude flight allowed for greater surveillance of radio and other wireless transmissions than can a satellite, though that is more speculative than proven.

Recovery of the downed balloon, and especially its sensor package, could prove revelatory, though it should be assumed that any sensitive information and technology taken into military possession will be classified, only parts of which may be selectively released. Given the widespread interest of other militaries in developing surveillance balloons, as well as the revelation that these overflights have happened before, it is likely that the modern balloon race is only just beginning. 

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On January 26, Russian politician Dmitry Rogozin claimed in an interview that the country’s robotic Marker Uncrewed Ground Vehicles will be deployed in Ukraine as a tool to counter tanks. The Marker is a long-in-development and high-tech concept, designed to explore how robots could work together with humans on the battlefield. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, and as Ukraine prepares to receive armored vehicles, including tanks, from other countries, Marker appears to have been moved from conceptual promise to being touted as a wonder weapon. 

The Marker UGV dates back to at least 2019, when it was promoted as a symbol of the modern technological prowess of the Russian military. While Russia had already developed armed drones, ground robots typically took the form of mine clearing machines like the Uran-6. With treads and with a turret, the Marker featured in glossy produced videos with a rock beat and a machine gun swivel that seemed to follow the commands of a remote human spotter.

Marker was developed by Russia’s Advanced Research Foundation, which is a rough analog to DARPA in the US. Early work on Marker made it a tool for exploring concepts in robots, remote control, and autonomy, with the assumption that later, other companies would develop new tools and weapons based on the research done with Marker.

As recently as January 2022, Russian state-owned media described Marker as being used to patrol a spaceport and work alongside quadcopter drones. Marker was one of several robots promoted as major technological advances, all against the backdrop of Russia mobilizing tanks and soldiers for the invasion of Ukraine that came February 24. In the eleven months since the invasion, Russia’s major advances have been halted, and on multiple fronts turned back. Now, with news that Ukraine stands ready to receive armored transports and tanks, Marker is back to being a darling of Russian media.

Meeting its Marker  

On January 15, Rogozin claimed to news service TASS that Marker robots would be tested in Ukraine soon. While Rogozin has no official capacity in the Russian government, he has held multiple high-level positions within the Russian government. In July 2022, he was dismissed as the head of Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, and has since rebranded himself as a leader of a volunteer group called the “Tsar’s Wolves” whose aim is improving the technology of Russian forces. Testing Marker in Ukraine would mark a debut for the device, and a task it was never quite designed for.

“This would be a first combat deployment for the Marker UGV, and yes, it wasn’t really tested in combat conditions before,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “It was tested in a rather controlled environment, even when it had to navigate autonomously through a forested environment in late 2021. There is of course a possibility of a classified series of tests that could have taken place, but as far as all info about this UGV, there was no real combat stress test.”

Deploying an untested robot into combat, should it happen, reads as more of a stunt than battle-changing tool. In earlier tests and demonstrations, what set Marker apart was its ability to carry machine guns and anti-tank weapons, then use them at the discretion of protected or hidden soldiers. Powerful cameras and sensors could make it a useful spotter and shooter, though the role necessarily entails exposing the robot to return fire, risking the integrity of the machine. At a production level, that is a loss that a military can absorb. But with just a handful of test platforms, it is a big gamble for a flashy demonstration.

“Marker has limited autonomy capability for movement and target selection, although testing that in a complex battlefield space is probably different than trying to recreate such a test in pre-2022 trials. This is the crux of the problem in using such UGVs – real combat presents many unpredictable situations that cannot be all tested out beforehand, so it’s also likely that Markers will be remote-controlled to avoid losses,” says Bendett. “And there is also a significant PR element here.”

The possible fronts where Marker could be deployed in Ukraine are many, from old trenches in the Donbas region that Russia has contested since 2014, to fierce fighting around the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in the east, or even along Russian-held front lines northeast of Crimea. Regardless of where it is deployed, it is unlikely to be effective against heavy armor.

Rogozin highlighted that Marker exists in two forms. The sensor-and-drone equipped scout is designed as a useful spotter. Rogozin pitched the armed version, complete with anti-tank missiles, as an answer to Abrams and Leopard tanks. Says Bendett: “The recon version seems more plausible [for use] than a straight up contest against two of the most powerful tanks in the world.”

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In the fall of last year, DARPA announced that it was looking for new ways to keep satellites operating in the lower edges of space. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency exists to explore blue-sky technologies, and create innovations that make new tools possible. Project Daedalus, announced in October, is a way to manage satellites beyond the blue sky of Earth, but not much further. The program solicitation is a fascinating portrait of the technology challenges DARPA wants to tackle to expand what can be done in orbit.

DARPA defined Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) as orbits less than 450 km, or roughly 280 miles, in altitude. Low Earth Orbit, by contrast, is 2,000 km or 1,200 miles. The benefits of being in Very Low Earth Orbit include, according to DARPA, “improved spatial resolution for optical imaging, higher signal-to-noise ratios for radar and lidar systems, improved geospatial position accuracy.” These all let cameras and other sensors on the satellite better observe activity on Earth below, and communicate those observations more quickly and accurately. 

In addition, DARPA suggests that it’s cheaper and easier to put a satellite into VLEO, noting “greater launch vehicle insertion capability, and mass, volume, and cost savings.” Even more importantly than all of that, because VLEO is so close to Earth and so far from other satellites, the low satellites can get away with less radiation protection, and are generally out of the path of most orbital debris.

The announcement also notes that “compliance burdens with Interagency Space Debris Coordination Committee guidelines are reduced compared to higher orbit,” likely in part because the very low orbit keeps the satellites generally out of the more heavily trafficked orbital lanes.

Debris in war and peace

Orbital debris is a compounding problem for satellites and especially satellites used by the military. While space is vast, orbit is not, and the useful slices of orbits are increasingly populated by human-made objects. 

Some of these objects are purely scientific, oriented out towards the stars beyond, while many are built to serve terrestrial ends. Communications satellites, surveillance satellites, and even observation satellites used for documenting weather below are all potential targets should a shooting war break out into space. Anti-satellite missiles, demonstrated by nations like the United States, Russia, China, and India, prove the capability is widespread.

Destroying a satellite with a missile creates debris, from the remains of the missile to the wreck of the satellite, and this debris persists in orbit. In November 2021, Russia destroyed its own Kosmos satellite, scattering debris throughout orbit, some of which continues to persist.

Even without the threat of destruction in war, when existing debris collides with satellites, it can create new debris, further imperiling all objects in orbit. The risk of these collisions increases with every new object put into orbit, because debris can travel into multiple directions from a collision, it can imperil satellites at further and closer orbits, too.

Flying close to the thermosphere

Orbital space has friction, especially the closer a satellite is to the atmosphere. Satellites in Low Earth Orbit experience atmospheric drag, as the gaseous particles bound to Earth’s atmosphere expand and contract in cycle with the sun. This in turn can increase the friction on a satellite, which will require either orbital correction by onboard engines or an orbit degrading until the satellite re-enters the atmosphere proper. The thermosphere, or the area starting about 90 km (56 miles) in altitude, extends “to between 500 and 1,000 km (311 to 621 miles) above our planet,” a range that fluctuates.

All of Very Low Earth Orbit is within the thermosphere. That makes the challenges of keeping a satellite in Very Low Earth Orbit unique, and suggests why DARPA might devote a program to mastering those challenges. These challenges include atmospheric and aerodynamic drag, space weather, charging the spacecraft’s batteries despite being lower than low orbit, and even atomic oxygen erosion, or the phenomena by which the O2 common lower in the atmosphere is replaced by single-atom oxygen in the thermosphere. Atomic oxygen can break chemical bonds, a problem for satellites made, as they are, out of chemical compounds.

In Daedelus, DARPA set out to demonstrate new technology that could enable sustained long-term Very Low Earth Orbit operations, despite these unique hazards. Should such a program succeed, it could allow for a new layer of satellite infrastructure, pointing narrowly targeted sensors down at the world below.

The Daedalus program itself is classified, with solicitations noting that contractors need to have security clearances for facilities and secret clearances for personnel working on the project. The program borrows its name from the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun on waxen wings and thus perished in uncontrolled descent. Icarus’ more cautious father, Daedalus, flew lower, and survived.

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On January 17, DARPA announced the next steps of a program to create an aircraft designed to fly entirely on control surfaces that lack the moving parts that airplanes typically use to maneuver. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, specializes in blue-sky visions, investing in research towards creating new possibilities for technology. In this program, it seeks to change how aircraft alter direction in the sky.

The program is called Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors, or CRANE. DARPA first started the program in 2019, with a request for proposals to “design, build, and flight test a new and novel aircraft that incorporates Active Flow Control (AFC) technologies as a primary design consideration.”

AFC is a kind of control paradigm that replaces moving parts like ailerons and rudder of an aircraft. Planes change their positions by redirecting airflow with ailerons attached to the wings, an elevator at the tail, and a rudder. These controls are what let planes roll side to side, pitch upwards to take off and downwards to land, as well as or yaw left to right. Extendable slats and flaps on wings can also allow planes to generate more lift at low speeds, and to slow the plane as it angles down for a landing. (Here’s more on exactly how wings generate lift.)

With “Active Flow Control,” aircraft can use plasma actuators or synthetic jet actuators to move air, instead of relying on physical surfaces. With plasma actuators, this is achieved through changing the electrical charge of air passing over the actuators mounted in the wing, in turn changing the flow of that air. Meanwhile, synthetic jets can inject air into the airflow over the wing, changing lift. In 2019, NASA patented a wing control system that combined both plasma and synthetic jet actuators, with the goal of creating actuators without any moving parts, and which were “essentially maintenance free.”

In DARPA’s 2019 call for proposals, it emphasized that this technology could lead to “elimination of moving control surfaces for stability & control,” improvements in “takeoff and landing performance, high lift flight, thick airfoil efficiency, and enhanced high altitude performance.”

With improved takeoffs and landing, such a control system could allow for “extreme short takeoff and landing” (ESTOL), where a plane or drone operates from runways even smaller than those present used for short takeoff and landing. The Department of Defense and NATO define short takeoff as being able to land on a runway 1,500 feet long, with a 50-foot obstacle at either end. 

Because these new flow controls could increase the angle of lift for takeoff and improved braking for descent, it’s possible that a plane with it could land in an even smaller area. That expands how and where such planes can operate, and matters especially with future wars and operations at sea, where the military has to bring its own runways on ships, or on small islands.

Another area where these controls can help is in making it harder for aircraft to be observed, as it reduces the number of surfaces on an aircraft that would reflect radar signals. The controls can also be quieter, minimizing detection from audio sensors, and can improve aircraft stability and lift at high altitudes. The controls also allow for thicker plane wings, which can hold more fuel.

In December, Aurora Flight Sciences (which is a part of Boeing) was awarded over $89 million for the CRANE program, or roughly the cost of a single F-35A stealth jet fighter. In Phase 1, which is already completed, Aurora created an aircraft that was able to use active flow control to demonstrate control in a wind tunnel test. Phase 2, which was announced this month, will focus on designing and developing the software and controls of an X-plane demonstrator that “can fly without traditional moving flight controls on the exterior of the wings and tail.”

Should DARPA decide to continue the contrast, there’s the option for Phase 3, in which DARPA will fly a 7,000 pound X-plane that incorporates active flow control and relies on it for controlled flight.

In starting the design from a new kind of control paradigm, DARPA hopes to spark new thinking about how planes can fly and maneuver. DARPA’s long record of X-plane design includes everything from long endurance drones to stealth aircraft to hypersonic designs, all of which have led to changes in military design and planning. The ability of aircraft to use active flow control to operate from smaller runways expands not just the areas where the military can fight, but even the size of ships that could launch long-flying drones. 

DARPA, on the innovation edge of research, has focused the project on making sure the technology can work in demonstration, first. Should it prove successful, it will be up to other parts of the military to best determine how they want to employ it.

Correction on Jan. 31, 2023: This article was updated to change “1,5000 feet long” to “1,500 feet long” and “active follow control” to “active flow control.”

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On January 19, the Department of Defense announced that it would send 90 Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) with 20 mine rollers to Ukraine, as part of a broader $2.5 billion package of aid. The Strykers will join Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and a host of other equipment that will increase Ukraine’s ability to move with armor. 

Adding to the Strykers, Bradleys, and other equipment is now the distinct possibility that the US could send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, as both CNN and The Wall Street Journal are reporting. The US “could make an announcement as soon as this week” about those tanks, according to CNN. Meanwhile, Germany is reportedly preparing to announce the delivery of Leopard 2 tanks as well.

All this mobile armor—Strykers, Bradleys, tanks, and more—serve different roles on a battlefield. To understand this hodgepodge better, it is easiest to look at each component part.

What to know about Strykers, or armor for moving

The Stryker is an eight-wheeled armored transport, designed to fit in between the Army’s light vehicles (like Humvees) and heavier transports (like Bradleys). It is operated by a crew of two, with room for a nine-person squad of infantry to ride in the back. The basic model of a Stryker is lightly armed, with just a machine gun for shooting and smoke grenades to conceal the vehicle’s movement. There are eight Stryker variants, including ones armed with everything from anti-tank missiles to extra sensors or even a mortar artillery piece, fired through the flipped-open roof hatches.

The mine rollers mentioned in the release allow a Stryker to detonate explosives, like anti-tank landmines, that are triggered by the weight of heavy vehicles. These rollers, which can be mounted on the front of the vehicle, set the mines off before they are underneath the Stryker. Strykers, as wheeled vehicles, are especially dependent on roads, which are easy to cover with mines. Using a Stryker to clear mines lets the road become an open path not just for the Strykers, but for the whole armored column behind them.

[Related: The Army’s new light tank can venture where its beefier cousins can’t]

At a press conference on January 20, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the US’s objective “is to provide the capability that Ukraine needs to be successful in the near term. And so you’ve heard us talk about two battalions of Bradley infantry fighting vehicles — very capable platform, [as well as] three battalions, or a brigade’s-worth of Strykers. So you add that up, that’s two brigades of combat power that the U.S. is providing, along with enablers and other things.”

In the US, a Brigade Combat Team is a formation of about 5,000 soldiers and about 300 vehicles, usually some mix of transports and tanks, or vehicles with heavy weapons. So far, the United States has promised Ukraine 109 Bradleys and 90 Strykers, which is two-thirds of the way to an armor brigade combat team, without the tanks. The US has also provided other vehicles, like 300 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, an even more lightly armed and protected battlefield taxi than the Stryker. 

What to know about tanks, or armor for fighting

In order for an army to take advantage of armored transports, it needs to break through a defended line. That is the role tanks were built for, as heavy armor designed for fighting.

Tanks are in concept and execution over a century old. The first tanks were built to break the stalemate along Europe’s Western Front in World War I, where trenches, machine guns, explosives, and artillery made any assault horrific and bloody. Tanks, as literal moving armor, protected soldiers advancing behind them; with cannons and machine guns, tanks could devastate defenders. While tanks debuted in World War I, their use in World War II would shift the course of warfare. German tank doctrine, developed during the interwar era, prized armored formations that could punch through enemy lines, leaving defenses useless and routed around.

Today, tanks remain a vital part of the military effort, as both Ukraine and Russia employ their Soviet-inherited tanks against one another. Tanks remain vulnerable to dedicated anti-tank weapons, like Javelin missiles, as well as to attack from the air, like by planes or helicopters. And tanks are also vulnerable to other tanks. In other words, stopping a tank assault requires dedicated anti-tank weapons, which could include other tanks. Meanwhile, weapons that are useful at stopping other armored vehicles, like rocket-propelled grenades useful against Bradleys and Strykers, are more abundant, but will struggle against heavy armor.

The heavy and powerful M1 Abrams is optimized to run on jet fuel, which American logistics can regularly supply, but could be trickier for a military without as robust a resupply system as the United States. Meanwhile, the Leopard 2, made by and exported from Germany, is a diesel-powered tank used by the militaries of many NATO countries. Should Ukraine receive the tanks, they will enable the Ukrainian military to launch combined arms assault, with the mobility of tanks and armored transports shifting the battle. 

In brief, the Stryker is a transport that can protect passengers from machine gun fire. The Bradley is heavier armored transport with some weapons useful against other vehicles, and a tank like the M1 Abrams is built to destroy other heavy vehicles, while being protected from the same.

The stakes: Armored columns pick their battlefields

Ever since Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the United States and other countries have increased aid to that invaded country. This aid built in some cases on programs already in place, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, along with Russian occupation of the Donbas from 2014 to the present. But while the Donbas war was long-fought, it was geographically contained, over a fraction of the country, and involving somewhat static defensive lines for both sides. The present war was launched with a three-pronged invasion of Ukraine, with Russia at one point threatening Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv, the eastern metropolis of Kharkiv, and occupying the city of Kherson, at the mouth of the Dnipro river.

Today, much of Russia’s effort is aimed at capturing the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, in the Donbas. The nature of the war is such that the two sides can lock into grinding, gruesome fights over static positions, and then shift dramatically based on a collapse elsewhere in a front line. When Ukraine launched a counter-offensive in fall 2022, its armed forces did so with new weapons like US-supplied HIMARs rocket artillery, which destroyed Russian supplies at a great distance.

With an army in armored transports, like those provided by the US, Ukraine would be in a position to take advantage of any new gap in Russian defenses, moving behind established defenses and possibly causing a major shift in the war, like what happened in the fall of 2022. 

Update on Feb. 13, 2022. This story has been updated to clarify that M1 Abrams tanks are optimized to run on jet fuel. They don’t necessarily run on that fuel exclusively.

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On January 12, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. The term “UAP,” which is largely synonymous with the original usage of Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, is designed to be a broad category for reporting observed but unexplained sights in the sky, a kind of “see something, say something” for pilots. 

The report, mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022, includes the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was originally created within the Department of Defense in 2020 as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. “All domains” means the phenomena need not be flying in the sky, but could also occur at sea, in space, or on land. 

This is the second report on UAPs since the creation of the task force, following a preliminary report released in 2021. In the preliminary report from two years ago, the task force identified 144 sightings over the previous 17 years. In the new report, there are a total of 510 sightings, including those 144 already documented, 247 new ones made since the first report, and 119 reports of events prior to 2021 but that were not included in the initial assessment, for a total of 366 newly identified reports.

[Related: UFO research is stigmatized. NASA wants to change that.]

The majority of new reports come from US Navy and US Air Force “aviators and operators,” who saw the phenomena during regular operations, and then reported those sightings to the newly created appropriate channels, like the AARO. 

The official takeaway? “AARO’s initial analysis and characterization of the 366 newly-identified reports, informed by a multi-agency process, judged more than half as exhibiting unremarkable characteristics,” the document notes. Of those unremarkable reports: 26 were drones or drone-like, 163 were balloons or balloon-like, and six were clutter spotted in the sky.

That leaves 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed” remaining from the batch of newly identified reports, a group that is perhaps thought of more as unresolved than unexplainable. Of those, some “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” though anyone looking for that analysis in the report will be sorely disappointed.

Tracking, cataloging, and identifying unexplained—or at least not immediately explainable—phenomena is tricky work. It has created persistent problems for the military since the first panic over “flying saucers” in the summer of 1947 (more on Roswell in a moment), and it persists to this day. Part of the impetus for a task force to study UFOs, or UFOs under the UAP name, came from a series of leaked videos, later declassified by the military, showing what appear to be unusual objects in flight.

Lost in observation

One of the more famous UAP sightings this century is the “Tic Tac,” spotted by Navy pilots flying southwest of San Diego on November 14, 2004. The pilots captured video of the object, which appeared small and cylindrical, and changed direction in flight in an unusual way. This video was officially released by the Navy in 2020, but which had found its way onto the internet in 2007, and was the centerpiece of a New York Times story about UFO sightings in 2017. New documents released by the Navy on January 13 show that formal reports of the so-called Tic Tac never made it beyond the 3rd Fleet’s chain of command, effectively leaving the report stranded within part of the Navy. 

As PopSci sister publication The War Zone notes, “the Navy and other U.S. military officials have publicly acknowledged that there were serious issues in the past with the mechanisms available, or lack thereof, through which pilots could make such reports and do so without fear of being stigmatized.” The released documents show that, indeed, the pilots faced stigma for the report afterwards.

None of that explains what the object in the “Tic Tac” video is, or what other still-unidentified phenomena might actually be. But it does suggest that the existence of an office responsible for collecting such reports has made it easier for such phenomena to be collected and analyzed, rather than kept quiet by pilots afraid of ridicule or having their judgment questioned.

Everything unidentified is new again

Part of the challenge of thinking about UFOs, and now UAPs, is that by asking people to report unusual sightings, people may interpret what they see as directly related to what they are being asked to find. Tell someone to take a walk in the woods and keep their eye out for rodent sightings, and every shadow or scurrying creature becomes a possible identification. 

The Army observation balloon that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was discovered almost a month before it was reported to local authorities. The summer of 1947, early in the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, saw a major “flying saucer” panic, as one highly publicized sighting led people across the nation to report unusual craft or objects. 

These reports eventually became the subject of study in Project Blue Book, an Air Force effort to categorize, demystify, and understand what exactly people were reporting. When the Air Force concluded Project Blue Book in 1969, it did so noting that 90 percent of UFOs were likely explainable as ordinary objects, like planets in twilight or airplanes at odd angles. 

As documents later declassified in the 1990s revealed, the military knew even more of the sightings to be explainable, such as backyard observers documenting US spy plane flights and reporting them to the government. The Roswell crash, which a military officer first identified as a flying saucer before the Army clarified a day later that it was a weather balloon, wasn’t precisely a weather balloon. The object was indeed a balloon, but it carried acoustic sensors designed to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. In other words, letting the public think an object is mysterious or unexplained is a good way of disguising something that’s explainable but should be secret.

[Related: UFO conspiracies can be more dangerous than you think]

In the decades following the conclusion of Project Blue Book, the military tried to debunk sightings, rather than catalog them. Today, the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office is to take the sightings seriously, and to encourage reporting, in case there are in fact important aircraft sightings that would otherwise be shrugged off. The advent of drones, stealth technologies, uncrewed sea vehicles, and advanced ways for someone to interfere with sensors all make it possible, if not always plausible, that a given UAP sighting could be a deliberate act by a hostile group or nation.

Still, as the report already attests, most sightings can be dismissed and known phenomena. Balloons, decades after Roswell, still catch light in unusual ways, and can look surreal on the ground.

One takeaway from the report hints that some of the phenomena could be due to people or sensors being mistaken or not working properly. “ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and AARO [All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office] operate under the assumption that UAP reports are derived from the observer’s accurate recollection of the event and/or sensors that generally operate correctly and capture enough real data to allow initial assessments,” notes the report. “However, ODNI and AARO acknowledge that a select number of UAP incidents may be attributable to sensor irregularities or variances, such as operator or equipment error.”

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This article was originally featured on Task and Purpose.

Located just north of Atlanta, Georgia, Dobbins Air Reserve Base is usually home to C-130 transport planes. But for the next few weeks, the base will host an unusual guest: a white-painted jet that can fly for more than half a day at the edge of space.

The ‘Earth Resources 2’ jet is used by NASA for studying hurricanes, testing satellite systems, and a range of other scientific purposes. Military aviation observers may be more familiar with its cousin, the all-black Air Force U-2 spy plane that has collected intelligence photos for the U.S. government since the 1950s. 

Turns out, the so-called ‘Dragon Lady’ is good for more than just collecting information on enemy forces: it is also great at studying the forces of nature.

“NASA ER-2s have played an important role in Earth science research because of their ability to fly into the lower stratosphere at subsonic speeds, enabling direct stratospheric sampling as well as virtual satellite simulation missions,” NASA says of the jet. 

It makes sense that a spy plane works well as a science plane. After all, part of the reason why the U-2 is still in Air Force service 67 years after its first flight is due to its adaptability. The aircraft is basically a massive glider that can carry large payloads of sensors, cameras and other tools for gathering information.

“It’s just a glider with a big motor stuffed up its ass,” a former U-2 pilot, retired Col. Michael “Lips” Phillips, said on the Fighter Pilot Podcast in October 2020. “The reason it’s still used every single day is all the crap that we got on the most sophisticated spy satellites in the world can be put on a U-2. And the bad guys don’t know when it’s coming.”

Unlike satellites, which travel in predictable orbits around the Earth, the U-2 can fly whenever it is needed at a very high altitude. The U-2 often flies at 70,000 feet (13 miles) and above, while commercial airliners usually fly at around 31,000 and 38,000 feet (6 to 7 miles), according to Time. That high up, you can see the curve of the Earth, the movement of the night sky across the planet, and the tiny shapes of airliners beneath you, one U-2 pilot, identified only as Maj. Chris, said in 2020. 

Meanwhile, the ER-2 usually flies between 20,000 to 70,000 feet, NASA wrote. At that altitude, the ER-2 can test out the sensors that scientists want to use on satellites, which means they can find and address any bugs in the system without the cost of launching a faulty satellite into space.

The ER-2 has deployed to six continents to study everything from global warming to ozone depletion, according to NASA. That work benefits not just the space agency, but also the U.S. Forest Service, Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

The agency used to operate straight-up U-2s starting in 1971 until it acquired its first ER-2 in 1981, followed by the second in 1989. Together the U-2s and ER-2s “have flown more than 4,500 data missions and test flights in support of scientific research,” NASA wrote.

The ER-2 flies at altitudes where the air pressure is so low that an unprotected pilot’s blood would literally boil. To prevent that, ER-2 pilots wear pressurized suits that are nearly the same as the ones worn by NASA astronauts on the way to orbit and back, ER-2 pilot Donald “Stu” Broce told WIRED Magazine in 2017.

Broce, who used to land F-14 fighter jets on aircraft carriers as a Navy pilot, said flying the ER-2 is a difficult task.

“Everything about the plane is kind of hard to do,” he told WIRED. “I call it the circus, everything about the plane is unique.”

[Related: The spy agency origins of NASA’s next powerful planet-hunting observatory.]

One of the odd things about the ER-2 is the pair of wheels that keep the plane’s huge wings off the runway. When the plane takes off, the wheels are designed to fall away and not be used again until the next flight. 

Once airborne, the flight itself can last eight, 10 or even 13 hours, as Broce has experienced. To stay energized, pilots bring an edible substance similar to baby food, which they eat through a tube that connects to their suit helmet.

The suit may sound uncomfortable, but there is quite an office view.

“The views are beautiful, there is no weather, you see the curvature of the Earth,” Broce said.

The most difficult part of flying the U-2 and the ER-2 comes at the end of the long flight, where pilots have to bring the lumbering aircraft to a stop using just the two wheels arranged bicycle-style on its belly, a dicey proposition even for a former carrier pilot.

“Every plane in the world, at some point in the landing you can give up and relax and you’re done and all you have to do is roll out and use the brakes,” Broce told Flying Magazine in 2015. “The U-2 wasn’t like that at all. You have to fly the plane until it stops on the runway. And it doesn’t handle crosswinds well and it’s on bicycle gear.”

To help with the landing, a fellow U-2 or ER-2 pilot in a chase car pursues the jet down the runway, guiding the landing pilot to a halt. For the next few weeks, airmen at Dobbins will get to enjoy that sight as the ER-2 there returns from missions tracking severe weather. The ER-2 will be based there until about March 5, the base said in a press release.

Whether it is climate change, the ozone layer, the nuclear-armed Soviet military or other things that could end all life on earth, the U-2 and the ER-2 always seem to be around to keep an eye on it for the U.S. government. The aircraft will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

“The handful of airplanes that we have, we’ve got about three dozen left, they fly every day,” Phillips, the retired U-2 pilot, said in 2020. “Somewhere in the world, some agency of the government needs something, and the U-2 flies all the time.”

Special thanks to The Flyby newsletter where we first learned of this story.

The post A Cold War spy plane now tracks humanity’s greatest threat for NASA appeared first on Popular Science.

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On Sunday, January 15, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off to orbit with a payload for just the fifth time since the company began flying the 70-ton capacity vehicle in 2018.

Launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:56 p.m. EST, the partially reusable rocket carried USSF-67, a classified US Space Force mission consisting of two main payloads. The first held a military communications satellite destined for geosynchronous orbit, the Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM, or CBAS-2, according to a Space Force media release.

The second payload, the Long Duration Propulsive ESPA, or LDPE-3A, is a craft the Space Force uses for deploying multiple smaller payloads into low Earth orbit. In this case, the LDPE-3A carried five payloads, including a prototype of a secure space-to-ground communications device and another prototype designed for “enhanced situational awareness,” as per the Space Force announcement.

The most recent prior Falcon Heavy launch was also a Space Force mission, USSF-44, which launched from Kennedy Space Center on November 1. That was the first flight for the 229-foot-tall rocket since June 2019, a surprising slow pace given the sleeker Falcon 9 rocket launched a record-setting 48 times in 2022 alone.

What’s next for Falcon Heavy?

That the January 15 launch was only the fifth for the Falcon had nothing to do with Falcon Heavy itself, says Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analysis firm Astralytical. Instead, it was a result of delays in payloads for both NASA and the US military, including the USSF-44 mission launched in November, that kept the pace of launches low.

“It’s actually very common for payloads to be delayed,” Forcyzk notes. Meanwhile, the majority of SpaceX’s clientele don’t need a rocket as powerful as the Falcon Heavy, and so can fly on the more affordable Falcon 9, which the company uses to launch its own Starlink satellites. A Falcon 9 launch costs $67 million, according to SpaceX pricing, while a Falcon Heavy launch rings up to $97 million.

The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful launch vehicle SpaceX currently operates and consists of three of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket boosters strapped together side-by-side. The combined 27 Merlin engines provide 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, and when combined with an upper stage atop the middle booster, can lift up to 141,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

That makes the Falcon Heavy “SpaceX’s current solution for launching medium- and large-sized payloads to orbit or beyond,” Forczyk says, but it’s not necessarily a long-term option. SpaceX’s massive Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster are still under development; as they become operational, there will be less and less need for Falcon Heavy launches. The company claims the more powerful Starship will generate 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and be capable of hauling more than 220,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

[Related: SpaceX’s new Starshield program will supply satellite networks to the military]

But Starship has yet to fly in orbit, and in the meantime, Falcon Heavy launches are ramping up, with at least five scheduled so far in 2023. Those launches consist of another Space Force mission and two commercial satellite launches in the spring. NASA’s Psyche mission to an asteroid of the same name is also scheduled to launch sometime in October. That means we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of the Falcon Heavy before it fades away.

“The very fact that Falcon Heavy still exists and is still getting customers means there is a demand for it,” Forcyzk says. “They’re going to be launching more customer payloads, which is going to bring in more revenue for the company. They will absolutely need that as they are ramping up development of Starship.”

What’s next for SpaceX?

SpaceX is working steadily on developing the Starship vehicle, which when paired with the reusable Super Heavy Booster, will make it the largest rocket ever flown. Work had been delayed by years due to a prolonged Programmatic Environmental Review between SpaceX and the FAA necessary for the regulator to issue SpaceX a license for orbital Starship launches from Boca Chica, Texas. The process was finally completed in June 2022 with the FAA requiring some safety changes for the company’s site and protocols. 

The next major milestone for Starship would be an uncrewed orbital test flight, but it’s unclear when that may take place, according to Forczyk. “A year ago, in January 2022, I gave a prediction that SpaceX would have its first orbital launch of Starship in 2022. And I was wrong,” she says. “So I want to say that they’re gonna have their first successful orbital Starship mission in 2023, but I don’t want to be wrong again.”

[Related: Dark matter, Jupiter’s moons, and more: What to expect from space exploration in 2023]

The company will need to get a move on, however. Not only is SpaceX contracted to fly a group of private citizens around the moon in the 2024, but NASA has contracted the company to create a lunar lander variant of Starship for use by NASA astronauts during the Artemis III mission scheduled for 2025.

In the meantime, SpaceX will continue launching everything from satellites to Crew Dragon spacecraft bound for the International Space Station atop its Falcon 9 rockets. In August, its CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that the company was aiming for 100 Falcon 9 flights in 2023. Less than a month in, it’s already successfully completed four Falcon 9 flights.    

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In the nightmare scenario of a nuclear bomb blast, you might picture a catastrophic fireball, a mushroom cloud rising into an alien sky overhead, and a pestilent rain of toxic fallout in the days to come. All of these are real, and all of them can kill.

But just as real, and every bit as deadly, is the air blast that comes just instants after. When a nuke goes off, it usually creates a shockwave. That front tears through the air at supersonic speed, shattering windows, demolishing buildings, and causing untold damage to human bodies—even miles from the point of impact.

[Related: How to protect yourself from nuclear radiation]

So, you’ve just seen the nuclear flash, and know that an air blast is soon to follow. You’ve only got seconds to hide. Where do you go?

To help you find the safest spot in your home, two engineers from Cyprus simulated which spaces made winds from a shockwave move more violently—and which spaces slowed them down. Their results were published on January 17 in the journal Physics of Fluids.

During the feverish nuclear paranoia of the Cold War, plenty of scientists studied what nuclear war would do to a city or the world. But most of their research focused on factors like the fireball or the radiation or simulating a nuclear winter, rather than an individual air blast. Moreover, 20th-century experts lacked the sophisticated computational capabilities that their modern counterparts can use. 

“Very little is known about what is happening when you are inside a concrete building that has not collapsed,” says Dimitris Drikakis, an engineer at the University of Nicosia and co-author of the new paper. 

[Related: A brief but terrifying history of nuclear weapons]

The advice that he and his colleague Ioannis W. Kokkinakis came up with doesn’t apply to the immediate vicinity of a nuclear blast. If you’re within a shout of ground zero, there’s no avoiding it—you’re dead. Even some distance away, the nuke will bombard you with a bright flash of thermal radiation: a torrent of light, infrared, and ultraviolet that could blind you or cause second- or third-degree burns.

But as you move farther away from ground zero, far enough that the thermal radiation might leave you with minor injuries at most, the airburst will leave most structures standing. The winds will only be equivalent to a very strong hurricane. That’s still deadly, but with preparation, you might just make it.

Drikakis and Kokkinakis constructed a one-story virtual house and simulated striking winds from two different shockwave scenarios—one well above standard air pressure, and one even stronger. Based on their simulations, here are the best—and worst—places to go during a nuclear war.

Worst: by a window

If you catch a glimpse of a nuclear flash, your first instinct might be to run to the nearest window to see what’s just happened. That would be a mistake, as you’d be in the prime place to be hit by the ensuing air blast.

If you stand right in a window facing the blast, the authors found, you might face winds over 300 miles per hour—enough to pick the average human off the ground. Depending on the exact strength of the nuke, you might then strike the wall with enough force to kill you.

Surprisingly, there are more dangerous places in the house when it comes to top wind speed (more on that later). But what really helps make a window deadly is the glass. As it shatters, you’ll be sprayed in the face by high-velocity shards.

Bad: a hallway

You might imagine that you can escape the airblast by retreating deeper into your building. But that’s not necessarily true. A window can act as a funnel for rushing air, turning a long hallway into something like a wind tunnel. Doors can do the same. 

The authors found that winds would throw an average-sized human standing in the corridor nearly as far as it would throw an average-sized human standing by the front window. Intense winds can also pick up glass shards and loose objects from the floor or furniture and send them hurtling as fast as a shot from a musket, the simulations showed.

Better: a corner

Not everywhere in the house is equally deadly. The authors found that, as the nuclear shockwave passed through a room, the highest winds tended to miss the room’s edges and corners. 

Therefore, even if you’re in an otherwise dangerous room, you can protect yourself from the worst of the impact by finding a corner and bracing yourself in. The key, again, is to avoid doors and windows.

“Wherever there are no openings, you have better chances to survive,” says Drikakis. “Essentially, run away from the openings.”

Best: a corner of an interior room

The best place to hide out is in the corner of a small room as far inside the building as possible.  For example, a closet that lacks any openings is ideal.

The “good” news is that the peak of the blast lasts just a moment. The most furious winds will pass in less than a second. If you can survive that, you’ll probably stay alive—as long as you’re not in the path of the radioactive fallout.

These tips for sheltering can be useful in high-wind disasters across the board. (The US Centers for Disease Control currently advises those who cannot evacuate before a hurricane to avoid windows and find a closet.) But the authors stress that the risk of nuclear war, while low, has certainly not disappeared. “I think we have to raise awareness to the international community … to understand that this is not just a joke,” says Drikakis. “It’s not a Hollywood movie.”

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AROUND 2011, when Warren Hatch’s job was moving money around on Wall Street, he read a book that stuck with him. Called Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Would We Know?, it was written by psychologist Phil Tetlock, who was then working as a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley. 

The book was a few years old, and Hatch was curious about what Tetlock had been up to since, so he went to the academic’s website. On the page, to his surprise, he found an invitation. Tetlock was looking for people who wanted to forecast geopolitical events. Did he want a chance to try to predict the future? Hatch says he remembers thinking, Who wouldn’t?

Hatch signed up right away and soon joined a virtual team of people who were trying to predict the likelihood of various hypothetical future global happenings. They were giving probability-based answers to questions like: Will Country A or Country B declare war on each other within the next six months? Or: Will X vacate the office of president of Country Y before May 10, Year Z? The answers would take this type of form: There is a 75 percent chance the answer to the question is yes, and a 25 percent chance it is no.

“I just thought it was a fun way to while away some time,” says Hatch.

It may have been fun for Hatch, but it was serious business for the US intelligence community, whose R&D arm—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)—was sponsoring the project. Tetlock, along with a team of scholars, was a participant in the spy agency’s Aggregative Contingent Estimation, or ACE, program.

The ACE program aimed to, as the description page put it, “dramatically enhance the accuracy, precision, and timeliness of intelligence forecasts.” 

Tetlock was leading an ACE team with colleague Barbara Mellers to try to make that dramatic enhancement—and to do it better than four other competing teams. Tetlock’s secret sauce ended up being a set of expert forecasters like Hatch. 

Becoming a Superforcaster

Hatch, at the time, didn’t know much about the grand vision that the head researchers, or IARPA, had in mind. After he’d been making predictions for Tetlock for a while, though, something strange happened. “Some of the better team members disappeared,” Hatch says.

It wasn’t nefarious: The researchers had deemed these skilled predictors to be “Superforecasters,” because of their consistent accuracy. Those predictors, Hatch later learned, had moved along and been placed in teams with other people who were as good as they were. 

Wanting to be among their ranks, Hatch began to mimic their behaviors. He started being more active in his attempts, leaving comments on his forecasts to explain his reasoning, revising his fortune-telling as new information came in. “And after a couple of months, it clicked,” he says. “I started to get it.” 

In the second year, Hatch was invited to become a Superforecaster.

Meet the Good Judgment group

The team, then headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania, called itself Good Judgment. It was winning ACE handily. “The ACE program started with this idea of crowd wisdom, and it has sought ways of going beyond the standard wisdom of the crowd,” says Steven Rieber, who managed the program for IARPA. 

The teams’ forecasts had to be increasingly accurate with each year of the competition. By the end of the first year, Good Judgment had already achieved the final year’s required level of accuracy in its forecasts. 

Eva Chen, a postdoc on one of the other (losing) ACE teams, was watching with interest as the first year transitioned into the second. “It’s a horse race,” she says. “So every time a question closes, you get to see how your team is performing.” Every time, she could see the Good Judgment group besting both her team and the crowd. What are they doing? she recalls wondering.

Chen’s group ended up shuttering, as did the rest of the teams except Good Judgment, which she later joined. That group was the only one IARPA continued working with. Chen made it her mission to discover what they were doing differently. 

And soon she found out: Her previous team had focused on developing fancy computational algorithms—doing tricky math on the crowd’s wisdom to make it wiser. Good Judgment, in contrast, had focused on the human side. It had tracked the accuracy of its forecasts and identified a group that was consistently better than everyone else: the so-called Superforecasters. It had also trained its forecasters, teaching them about factors like cognitive biases. (One of the most well-known such errors is confirmation bias, which leads people to seek and put more weight on evidence that supports their preexisting ideas, and dismiss or explain away evidence to the contrary.) And it had put them in teams, so they could share both knowledge about the topics they were forecasting and their reasoning strategies. And only then, with trained, teamed, tracked forecasts, did it statistically combine its participants’ predictions using machine learning algorithms.

While that process was important to Good Judgment’s success, the Superforecaster (now a trademarked term) element gets the most attention. But, curiously, Superforecasters—people consistently better at forecasting the future than even experts in a field, like intelligence analysts—were not an intended outcome of Good Judgment’s IARPA research. “I didn’t expect it,” says Rieber, “and I don’t think anyone did.”

These forecasters are better in part because they employ what Rieber calls “active open-minded thinking.” 

“They tend to think critically about not just a certain opinion that comes to mind but what objections are, or counterexamples to an opinion,” Rieber says. They are also good at revising their judgment in the face of new evidence. Basically, they’re skilled at red-teaming themselves, critiquing, evaluating, and poking holes in all ideas, including their own—essentially acting as devil’s advocate no matter where the opinion came from.

Seeing dollar signs in Superforecasters, the Good Judgment ACE team soon became Good Judgment Inc., spinning a company out of a spy-centric competition. Since then, curious fortune-seekers in sectors like finance, energy, supply chain logistics, philanthropy, and—as always—defense and intelligence, have been interested in paying for the future these predictive elites see.

Chen stayed on and eventually became Good Judgment’s chief scientist. The company currently has three main revenue streams: consulting, training workshops, and providing access to Superforecasters. It also has a website called Good Judgment Open, where anyone can submit predictions for crowdsourced topics, for fun and for a shot at being recruited as an official, company-endorsed Superforecaster.

Not exactly magic

But neither Good Judgment nor the Superforecasters are perfect. “We don’t have a crystal ball,” says Rieber. And their predictions aren’t useful in all circumstances: For one, they never state that something will happen, like a tree will definitely fall in a forest. Their forecasts are probability based: There is an 80 percent chance that a tree will fall in this forest and a 20 percent chance it won’t. 

Hatch admits the forecasts also don’t add much when there’s already lots of public probability-based predictions—as is the case with, say, oil prices—and also when there isn’t much public information, like when political decisions are made based on classified data.

From an intelligence perspective (where the intelligence community’s own ultrapredictors might have access to said classified information), forecasts nevertheless have other limitations. For one, guessing the future is only one aspect of a spy’s calculus. Forecasting can’t deal with the present (Does Country X have a nuclear weapons program at this particular moment?), the past (What killed Dictator Z?), or the rationale behind events (Why will Countries A and B go to war?). 

Second, questions with predictive answers have to be extremely concrete. “Some key questions that policymakers care about are not stated precisely,” says Rieber. For example, he says, this year’s intelligence threat assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence states: “We expect that friction will grow as China continues to increase military activity around the island [of Taiwan].” But friction is a nebulous word, and growth isn’t quantified. 

“Nevertheless, it’s a phrase that’s meaningful to policymakers, and it’s something that they care about,” Rieber says.

The process also usually requires including a date. For example, rather than ask, “Will a novel coronavirus variant overtake Omicron in the US and represent more than 70 percent of cases?” the Good Judgment Open website currently asks, “Before 16 April 2023, will a SARS-CoV-2 variant other than Omicron represent more than 70.0% of total COVID-19 cases in the US?” It’s not because April is specifically meaningful: It’s because the group needs an expiration date.

That’s not usually the kind of question a company, or intelligence agency, brings to Good Judgment. To get at the answer it really wants, the company works around the problem. “We work with them to write a cluster of questions,” Chen says, that together might give the answer they’re looking for. So for example, a pet store might want to know if cats will become more popular than dogs. Good Judgment might break that down into “Will dogs decrease in popularity by February 2023?” “Will cats increase in popularity by February 2023?” and “Will public approval of cats increase by February 2023 according to polls?” The pet store can triangulate from those answers to estimate how they should invest. Maybe.

And now, IARPA and Rieber are moving into the future of prediction, with a new program called REASON: Rapid Explanation Analysis Sourcing Online. REASON throws future-casting in the direction it was probably always going to go: automation. “The idea is to draw on recent artificial intelligence breakthroughs to make instantaneous suggestions to the analysts,” he says. 

In this future, silicon suggestions will do what human peers did in ACE: team up with humans to try to improve their reasoning and so their guess at what’s coming next, so they can pass their hopefully-better forecasts on to the other humans: those who make decisions that help decide what happens to the world.

Seeding doubt

Outside the project, researcher Konstantinos Nikolopoulos, of Durham University Business School in England, had a different criticism for Superforecasting than its accuracy, whose rigor he saw others had followed up on and confirmed. Nevertheless, he says, “something didn’t feel right.” 

His qualm was about the utility. In the real world, actual Superforecasters (from Good Judgment itself) can only be so useful, because there are so few of them, and it takes so long to identify them in the first place. “There are some Superforecasters locked in a secret room, and they can be used at the discretion of whoever has access to them,” he says. 

So Nikolopoulos and colleagues undertook a study to see whether Good Judgment’s general idea—that some people are much better than others at intuiting the future—could be applied to a smaller pool of people (314, rather than 5,000), in a shorter period of time (nine months, rather than multiple years). 

Among their smaller group and truncated timeframe, they did find two superforecasters. And Nikolopoulos suggests that, based on this result, any small-to-medium-size organization could forecast its own future: Hold its own competition (with appropriate awards and incentives), identify its best-predicting employees, and then use them (while compensating them) to help determine the company’s direction. The best would just need to be better than average forecasters. 

“There is promising empirical evidence that it can be done in any organization,” says Nikolopoulos. Which means, although he doesn’t like this word, Good Judgment’s findings can be democratized.

Of course, people can still contract with Good Judgment and its trademarked predictors. And the company actually does offer a Staffcasting program that helps identify and train clients’ employees to do what Nikolopoulos suggests. But it does nevertheless still route through this one name-brand company. “If you can afford it, by all means, do it,” he says. “But I definitely believe it can be done in-house.”

Good Judgment would like you to visit its house and pay for its services, of course, although it does offer training for outsiders and is aiming to make more of that available online. In the future, the company is also aiming to get better at different kinds of problems—like those having to do with existential risk. “The sorts of things that will completely wipe out humanity or reduce it so much that it’s effectively wiped out,” says Hatch. “Those can be things like a meteor hitting the planet. So that’s one kind. And another kind is an alien invasion.” 

On the research side, the company hopes to improve its ability to see early evidence not of “black swans”—unexpected, rare events—but “really, really dark gray swans,” says Hatch. You know, events like pandemics.

Five years from now, will Good Judgment be successful at its version of predicting the future? Time will tell. 

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This post has been updated with additional information. It was originally published on January 17.

The US Navy is adding more medical vessels to its fleet, to better meet the needs of the force across theaters. The next produced Expeditionary Fast Transports, a vessel type already in production, will be built with modifications to serve as medical ships when needed. 

After the medically modified transports are constructed, the next ship built will be a new dedicated medical vessel. This Expeditionary Medical Ship will be designed to offer medical care where larger hospital ships cannot go. Before the Navy builds this newer class, it will learn to fill the role by adapting a familiar frame.

Tucked away in the Navy’s 2023 Justification Book, a document that outlines the why and what of its budget requests, are two notes about the medical adaptation of these ships. Expeditionary Fast Transports (confusingly abbreviated EPF) “will have modifications to conduct a Role 2 Enhanced (R2E) Medical Transport mission which will include enhanced medical capabilities to support embarked Medical Military Detachment (MILDET) teams while retaining the ability to perform high-speed intra-theater sealift.” 

That means, in essence, that these will be medical-capable transports, but ones that can also do the workhorse job of moving people and goods from ship to shore and back.

The book also notes that after building a few modified transports, the next built “will be an Expeditionary Medical Ship (EMS) Variant,” which is the one that will be designed with medical care at the forefront of its mission. 

“The ship’s builders and Navy officials say this reimagined vessel, the Expeditionary Medical Ship, is especially designed for easy movement and rapid response in the shallow littorals and vast expanses of a future operating theater like the Pacific,” reports Hope Seck at Sandboxx. “And the service is working to develop a complement of skilled medical personnel trained and ready to deploy onboard these ships to provide triage care almost anywhere in the world.”

The Navy has three of the EPF-template medical transports under contract, with funding secured for three EMS ambulance ships to follow, according to shipbuilder Austal USA.

To understand what sets these medical capable Expeditionary Fast Transports and the upcoming Expeditionary Medical Ships apart from existing medical vessels, it’s important to understand the hospital ships it is designed to augment.

Hospital shipping 

Medical ships are an accommodation to the grim reality of war. Wherever the Navy goes, sailors will need medical attention, and those facilities can accommodate the various marines, soldiers, and other compatriots injured and within reach of a hospital ship. The Navy currently operates two large hospital ships, the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy, which barged into public consciousness when deployed to render aid in the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. That aid rendered appears to have been less than expected, though not nothing.

Pandemic relief is an outlier job for the vessels, which are constrained not just by size but speed, making them most useful as a hospital that can be parked in a deep harbor or anchored offshore, treating patients as they arrive. The USNS Comfort in particular boasts a long record of surgeries at sea, in support of US and allied forces in the Gulf and Iraq wars. Both Mercy and Comfort have also been deployed for disaster relief, where the hospital ships trained personnel and stockpiles of blood make them a powerful resource for treating injury. 

And both hospital ships were converted from former oil tankers, and fit into a long history of commercial vessels adapted into hospital ships. Converted vessels come ready-made, but they lack the dedicated military design features to accommodate specific military missions.

Getting the medical supplies from storage on a hospital ship to patients in need often, but not always, involves bringing the patients aboard. In 2016, researchers tested using drones to deliver blood from ship to shore, an approach that could help get aid to people injured and unable to reach port.

Hospital ships can also receive patients by helicopter, thanks to a landing pad. That kind of arrival is vital for the injured but limited in capacity for transporting large numbers of people to the care they need. With 15 patient wards, 80 ICU beds, and accommodations for 1,300 people, the Comfort and Mercy can treat the people brought to it, but they cannot get everywhere. And, with a top speed of 20 mph, they are slow going even in the best of times. 

To get care closer and faster, the Navy has selected a smaller, faster ship in the ambulance role.

Catamaran ambulance

Smaller than full-scale hospital ships, the ships in the Expeditionary Fast Transport class are already expanding how and where the Navy can operate, by providing supply and transport support for the fleet. The EPFs can sustain an average speed of 40 mph at sea, twice as fast as the hospital ships, and they can operate in shallower waters and less developed ports, with a draft of only 15 feet. The ship’s catamaran design offers great stability, especially important for the difficult tasks of surgery and sea.

When it comes to moving people and goods, the existing EPFs can carry up to 544 metric tons of cargo, and beyond a crew of 41, can accommodate 416 passengers, with 312 of those in airline-style seats and 104 in more proper berths. As presently designed, the EPFs can land helicopters as large as the CH-53 Super Stallion.

In the envisioned medical role, beyond converting some of that space to treatment facilities, EPF maker Austal says that the landing deck will be enhanced to accommodate V-22 Ospreys. This, combined with 10 ICU beds, 23 ward beds, and two operating rooms, would make the ship able to function as a floating hospital in miniature, providing care to match the needs of the remote coasts it can access.

This article has been updated to include additional information about how many ships of each type will be produced.

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There’s a reason lightning rods haven’t changed much since Benjamin Franklin’s literally electrifying 18th century experiments—they work pretty well as is. Typically composed of a metal rod anchored directly into the ground via metal cabling, the simple, scalable device directs lightning bolts that are often five-times hotter than the sun’s surface into the Earth, where the charge can safely dissipate.

Still, lightning strikes can cause billions of dollars of infrastructural damage each year, leading one research team in Switzerland to recently develop a breakthrough method in diverting the electrical discharges away from sensitive structures. In essence, the scientists propose firing extremely powerful laser beams into the heart of a thunderstorm.

[Related: How to prevent a lightning strike.]

As detailed on Monday in the research journal Nature Photonics, alongside rundowns from The Guardian and elsewhere, the group of scientists recently set up a laser array near a 124m telecom tower atop Switzerland’s Säntis mountain. The structure is the recipient of over a hundred lightning strikes annually, making it a prime attractor for the experiment. Between July and September of last year, the lasers fired into a number of stormfronts over a total of six hours. According to researchers’ measurements, the laser pulses influenced the course of four upward discharges, although only one took place in clear enough conditions to photograph using high-speed cameras. Still, the lightning’s path in that instance appears to have been diverted around 50m towards the laser beam.

The system works thanks to the lasers’ ability to forge a more convenient path for lighting to travel towards the Earth. The surrounding air’s refractive index changes as the pulses fire at over 1,000 times per second into the storm clouds, making them contract and intensify so much that they ionize surrounding air molecules. A channel of ionized, low density air is then created from the air molecules quickly heating and spreading at supersonic speeds. Although these “filaments” as researchers describe them only last mere milliseconds, their conductivity compared to surrounding air make a much easier path for lightning arcs. Early indications also point to the laser lightning rods’ diversion range being much wider than traditional metal rods, which ostensibly cover an area about twice as wide as the rod is tall.

[Related: A new energy weapon combines multiple laser beams.]

There are some immediate drawbacks to this new system, however. For one, the laser pulses are (perhaps unsurprisingly) extremely bright, and could easily pose issues for any potential nearby pilots—hence closing the airspace around the experiment during its runtime. Then there’s the system’s roughly $2 million price tag during the experiment’s five year development that eventually saw the enlisting of Switzerland’s largest helicopter to help build the laser system’s home atop Säntis. All of that makes it very unlikely to see laser lightning rods atop suburban homes thanks to the  comparatively very cheap land-based rod.

That said, such a system could be more cost-effective for places like military bases, extremely tall structures, and spaceports with generally far more expensive repair costs than the average home following lightning strikes.

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If you want to be able to see in the dark, a good first step is to turn on the lights. That’s why cars have headlights, nocturnal hikers wear headlamps, and dog-walkers carry flashlights after the sun sets. Adding artificial light to the scene makes it knowable. 

But there’s another approach to seeing in the dark that involves a piece of military gear: night vision goggles. If you’ve ever seen a green-tinted scene in the movies and wondered how this type of equipment works, here’s a look at the three-step process that takes place inside this type of device. 

Imagine a single photon entering the goggles. The initial trick that the night vision device pulls off involves that incoming photon. “We convert that photon to an electron through a photocathode,” Renzi says. “That’s a specialized material that’s there to make that transition from a single photon of light into that electron.”

In brief, this step involves converting particles from the domain of light to the domain of electricity. 

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The next step involves boosting the signal from that electron, and for that, the device uses onboard battery power, like from an AA battery or two. “That electron multiplies significantly,” Renzi says, noting that it could be multiplied “tens of thousands” of times. While the part of the device that converted the photon to an electron is called a photocathode, this part that turns the volume up on the electron is known as the microchannel plate. 

Finally, the information needs to be transferred back into the visual realm, so that whoever is looking through the goggles can see the scene. That happens thanks to a phosphor screen, which the user can see when they look through the eyepiece. “The phosphor screen is what takes that energy from those electrons and converts it back into visible light,” Renzi says. 

White and black is the new green and black

That last stage is where the traditional green and black images are produced, but Renzi says that instead of green, the more modern devices today display the scene in black and white. “You might say that a green and a white are equivalent in terms of measurable performance, but the human eye perceives white and black better than it does green versus black,” he argues. The white-versus-green phosphor distinction also surfaces when it comes to night vision equipment that’s for sale. 

So in brief, to make a dark scene more seeable, these gadgets take in photons, convert them to electrons, amplify those electrons, and then convert that information back to the visible again. In some cases, night vision goggles will include “an illuminator,” which actually produces a small amount of new light to brighten up the scene, he says.  

Renzi notes that the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that these types of night-vision goggles are perceiving comes from both the visible range and the near infrared; the near infrared is the part of the spectrum that’s found right next to the red part of the visible spectrum. This cheesy NASA video breaks that spectrum down:

Traditional night vision goggles focus on the light from both the visible and near-infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, which are, along with shortwave infrared, “part of what we call the reflective bands—where you’re still looking at light that bounces off something,” he says. 

Meanwhile, a different piece of gear—a thermal camera—sees a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is longwave infrared; that’s emissive, as opposed to reflected light. That part of the spectrum, Renzi says, is “outside of the visuals of your traditional night-vision goggles.” A gizmo from L3 Harris called the ENVG-B actually combines both traditional night vision goggles, with their focus on the visible spectrum and the near infrared (both of which are reflected light), together with thermal sensing from the longwave infrared area that can see emissive body heat, for example. 

The difference between these two types of information is imaginable in a scenario like this: “Let’s say somebody was off in the distance and behind some leaves,” he says. “You would likely pick up that heat with the long-wave infrared, [which] might have been more difficult with [just] the reflective band—but you might not know much about it at that point—you would just see that there’s some heat there.” 

Ultimately, he says that the technology that allows people to see in the dark has evolved over the decades. Older systems with a “passive imaging” approach needed “a full-moon scenario or some sort of ambient light,” he says. Today, night vision goggles can “use starlight.” 

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The US Army is moving ahead with its augmented reality headset, a gadget that has had a turbulent history. In an announcement shared January 5, the Army announced that Microsoft had been awarded a contract for version 1.2 of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, a headset for soldiers that’s designed to improve perception of their surroundings. The Army already has 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the headset on hand, and expects to start fielding the headsets in September 2023.

“The mixed-reality headsets allow Soldiers to see through smoke and around corners, use holographic imagery, thermal and low-light sensors to see in the dark and display 3D terrain maps and a compass projected into their field of vision,” the Army said in a release. “They provide tools to better conduct land navigation, battlefield tracking and movement through urban buildings and open terrain.”

The headset, based on Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headset, is designed to let soldiers see the battlefield in a normal way, as well as with additional information, thanks to onboard image processing and data-sharing tools. Ideally, it’s a way to make real combat incorporate some of the innovations in perception and data display that have proven useful in video games, while also ensuring that only actually relevant information is added.

IVAS strain

In asking for a 1.2 variant, the Army appears to be addressing some of the limitations of existing models of the headset. These shortcomings were reported in October, after an unclassified internal evaluation was obtained by Bloomberg News, revealing the existing headsets caused “‘mission-affecting physical impairments’ including headaches, eyestrain and nausea,” according to a summary of soldiers’ experiences during a field exercise, complied by the Pentagon’s testing office. 

One way to think of the headsets is as providing an extra set of sensory information to the people wearing them. If displaying that information in front of the soldier’s face, as the visor is designed to do, causes impairment, then it takes what should feel like a superpower and turns it into, at best, a discarded inconvenience and, at worst, a life-threatening liability. 

These reported problems undermine the potential of the system, and with it the Army’s vision of data-driven warfare down to every soldier acting as a sensing node in part of a larger network.

In the terse language of the award announcement, the possible headaches, eyestrain, and nausea are not mentioned. Instead, the announcement first walks through the achievements of the 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the headset. “IVAS 1.0 provides baseline warfighter capability, and the IVAS 1.1 features an improved low-light sensor to aid maneuver and positive target identification.”

It’s in outlining the 1.2 improvements that changes made to ease the strain of use can be seen.

“In addition to the IVAS 1.1 improvements, IVAS 1.2 will include a new form factor to address Human Systems Integration, including physiological impacts identified during testing, and a lower profile heads-up display with distributed counterweight for improved user interface and comfort. IVAS 1.2 will also include software improvements for increased reliability and reduced power demand.”

That reads like a tacit acknowledgement of some limitations in the system. The Army did not respond to a request for comment.

Future focus

As reported at Defense News, the goal for the 1.2 version of IVAS is to trim over half a pound from the total weight of the original system. The 1.0 weighs 3.4 pounds, including a 2.4-pound headset and 1 pound of weight carried somewhere below the soldier’s head. The goal for 1.2 is a total system weight of 2.85 pounds, “the same or better than the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular,” defense officials told Defense News.

Should the 1.2 version of IVAS mitigate the earlier reported problems with the system, it will increase the field of what soldiers can see and track. Goggles and binoculars are limited by the narrowness of their field of view, and IVAS’s broad goggle plus camera array is aimed at widening that perception. Target identification, or the ability for the goggles to perceive and mark objects like vehicles, buildings, and people on the battlefield, could greatly improve the ability of soldiers to fight, especially in low-light situations or against enemies hiding in cover. The headsets even promise to let soldiers riding as passengers in transports perceive the area outside the vehicle’s armored walls.

By incorporating the individual headset-wearing soldier into the broader array of Army sensors, the hope is that the Army can not just perceive more of the battlefield, but make sure vital information is in the hands of—or vision of—the soldiers who most need it. It’s long been the promise of the future. If the 1.2 version delivers as promised, and the headsets can start being fielded on time, that means this future starts in September 2023.

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From January 6 through 9, in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy conducted an exercise in which two Saildrone robotic boats communicated with the USS Delbert D. Black, a destroyer. The exercise used robots, AI, and a crewed ship to scout the environment around them, a practical peacetime use of the robot that could inform how these tools are used in war. 

“During the exercise, unmanned and artificial intelligence systems operated in conjunction with Delbert D. Black and CTF [Coalition Task Force] Sentinel’s command center ashore in Bahrain. The systems were able to help locate and identify objects in nearby waters and relay visual depictions to watchstanders,” the US Navy said in a release. 

This isn’t the first time the Navy has used Saildrones in these waters. In August 2022, a ship from the US Coast Guard and a ship from the Royal Bahrain Naval Force worked alongside a Saildrone, integrating the robot’s sensors into the mission. And in September 2022, while Navy Saildrones were operating in the Persian Gulf, Iran’s Navy temporarily seized and held the robots before returning them to the US Navy, a return facilitated by the USS Delbert D. Black. 

Robots at sea can see

So what kind of information or images might the robots capture that’s so valuable to the Navy? A pair of images released by the service branch offer some detail. In one, Lieutenant Richard Rodriguez, aboard the Delbert D. Black, watches images sent from the sea-going drone to a monitor. The Saildrone’s information is viewed through a Mission Portal dashboard displayed in Chrome. The robot’s camera tracks the horizon at an angle, and against it are three marker rectangles, showing possible ship sightings.

As the Navy’s caption describes it, the visuals were transmitted from a Saildrone to a room on the destroyer where a crew member could watch it. In this way, the drones help the crew keep watch.

Another image captures the information as displayed inside the group’s Manama, Bahrain headquarters. At the center of this display is a map, where the layout of the observed gulf is plotted and abstracted. Solid shapes indicate vessels, lines track the Saildrones’ path through time, and plotted polygons denote other phenomena, perhaps rules of egress or avoidance.

The Malaysian-flagged cargo vessel MSC Makalu III is selected in the shot. The Makalu III was tracked for 23.6 nautical miles over two hours and 38 minutes by two Saildrones. Two images below the name of the Makalu III on the dashboard, presumably from the Saildrone’s cameras, show the distant position of the ship against the watery horizon, and a zoomed-in view that clearly shows the dark mass of a far-away vessel on the surface.

Again, the Saildrone was being used as an observer, a robot on watch duty.

In some sense, this information isn’t exactly novel. The Makalu III is trackable publicly. What is more remarkable is that the Saildrones are able to not just spot vessels, but follow them. The Persian Gulf is a high-traffic waterway, and while many navigational technologies make it easier to track and follow ships as they transit to and from the gulf, the ability to put new sensors into the water enhances what can be known.

The screen displayed in the Manama headquarters shows not just Saildrone activity at the moment, but over time. One of the driving goals behind the Navy’s adoption of uncrewed ships is to enhance how much ocean traffic it can observe over time, and in this case, with two wind-driven robots the ability of a ship to passively observe its surroundings appears greatly enhanced. 

Watching, waiting

Saildrones are small boats, just 23 feet long and rising 16 feet above the surface. With a sail to catch the wind and solar panels to power its electronic systems, and charge its batteries, a Saildrone exists as a tool for passively monitoring the sea. 

These vessels have been used by scientific organizations for civilian purposes. NASA and NOAA, respectively, used Saildrones to fix gaps in satellite maps and monitor fish populations. While the Navy’s recent exercise with Saildrones was brief, the solar power and long endurance of the robots makes them ideal for longer term monitoring, as they sip power from the sun.

The Pentagon formally divides the places combat can take place into domains, and while “sea” is smaller than the vastness of “space,” it is far more peopled. The Navy is tasked simultaneously with ensuring the free flow of law-abiding traffic across the oceans, and with being ready to fight any force that threatens open navigation of the oceans. Knowing where and when to fight, or at least move ships into a show of force, can be aided by keeping an eye on ocean traffic.

Saildrones are a way to make the ocean more known, through the watchful and unblinking eyes of wind-propelled and solar-powered robots.

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On January 6, the Department of Defense announced it was going to send 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine. The long-awaited move comes amidst a flurry of announcements from NATO nations about sending armored vehicles to Ukraine, as the country’s fight against the Russian invasion lurches inevitably towards its second year. 

The Bradley is an armored transport, with tracks and a small turret. It is tank-like in appearance, though the Bradley’s gun is much smaller than what’s mounted on a main battle tank like the M1 Abrams fielded by the US military. Its inclusion in the aid package comes after public calls from Ukraine’s President Zelensky for countries to send them high-end military equipment, including tanks.

“It’s not a tank, but it’s a tank killer,” Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon Press Secretary, said at a press conference on January 5. “A Bradley is an armored vehicle that has a firepower capability that can deliver troops into combat.  So, again, it will provide a significant boost to Ukraine’s already impressive armor capabilities.  And we’re confident that it will aid them on the battlefield.”

[Related: Ukraine is getting upgraded Soviet T-72B tanks]

In the January 6 announcement of US aid to Ukraine, the 50 Bradley vehicles share a line with 500 TOW anti-tank missiles, as well as 250,000 rounds of 25mm ammunition. The TOW, an acronym that originally stood for “Tube Launched, Optically Tracked, Wire-Guided” and now stands for the “Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wireless-guided” missile, is a kind of anti-tank missile that often is mounted on the side of Bradley turrets. This is the primary weapon to be used against tanks, and has been for decades. 

The 25mm ammunition, fired by the Bradley’s 25mm Bushmaster cannon, means that a Bradley can destroy targets like light vehicles, walls, and even helicopters. The weapon can fire armor-piercing ammunition, giving it some ability to fight with the gun against heavier armor, though that is at best a secondary use. Bradleys can sometimes fire ammunition using depleted uranium penetrators, which can punch through armor and also carry long-term environmental and health risk to civilians who might encounter them after the battle, especially if the rounds have not been properly disposed of.

Beyonds its weaponry, the Bradley can carry six or seven passengers inside. Dismounted, those soldiers can fight in support of the vehicle, before loading up and driving away as needed.

War of maneuver

One way to understand the Bradley is not in relation to tanks, which outclass it in firepower, but compared to the vehicle it was designed to replace. The M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, first introduced in 1960, were designed as a “battle taxi,” or a way to get soldiers where they needed to be to fight. The M113s were initially outfitted with machine guns, but unlike the sturdy cannon and missiles of a Bradley, the M113 was not designed to fight on its own in battle. Instead, the role of the M113 was to carry troops quickly to where they needed to disembark and fight.

The M113 is still in service today, and the Pentagon announced the aid to Ukraine would include 100 M113 APCs, alongside the 50 Bradleys provided. The M113 needs a crew of two to operate, and can carry 11 soldiers and their gear in addition to that. While a modest difference from the Bradley’s passenger capacity, it can add up: The 50 M113s can carry 550 soldiers, while 50 Bradleys can at best transport 350 troops.

[Related: What the future holds for the Army’s venerable Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle]

In addition to the Bradleys and the M113s, the same aid package includes 55 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs. These machines, used heavily by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, are big troop transports with V-shaped hulls, capable of deflecting the explosive blast from roadside bombs into injuries instead of immediate deaths. Landmines, common across the war, have been exacerbated by the risk of unexploded weapons fired across the battlefield. MRAPS provide a way for Ukraine to more safely move forces across those hazards.

Rounding out the mobility aid portion of the package, the Department of Defense aims to provide 138 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs), popularly known as Humvees. These are light transports, which move soldiers quickly and can cross terrain, like marshes or rocky fields, that may trap heavier vehicles.

[Related: The Army’s new light tank can venture where its beefier cousins can’t]

Tanks are a threat in combat in part because they require specialized equipment, like massive cannons or anti-tank missiles to destroy. But one major way to limit the impact of heavy armor is to launch fast offensives where the tanks aren’t, and then make sure anti-tank weapons are in place before a counter-offensive. Bradleys, with TOW missiles, offer added punch. The combined fleet of MRAPs, M113s, and Humvees supporting the Bradleys ensures that Ukrainian forces will have greater freedom of movement. 

While the United States is not at this moment providing Ukraine with heavy armor to fight heavy armor, it is preparing the aforementioned slew of vehicles that let Ukraine pick when and where to fight battles. 

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On December 28, the Department of Defense announced the award of an $118 million contract to build a special kind of radar installation in the Republic of Palau. Palau is a nation in the Pacific, about 800 miles southwest of Guam and about 1,000 miles southeast of Manila. It will, by 2026, be host to the Tactical Mobile Over-the-Horizon Radar, a new sensor about which the military is being fairly tight-lipped.

The late December announcement mentions only the concrete foundations that will support the installation. A February 2018 budget document notes that the Tactical Mobile Over-the-Horizon Radar, or TACMOR, “will support air domain awareness and maritime domain awareness requirements over the Western Pacific region. The project will demonstrate a sub-scaled over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) that is one quarter the size of traditional [Over The Horizon] systems.”

The installation, as outlined, will have two sites. One will be along a northern isthmus of Babeldaob, the largest island in Palau. The other will be on Angaur, an island about 60 miles south. These two sites will need to have communications between them, suggesting that the complex could be one linked sensor array. Site schematics show the Babeldaob location as a transmit site, with Angaur as a receiver site. 

Department of Defense documents, as well as general US planning and policy, increasingly suggest the western Pacific as a potential future battlefield for the United States. Guam, a territorial possession of the United States since the Spanish American war in 1898, routinely houses bombers that may be tasked with flights to North Korea or China. One of the major challenges of fighting in the Pacific is that the ocean is vast, and in any war that lasts more than a few hours (as a nuclear exchange might), being able to find, track, and attack enemy forces will be a vital component to victory.

That desire to see beyond, in order to better fight, is a driver of over-the-horizon radar.

Beyond line of sight

Radar, while capable of seeing far, is a technology bound by the physics of waves traveling in straight lines. A radio wave sent out needs to hit an object in a direct line from where it emanates to reflect back, and the difference between where it was sent and how it returns makes the signal. This is partly why radar is so useful for tracking planes, which travel above the ground and can thus be detected at further distances, without the curve of the Earth in the way. It is also why radar installations are often mounted high above the ground, as every few feet of height added increases how far it can see.

The Cold War drove early research and deployments of over-the-horizon radars, which were used as a way to try and watch for incoming missile and bomber attacks. So how do they typically work? 

One example comes from a Soviet over-the-horizon radar receiver, named Duga, that was built outside of Chernobyl, in Ukraine. Shortwave radio signals sent from transmitter sites in southern Ukraine would bounce off the ionosphere, allowing the signal to travel much further, and would then be detected and interpreted at the Duga site. The Soviet radar signal could be heard on shortwave radios, and radio hobbyists in the United States dubbed it the “woodpecker” for its distinctive pattern.

Another approach to sending radar over the horizon is to use low-frequency signals and send them along the surface, letting diffraction carry the waves further. This surface wave radar has a range of hundreds of kilometers, while techniques bouncing off the ionosphere can perceive the world thousands of kilometers away. 

In Ukraine, the distance between the Duga transmitter and receiver sites is over 300 miles. In Palau, the tactical over-the-horizon radar will have a distance between signal and transmitter of roughly one sixth that. If TACMOR is built on similar principles, the shorter distance between sending and receiving might suggest a short range of surveillance. Duga was designed to warn of nuclear launches. The TACMOR site will instead track different threats, on a different scale.

See the sea

TACMOR appears built for a different kind of role than the globe-spanning over-the-horizon radars of the Cold War. Instead of looking for the first sign of nuclear oblivion, TACMOR will track movements related to battle, and will presumably do so at a fraction of the cost of deploying crewed ships and aircraft patrols to scan the same area.

“A modern OTHR [over-the-horizon radar] on Palau will be able to support space-based and terrestrial-based sensor and weapon systems for the potential cueing and early warning of incoming hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, enemy aircraft, and ships,” reports The War Zone. “Most of all, OTHR allows for persistent monitoring of specific areas that would otherwise require many types of radar systems forward deployed over a huge area on the ground, in the air, and at sea at any given time, which may not even be possible.”

By putting the radar system in Palau, the Department of Defense will be able to increase its awareness of a vast swath of sea in the region, and in turn, keep an eye on an important slice of the Pacific. With luck, the radar will report nothing to worry about, but should danger arrive, having the sensor in place means the Navy and Air Force can respond with advance warning, should they need to. 

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To better defend Taiwan in the face of a potential invasion, the United States is selling it Volcanos. More precisely, the United States is selling Taiwan the Volcano Mine Dispenser, a system that can rapidly hurl anti-tank landmines, creating a dangerous and impassable area for heavy armor. The Volcano is an older system, but its use in Taiwan would be brand-new, indicating the kinds of strategies that Taiwan and the United States are considering when it comes to how to defend the island nation in the future.

Land mines are a defensive weapon, though one that can certainly be used aggressively. Putting a landmine in place imperils all who would pass through the area, forcing attackers to face immediate danger or slow down their advances as they reroute around the hazard. What the Volcano does, specifically, is allow for the defenders to create a minefield rapidly. 

“Using a ground vehicle, a 1,000-meter minefield can be laid in 4 to 12 minutes based on terrain and vehicle speed,” reads an Army description. The Volcano system’s mines can also be deployed by helicopter, and it can deploy anti-personnel mines, but the announcement from the State Department specifically mentions trucks for carrying and mounting the Volcano systems it is selling Taiwan, and mentions anti-tank mines. 

Enemy mine

Every landmine is an explosive designed to detonate in the future. Anti-personnel landmines, as the name suggests, are used to kill people, and are prohibited by international treaties in part because of the threat they pose to civilians during and after war. (The United States is only party to some of the treaties regarding land mines.)

Anti-tank landmines have detonation thresholds that are harder to accidentally set off with anything except a vehicle, and are targeted squarely at the largest and deadliest vehicles on a battlefield. In addition, to ensure that the anti-tank mines are used for battlefield purposes, rather than permanently delineating a fixed border, their detonation fuses can be programmed to not work after a set amount of time. 

“A Soldier-selectable, self-destruct mechanism destroys the mine at the end of its active lifecycle – 4 hours to 15 days – depending on the time selected,” declares the Army.

This fits into the larger role of mines as tools to change how battles are fought, rather than create static fronts. In the announcement authorizing the sale, the mines are referred to not as mines but as “munitions,” the broader category of all explosives fired by weapons. With the ability to cover an area, and then have that area be littered in active explosives for over two weeks, one way to think of the Volcano is as artillery designed to send explosives forward in both space and time. 

Island time

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine illustrated, landmines can have a major impact on how and where armies fight. Ukraine borders Russia by land, and even before the February 2022 invasion, the country had leftover explosives littering the landscape, posing a threat to life and limb. After the invasion, both sides used explosive barriers to limit how and where their foes could safely move. Placing landmines can be quick, while clearing landmines without loss of life or equipment usually needs specialized tools and time.

Taiwan’s unique position as an island nation gives it a meaningful physical barrier to hostile takeover. Unlike Russia into Ukraine, China cannot simply roll tanks over the border. An invasion of Taiwan, should the government of mainland China decide to undertake it, would have to be an amphibious affair, landing soldiers and vehicles by ship as well as attacking from the sea and sky. 

“I think we’ve been very clear in the United States over multiple administrations, that Taiwan needs to put its self-defense front and center. We think the Chinese put a premium on speed,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kath Hicks at a security forum in December.

“And the best speed bump or deterrent to that is really the Taiwan people being able to demonstrate that they can slow that down, let alone to defend against it,” Hicks continued. “And that’s where the Ukraine example, I think, really can give the Chinese pause to see the will of a people combined with capability to stall or even stop a campaign of aggression.”

The Volcano is not the flashiest of tools for stopping an invasion by sea, but it does give Taiwan’s military options for how to stop invading forces once they have landed. By being able to place deadly, explosive barriers to movement where they’re needed, for likely as long as they’re needed, the Volcano can halt and restrict advances. It makes the assault into a mess of impassable terrain, blunting attacks with an eruption of explosive power.

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On December 12, Australia announced the name of its latest robotic submarine: the Ghost Shark. This vessel, which is being developed by both Anduril and Australia’s Navy and Defence Science and Technology Group, is designed as a large, underwater, autonomous machine, guided by artificial intelligence. The Ghost Shark will be a stealth robot, built for future wars at sea.

In picking the name, the Royal Australian Navy chose a moniker that conferred both stealth, and paid tribute to the wildlife of the continent, or in this case, just off the coast of the continent.

“Ghost Shark’s name comes about from actually an indigenous shark that’s found on our southern waters, indeed it’s found in deeper waters, so it’s quite stealthy, which is a good corollary to the stealthy extra large autonomous vehicle. It also keeps that linkage to the Ghost Bat, the MQ-28 program for the Air Force, which is also another quite stealthy autonomous system,” said Commodore Darron Kavanagh of the Royal Australian Navy. (Ghost sharks, the animals, are often consumed as part of fish and chips.)

The Ghost Bat drone fighter, or MQ-28 he referenced, is another recent initiative by Australia to augment crewed forces with robotic allies. While a jet is bound by the finite number of hours it can stay airborne, a robotic submarine, freed of crew, can endure under the sea for a long time.

“They have the capacity to remain at sea undetected for very long periods, carry various military payloads and cover very long distances,” Rear Admiral Peter Quinn said in a release. “The vessels will provide militaries with a persistent option for the delivery of underwater effects in high-risk environments, complementing our existing crewed ships and submarines, as well as other future uncrewed surface vessels.”

Pause for effect

“Effects” is a broad term that refers to all the ways a vehicle, tool, or weapon can make battle easier for one side and harder for its enemies. “Kinetic effects,” for example, are the missiles, torpedoes, and bullets that immediately come to mind when people think of war. But effects can include other tools, like electromagnetic jamming, or a smoke grenade detonating and creating a dense cloud to hide the movement of soldiers.

Underwater, those effects could be direct attack, like with torpedoes, or it could be sending misleading sonar signals, fooling enemy ships and submarines to target a robot instead of a more powerful crewed vessel.

In May, Anduril announced it was working on Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicles (XL-AUVs) for the Royal Australian Navy, which is what is now known as Ghost Shark.

“It is modular, customizable and can be optimized with a variety of payloads for a wide range of military and non-military missions such as advanced intelligence, infrastructure inspection, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting,” read the announcement.

In this instance, its job could include seeing enemy vessels and movements, as well as identifying targets for weapons fired from other vehicles. One of the most consistent promises from autonomous systems is that, by using sensors and fast onboard processing, these machines will be able to discover, discern, and track enemies faster than human operators of the sensor systems. If the role of the Ghost Shark is limited, at least initially, to targeting and not firing, it lets the robot submarines bypass the difficult questions and implications of a machine making a lethal decision on its own.

At the press conference this month, Quinn told the press that adversaries will have to assume that a Ghost Shark is not only watching their movements, but “is capable of deploying a wide range of effects — including lethal ones,” reports Breaking Defense. If the Ghost Shark is to be an armed robot, it will raise difficult questions about human control of lethal autonomous machines, especially given the added difficulty of real-time communication under water.

Uncrewed underwater

The Ghost Shark is just one of a growing array of large underwater drones in development by a host of nations. In the chart below, the XL-AUV references the original name for the Ghost Shark.

Before the Ghost Shark can reach the extra-large size it’s intended to have, Anduril is developing the concept on an existing robot submarine it already makes, the smaller Dive-LD. At the naming announcement, a Dive-LD with “Ghost Shark” on the side was on display, highlighting how the program will flow from one into the other.

The Dive-LD is smaller than the XL-AUV (or Ghost Shark) will be, with its 5.8 meter length between 4 and 24 meters shorter than the final design. It still is a useful starting point for developing software, techniques, and testing payloads, all with the intent of scaling the robot up to the size needed for long lasting and deep operations.

The company boasts that these submarines can operate for up to 10 days, with room to expand that endurance, and can operate at depths of up to 6,000 meters below the surface. 

Watch a video about the Ghost Shark, from the Australian Department of Defence, below:

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On December 2, the Air Force revealed its first new bomber in 34 years: the B-21 Raider. The Raider most closely resembles its stealthy predecessor the B-2 Spirit, and both were built by defense giant Northrop Grumman. With only head-on views of the B-21 released and available to the press, it is hard to know all the features that distinguish it from its predecessor. Still, the head-on image is enough to identify some major changes. 

The Raider is a stealth flying wing, designed to carry an explosive arsenal deep into hostile countries while bypassing their radar systems. The B-2 could deliver deadly payloads from conventional explosives to nuclear weapons. Unlike the Spirit’s 1988 reveal, the B-21 arrived in a world with a very different geopolitical climate, one where the nuclear superpower over the horizon for the US to worry about is China, not the Soviet Union. 

The “Spirit” of the Cold War

The Spirit’s production, which the Air Force originally expected to reach 132 bombers, was stopped after just 21. This change matched the geopolitical and domestic expectations of the mid-1990s, when the dissolution of the USSR and the seemingly unchecked ascendancy of American power meant specialized aircraft to bypass advanced defenses seemed superfluous at best.

Stealth is a curious kind of protective technology. It is built into the physical form of the aircraft, with rounded shapes and smooth edges built to minimize the amount of surface that reflects radio waves back to radar receivers. That makes the shape both tremendously important as a secret during development, even if the ultimate form will be discernible by eyes and cameras. A 1988 memo from the CIA, declassified decades later, estimated that half of what the Soviet Union knew about stealth came from the public reporting on it by one Aviation Week writer in the United States.

[Related: Our first look at the Air Force’s new B-21 stealth bomber was just a careful teaser]

That was before Aviation Week pulled its biggest stunt to report on stealth aircraft. In 1988, for the B-2 rollout, the bomber was pulled by a tractor from a hangar into the open air, and then wheeled back again. Reporters with Aviation Week, knowing the location and time of the rollout, rented a Cessna plane to get photographs from overhead.

“One of the driving functions to get us into this mode was, ‘Hey, if they were going to pull this thing out of the hangar into the open, I can guarantee the Russians are going to have a satellite overhead. And if the powers that be don’t care if the Russians see the trailing edge, why should they care about the American people?’” William B. Scott, former Aviation Week editor, recalled in a recent piece.

While the Air Force and pre-merger Northrop revealed more about the B-2 over time, the stunt by Aviation Week to capture photographs of the plane’s whole outline and trailing edges was clearly remembered. The 1988 reveal took place outside a hangar, and during the daytime. The 2022 reveal of the B-21 took place at night, and it barely left the hangar.

Spot these differences

Even limited to the head-on view, there’s still striking details that stand out in the new bomber compared to the old one. The B-2 Spirit appears as two caverns and a mound arising from the flat plain of the wing. The B-21, instead, shares one generally rising approach to the middle, with a gentle slope for the narrower air inlets before a sharper incline to the peak of the cockpit. 

“Perhaps the most striking features of the B-21 are its slender, barely-there air intakes. Unlike the higher-rise, scalloped intakes on the B-2, the B-21’s are almost organically a part of its wing root,” reports Air & Space Forces Magazine. “That’s good for stealth—radar loves abrupt angles and big cavities—but the intakes are so thin and shallow, they seem hardly big enough to swallow enough air to feed the B-21’s engines.” 

The fact that it has slender inlets means that there would be less of a cavity for search radars to find. Moreover, the B-21’s engine fan blades are a huge radar reflector that are shielded from direct view. 

There are seven other notable differences spotted by Air & Space Forces, from depth of the bomber’s belly to its landing gear, color, and smoothness. Sensor technology has improved greatly in the decades since the first B-2 was introduced to the world, and protecting the bomber means stealth not just against radar, but from acoustic sensors, thermal imaging, and other detection strategies.

Many tests and, invariably, reveals are still ahead for the Raider, which has come a long way since the plane was first developed as the Long Range Strike Bomber. The Air Force also intends to roll the B-21 into full production, eventually replacing not just the existing B-2 Spirits but the B-1 Lancer bombers. It may even one day replace the still-in-service B-52 bomber, though that’s a lower priority for the Air Force.

The Air Force places to acquire at least 100 Raiders. Soon enough, observers both civilian and military will be able to catch it in the air, with its once carefully guarded form revealed against the undeniable clarity of the sky.

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On December 21, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke before the United States Congress, on his first trip out of his country since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Speaking against tyranny and drawing a direct analogy to American successes in the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Saratoga and World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, Zelensky promised to see Ukraine through to victory. He also asked for weapons. He asked for artillery, tanks, and planes, and he asked for one weapon specifically by name: Patriot missiles.

“If your Patriots stop the Russian terror against our cities, it will let Ukrainian patriots work to the full to defend our freedom,” said Zelensky. “When Russia cannot reach our cities by its artillery, it tries to destroy them with missile attacks.”

On the same day, the Department of Defense announced it was sending Ukraine its first Patriot air defense battery, along with missiles for it. 

Missile defense

There are, broadly, two ways that militaries can use long-range explosives in war. The first is specific attacks, trying to find military bases or ammunition depots, fixed targets with clear impact on the ability to fight a war. Another is to use bombardment as a weapon of punishment, to inflict pain generally on a population, hoping that the destruction and demoralization hastens victory. Cruise missiles, which can be quite precise weapons, can serve the latter function when fired in barrages at targets far away.

Stopping cruise missiles is hard, in part because of their long range and ability to change direction in flight. Missile defense, which are systems that pair sensors like radar with interceptors like missiles, is one way to stop some of the attacks. Missile defense is a hard problem, even when only talking about missiles with conventional (non-nuclear) warheads, but it’s also a technology that has been developed for decades.

In November, the Department of Defense announced it was joining Spain in supplying Ukraine with HAWK missile interceptors. These weapons were first developed in the 1950s, deployed in the 1960, and upgraded versions still in use by many nations today. HAWKs are useful against aircraft, and they destroyed planes and helicopters when fired by Kuwaiti forces against Iraq in 1990. 

Patriot missiles 

While the United States retained HAWKs in its inventory and other nations deployed them, Patriot missiles have been the standard of interception for a long time. A Patriot missile battery consists of launchers, missiles, a command room to control firing, and a radar to identify and track targets. Once a target, like a plane or a missile, is detected for intercept, the operators fire in response, and then the Patriot missile flies to intercept, its own sensors guiding it along the course. Early Patriot missiles would intercept targets by exploding near them. Modern Patriot missiles destroy their targets in a physical collision.

Patriot missiles also had a major debut in the 1991 Gulf War against Scuds, a ballistic missile fired by Iraq, though that debut should come with caveats.

“During the 1991 Gulf War, the public was led to believe the [sic] that the Patriot had near-perfect performance, intercepting 45 of 47 Scud missiles,” wrote Jeffrey Lewis of Middlebury Institute of International Studies in 2019. “The U.S. Army later revised that estimate down to about 50 percent — and even then, it expressed ‘higher’ confidence in only about one-quarter of the cases. A pesky Congressional Research Service employee noted that if the Army had correctly applied its own assessment methodology consistently, the number would be far lower. (Reportedly that number was one — as in one lousy Scud missile downed.)”

Patriot missiles have improved considerably since then. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Patriot missiles were much more effective at intercepting ballistic missiles than they were in 1991, though there were still limits to their performance. The missiles have seen extensive use by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, intercepting missiles, rockets, and drones fired into the countries by forces in Yemen as part of that ongoing war. Israel has also used Patriot missiles to shoot down a Syrian fighter-bomber.

Part of the challenge of using Patriot missiles is that they are made to destroy big threats, like bombers and ballistic missiles, while also being used to destroy smaller targets, like drones. In his speech before Congress, Zelensky said “Iranian deadly drones sent to Russia in hundreds — in hundreds became a threat to our critical infrastructure.”

These drones, most especially the self-detonating Shahed-136s, are used like cruise missiles to barrage a target from afar, but built from much cheaper parts.

“The high cost per missile and the relatively small number of missiles in a battery means that Patriot operators cannot shoot at every target,” wrote Mark Cancian and Tom Karako of CSIS, a think tank, earlier this month. “High-value Russian aircraft and ballistic missiles would be appropriate targets. Shooting $4 million missiles at $250,000 Russian cruise missiles might be justified if those missiles would hit sensitive targets. Shooting a $4 million missile at a $50,000 Iranian Shahed-136 drone would probably not.”

So long as Russia launches or threatens to launch cruise missiles into Ukraine, Patriot missiles can have a role in stopping the severity of the attack. To comprehensively deal with threats to the country, Ukraine can incorporate the Patriots into a holistic and layered defense, with everything from retaliatory rocket strikes to “threat emitters” that confuse sensors.

When it comes to stopping attacks, Ukraine may need not to use just Patriots, but Vampires—which are truck-mounted drone interceptors—too.

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Mayhem is an odd name for a spy, but it’s a pretty good name for a superfast jet. On December 16, the Department of Defense awarded contractor Leidos $334 million to develop a hypersonic flying scout. The award is technically for the “Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and Strike program,” but it’s also known as Mayhem. It will be uncrewed—a drone.

“The Mayhem system will use a scramjet engine to generate thrust, propelling the vehicle across long distances at speeds greater than Mach 5,” Leidos said in a release.

Hypersonic is the threshold defined as five or more times the speed of sound. Many of the recent developments in hypersonic technology have focused on weapons such as missiles that fly fast to evade detection and interception. Speed is profoundly useful for a weapon, as the force of a fast impact can be tremendously deadly even without a warhead on board.

What sets Mayhem apart from more outright destructive designs is that, while still intended to be expendable, the hypersonic Mayhem is a tool more for finding out than flying around. 

ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and is generally the Pentagon’s acronym for everything involved in discovering, observing, and monitoring activity below, is a mission often associated with slow-moving vehicles. Drones, like the medium-altitude Reaper or the ultra long-endurance Global Hawk, are built to keep watch on activity below, informing how soldiers, sailors, and pilots below all respond. Yet some missions cannot be done at the ponderous speeds of Reaper’s prop engine, or wait for an overhead satellite to be in place.

It is likely in that void, where the need is urgent and the information collection is dangerous, that Mayhem will work best. 

Past is prologue

One way to understand the role the Mayhem might have is to look at the history of superfast spy planes. The most famous of these is the SR-71 Blackbirds, and its single-seat, CIA-piloted predecessor, the A-12, also known as Oxcart. Both planes were designed to take photographs without being shot down by anti-air missiles, which had advanced considerably in power and accuracy into the Cold War. The Soviet Union used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down a U-2 spy plane in 1960, and while U-2s still fly today, there are certain missions better suited for a faster vehicle. The Oxcart flew missions for the US above North Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, before it was retired. The two-seat Blackbird, with room for a pilot and a person to crew the sensors, operated into the 1990s

“The SR-71 was designed to fly deep into hostile territory, avoiding interception with its tremendous speed and high altitude. It could operate safely at a maximum speed of Mach 3.3 at an altitude more than sixteen miles, or 25,908 m (85,000 ft), above the earth,” notes the National Air and Space Museum.

The Blackbird entered service in the late 1960s, and was retired in 1998. In April 1988, a decade before the Blackbird’s retirement, Popular Science highlighted what the Air Force would want in a replacement, including a speed of Mach 5 and a service ceiling of above 100,000 feet. 

There’s a third distant predecessor to Mayhem: the D-21 supersonic drone. Launched by planes, including the B-52, four D-21s were used to take photographs of China between 1969 and 1971. The drone was designed within the limits of the technology at the time, which meant film cases that had to be ejected and recovered, before they were to be processed in a darkroom. The D-21 flew a fixed path, and then detonated after its mission. None of the four flights over China produced recoverable images, and the program was abandoned. 

Developing a new hypersonic spyplane has long been a goal of the Air Force, with reports of new concepts sprouting periodically. 

Uncrewed is good news

What might make Mayhem a better bet in 2022 than any prior attempt at a Blackbird replacement is a conflux of factors, all of which have led to improved drone technology. Removing the need for a pilot onboard a plane can shrink its overall profile, and lets the aircraft operate without the constraints of having to keep people onboard alive.

Cameras, data processing, and wireless data transfer have all improved tremendously in the past decades. The era of using film cameras for aerial surveillance finally ended this summer, and with it the constraints of having to collect or process film negatives. The cameras that make possible drone sensors, like the far-seeing pods on Global Hawks, show an industrial community proficient in far-seeing sensors, though taking pictures with clarity and at speed has its own obstacles. The Blackbird included sensors for listening and recording signals, like radar and radios, and those too could be incorporated into a hypersonic drone.

Like the D-21 before it, Mayhem can be expendable, where the loss of the drone need not mean the loss of information it collected. But expendable doesn’t have to mean that the drone is destroyed at the end of every mission, and a drone that could be recovered and reused offers a boon to military brass looking for a way to confirm reports by photography 

“This program is focused on delivering a larger class air-breathing hypersonic system capable of executing multiple missions with a standardized payload interface, providing a significant technological advancement and future capability,” is all the detail provided by the contract announcement for what Mayhem actually will do.

However Mayhem ultimately develops, it will fill a void the Air Force has left open for almost thirty years. 

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The Army will field a platoon of laser-armed fighting vehicles in January 2023, Task and Purpose reports. This platoon was originally supposed to be delivered by October 2022, but was delayed due to additional checks ensuring that the system will be fully functional when it arrives. The testing is a crucial first step towards providing an Army with a deeply protective tool that can roll into battle against drones and mortars.

One way the Army currently fights is from Stryker vehicles. These armored, eight-wheeled transports can seat up to nine soldiers inside, and can mount light weapons on turrets. In the case of the laser-armed Strykers, the light weapons are literal, and they use the heat of photons (also known as directed energy) to quickly burn through hostile targets. 

A Stryker Platoon consists of four vehicles, each with a drive, commander, and a squad of infantry. That’s roughly 44 people in light armored vehicles, tasked with moving across the battlefield into a well-placed position suitable for deploying their weapons. En route and in combat, those soldiers can expect to face attack from a range of enemy weapons from indirect-fire mortar rounds to hostile drones armed with bombs or scouting for artillery.

With lasers, the Strykers will have a defense against these attacks. In proper military fashion, the ability to shoot objects out of the sky is given a big acronym: Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense, or DE M-SHORAD. “DE” is the laser, “maneuver” here means “on a vehicle,” and “SHORAD” is about the types and distances of targets these lasers will defeat. That’s all a bit of a complex alphabet soup, so the vehicles will be known by a more straightforward name: Guardian.

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

“There are places where directed energy can provide a significant advantage,” Craig Robin, deputy director of the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office’s directed energy office, said in 2021. “All the bullets are built into the system, so the logistics associated with moving a platform and supplying it requires just gas and parts.”

For the Stryker-mounted laser, the vehicle’s gas engine charges its batteries, powers its cooling system, and can power its laser. The stored energy allows the 50-kilowatt laser to fire multiple times before the system needs a recharge.

In May, laser-maker Raytheon announced that a laser mounted on an armored vehicle had successfully shot down multiple mortar rounds in testing. Mortars are common in both counter-insurgency and conventional warfare because the small and low-cost explosive rounds arc over intervening terrain, like trees and hills and buildings, crashing down onto targets from above. Mortar fire was a regular concern for forces in Afghanistan because they could bypass walls. Additionally, on-the-move mortars could destroy a vehicle and slow down a whole column. 

What lasers offer is a way to destroy those rounds mid-flight. The heat of the beam can detonate the bomb in midair or melt its guiding fin, sending it on a different trajectory. A whole platoon of Stryers equipped with these lasers could have a kind of rolling protection, making such weapons that much harder to use against soldiers.

[Related: This laser-armed Stryker vehicle can shoot down drones and mortar rounds]

Lasers have already seen some use as a way to defend ships and soldiers from mortars and drones. In the right conditions, laser weapons can be effective, though dust, rain, or thick fog can all alter how well the light from these devices travels and concentrates. Destroying drones with a laser takes a matter of seconds, depending on what part of the drone is hit and the power of the laser. 

Drone scouts and artillery spotters, especially low-cost drones, have proven themselves on the fields of Ukraine, as both Russian and Ukrainian forces have been utilizing commercial models to great effect. The US Army is deploying its own dedicated quadcopters, designed to match and exceed the abilities of commercial quadcopters. Lasers cannot prevent the drone from having already transmitted video or coordinates, but they can stop the drone from continuing to watch. 

Before any laser-armed Strykers see action abroad, they will arrive at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. The Army has already tested the system in development exercises and demonstrations. Now, lasers can be integrated into the regular operation of the military—becoming one more tool designed to protect modern soldiers from the threats of modern warfare.

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This article was originally featured on ProPublica.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

In early February 2016, the security gate at a U.S. military base near Washington, D.C., swung open to admit a Navy doctor accompanying a pair of surprising visitors: two artificial intelligence scientists from Google.

In a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse at the Joint Pathology Center, they stood amid stacks holding the crown jewels of the center’s collection: tens of millions of pathology slides containing slivers of skin, tumor biopsies and slices of organs from armed service members and veterans.

Standing with their Navy sponsor behind them, the Google scientists posed for a photograph, beaming.

Mostly unknown to the public, the trove and the staff who study it have long been regarded in pathology circles as vital national resources: Scientists used a dead soldier’s specimen that was archived here to perform the first genetic sequencing of the 1918 Flu.

Google had a confidential plan to turn the collection of slides into an immense archive that — with the help of the company’s burgeoning, and potentially profitable, AI business — could help create tools to aid the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases. And it would seek first, exclusive dibs to do so.

“The chief concern,” Google’s liaison in the military warned the leaders of the repository, “is keeping this out of the press.”

More than six years later, Google is still laboring to turn this vast collection of human specimens into digital gold.

At least a dozen Defense Department staff members have raised ethical or legal concerns about Google’s quest for service members’ medical data and about the behavior of its military supporters, records reviewed by ProPublica show. Underlying their complaints are concerns about privacy, favoritism and the private use of a sensitive government resource in a time when AI in health care shows both great promise and risk. And some of them worried that Google was upending the center’s own pilot project to digitize its collection for future AI use.

Pathology experts familiar with the collection say the center’s leaders have good reason to be cautious about partnerships with AI companies. “Well designed, correctly validated and ethically implemented [health algorithms] could be game-changing things,” said Dr. Monica E. de Baca, chair of the College of American Pathologists’ Council on Informatics and Pathology Innovation. “But until we figure out how to do that well, I’m worried that — knowingly or unknowingly — there will be an awful lot of snake oil sold.”

When it wasn’t chosen to take part in JPC’s pilot project, Google pulled levers in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and in Congress. This year, after lobbying by Google, staff on the House Armed Services Committee quietly inserted language into a report accompanying the Defense Authorization Act that raises doubts about the pathology center’s modernization efforts while providing a path for the tech giant to land future AI work with the center.

Pathology experts call the JPC collection a national treasure, unique in its age, size and breadth. The archive holds more than 31 million blocks of human tissue and 55 million slides. More recent specimens are linked with detailed patient information, including pathologist annotations and case histories. And the repository holds many examples of “edge cases” — diseases so vanishingly rare that many pathologists never see them.

Google sought to gather so many identifying details about the specimens and patients that the repository’s leaders feared it would compromise patients’ anonymity. Discussions became so contentious in 2017 that the leaders of the JPC broke them off.

In an interview with ProPublica, retired Col. Clayton Simon, the former director of the JPC, said Google wanted more than the pathology center felt it could provide. “Ultimately, even through negotiations, we were unable to find a pathway that we legally could do and ethically should do,” Simon said. “And the partnership dissolved.”

But Google didn’t give up. Last year, the center’s current director, Col. Joel Moncur, in response to questions from DOD lawyers, warned that the actions of Google’s chief research partner in the military “could cause a breach of patient privacy and could lead to a scandal that adversely affects the military.”

Google has told the military that the JPC collection holds the “raw materials” for the most significant biotechnology breakthroughs of this decade — “on par with the Human Genome Project in its potential for strategic, clinical, and economic impact.”

All of that made the cache an alluring target for any company hoping to develop health care algorithms. Enormous quantities of medical data are needed to design algorithmic models that can identify patterns a pathologist might miss — and Google and other companies are in a race to gather them. Only a handful of tech companies have the scale to scan, store and analyze a collection of this magnitude on their own. Companies that have submitted plans to compete for aspects of the center’s modernization project include Amazon Web Services, Cerner Corp. and a host of small AI companies.

But no company has been as aggressive as Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, has previously drawn fire for its efforts to gather and crunch medical data. In the United Kingdom, regulators reprimanded a hospital in 2017 for providing data on more than 1.6 million patients, without their understanding, to Alphabet’s AI unit, DeepMind. In 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google had a secret deal, dubbed “Project Nightingale,” with a Catholic health care system that gave it access to data on millions of patients in 21 states, also without the knowledge of patients or doctors. Google responded to the Journal story in a blog post that stated that patient data “cannot and will not be combined with any Google consumer data.”

In a statement, Ted Ladd, a Google spokesperson, attributed the ethics complaints associated with its efforts to work with the repository to an “inter-agency issue” and a “personnel dispute.”

“We had hoped to enable the JPC to digitize its data and, with its permission, develop computer models that would enable researchers and clinicians to improve diagnosis for cancers and other illnesses,” Ladd said, noting that all of Google’s health care partnerships involve “the strictest controls” over data. “Our customers own and manage their data, and we cannot — and do not — use it for any purpose other than explicitly agreed upon by the customer,” Ladd said.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the JPC said none of its de-identified data would be shared during its modernization process unless it met the ethical, regulatory, and legal approvals needed to ensure it was done in the right way.

“The highest priority of the JPC’s digital transformation is to ensure that any de-identified digital slides are used ethically and in a manner that protects patient privacy and military security,” the JPC said.

But some fear that even these safeguards might not be enough. Steven French, a DOD cloud computing engineer assigned to the project, said he was dismayed by the relentlessness of Google’s advocates in the department. Lost in all their discussions about the speed, scale and cost-saving benefits associated with working with Google seemed to be concerns for the interests of the service members whose tissue was the subject of all this maneuvering, French told ProPublica.

“It felt really bad to me,” French said. “Like a slow crush towards the inevitability of some big tech company monetizing it.”

The JPC certainly does need help from tech companies. Underfunded by Congress and long neglected by the Pentagon, it is vulnerable to offers from well-funded rescuers. In spite of its leaders’ pleas, funding for a full-scale modernization project has never materialized. The pathology center’s aging warehouses have been afflicted with water leaks and unwelcome intruders: a marauding family of raccoons.

The story of the pathology center’s long, contentious battle with Google has never been told before. ProPublica’s account is based on internal emails, presentations and memos, as well as interviews with current and former DOD officials, some of whom asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter or for fear of retribution.

Google’s Private Tour

In December 2015, Google began its courtship of the JPC with a bold, unsolicited proposal. The messenger was a junior naval officer, Lt. Cmdr. Niels Olson.

“I’m working with Google on a project to apply machine learning to medical imaging,” Olson wrote to the leaders of the repository. “And it seems like we are at the stage where we need to figure exactly what JPC has.”

A United States Naval Academy physics major and Tulane medical school graduate, Olson worked as a clinical and anatomical pathology resident at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego.

With digitized specimen slides holding massive amounts of data, pathology seemed ripe for the coming AI revolution in medicine, he believed. Olson’s own urgency was heightened in 2014 when his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

That year, Olson teamed up with scientists at Google to train software to recognize suspected cancer cells. Google supplied expertise including AI scientists and high-speed, high-resolution scanners. The endeavor had cleared all privacy and review board hurdles. They were scanning Navy patients’ pathology slides at a furious clip, but they needed a larger data set to validate their findings.

Enter the JPC’s archive. Olson learned about the center in medical school. In his email to its leaders in December 2015, Olson attached Google’s eight-page proposal.

Google offered to start the operation by training algorithms with already digitized data in the repository. And it would do this early work “with no exchange of funds.” These types of partnerships free the private parties from having to undergo a competitive bidding process.

Google promised to do the work in a manner that balanced “privacy and ethical considerations.” The government, under the proposal, would own and control the slides and data.

Olson typed a warning: “This is under a non-disclosure agreement with Google, so I need to ask you, do please handle this information appropriately. The chief concern is keeping this out of the press.”

Senior military and civilian staff at the pathology center reacted with alarm. Dr. Francisco Rentas, the head of the archive’s tissue operations, pushed back against the notion of sharing the data with Google.

“As you know, we have the largest pathology repository in the world and a lot of entities will love to get their hands on it, including Google competitors. How do we overcome that?” Rentas asked in an email.

Other leaders had similar reactions. “My concerns are raised when I’m advised to not disclose what seems to be a contractual relationship to the press,” one of the top managers at the pathology center, Col. Edward Stevens, told Olson. Stevens told Olson that giving Google access to this information without a competitive bid could result in litigation from the company’s competitors. Stevens asked: “Does this need to go through an open-source bid?”

But even with these concerns, Simon, the pathology center’s director, was intrigued enough to continue discussions. He invited Olson and Google to inspect the facility.

The warehouse Olson and the Google scientists entered could have served as a set for the final scene of “Raiders of Lost Ark.”

Pathology slides were stacked in aisle canyons, some towering two stories. The slides were arranged in metal trays and cardboard boxes. To access tissue samples, the repository used a retrieval system similar to those found in dry cleaners. The pathology center had just a handful of working scanners. At the pace they were going, it would take centuries to digitize the entire collection.

One person familiar with the repository likened it to the Library of Alexandria, which held the largest archive of knowledge in the ancient world. Myth held that the library was destroyed in a cataclysmic fire lit by Roman invaders, but historians believe the real killer was gradual decay and neglect over centuries.

The military’s tissue library had already played an important role in the advancement of medical knowledge. Its birth in 1862 as the Army Medical Museum was grisly. In a blandly written order in the midst of the Civil War, the Army surgeon general instructed surgeons “diligently to collect and preserve” all specimens of “morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable.”

Soon the museum’s curator was digging through battlefield trenches to find “many a putrid heap” of hands, feet and other body parts ravaged by disease and war. He and other doctors shipped the remains to Washington in whiskey-filled casks.

Over the next 160 years, the tissue collection outgrew several headquarters, including Washington’s Ford Theater and a nuclear-bomb-proof building near the White House. But the main mission — identifying, studying and reducing the calamitous impact of illnesses and injuries afflicting service members — has remained unchanged in times of war and peace. Each time a military or veterans’ hospital pathologist sent a tissue sample to the pathology center for a second opinion, it was filed away in the repository.

As the archive expanded, the repository’s prestige grew. Its scientists spurred advances in microscopy, cancer and tropical disease research. An institute pathologist named Walter Reed proved that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever, an important discovery in the history of medicine.

For much of its modern history, in addition to serving military and veterans hospitals, the center also provided civilian consultations. The work with elite teaching hospitals gave the center a luster that helped it attract and retain top pathologists.

Congress and DOD leaders questioned why the military should fund civilian work that could be done elsewhere. In 2005, under the congressionally mandated base closure act, the Pentagon ordered the organization running the repository to shut down. The organization reopened with a different overseer, tasked with a narrower, military-focused mission. Uncertainty about the organization’s future caused many top pathologists to leave.

In its first pitch to the repository’s leaders, Google pointedly mentioned a book-length Institute of Medicine report on the repository that stated that “wide access” to the archive’s materials would promote the “public good.” The biorepository wasn’t living up to its potential, Google said, noting that “no major efforts have been underway to fix the problem.”

Following the tour, a Google scientist prepared a list of clinical, demographic and patient information it sought from the repository. The list included “must haves” — case diagnoses; pathology and radiology images; information on gender and ethnicity; and birth and death dates — as well as “high-value” patient information, including comorbidities, subsequent hospitalizations and cause of death.

This troubled the JPC’s director. “We felt very, very concerned about giving too much data to them,” Simon told ProPublica, “because too much data could identify the patient.”

There were other aspects about Google’s offer that made it “very unfavorable to the federal government,” Simon later told his successor, according to an email reviewed by ProPublica.

In exchange for scanning and digitizing the slide collection at its own expense, Google sought “exclusive access” to the data for at least four years.

The other deal-breaker was Google’s requirement that it be able to charge the government to store and access the digitized information, a huge financial commitment. Simon did not have the authority to commit the government to future payments to a company without authorization from Congress.

Today, Ladd, the Google spokesperson, disputes the claim that its proposal would have been unfavorable to the government. “Our goal was to help the government digitize the data before it physically deteriorates.”

Ladd said Google sought exclusive access to the data during the early stages of the project, so that it could scan the de-identified samples and perform quality-control measures on the data prior to handing it back to the JPC.

Niels Olson, who spearheaded the project for the Navy in 2016, declined requests for interviews with ProPublica. But Jackson Stephens, a friend and lawyer who is representing Olson, said Olson had always followed the Institutional Review Board process and worked to anonymize patient medical data before it was used in research or shared with a third party.

“Niels takes his oath to the Constitution and his Hippocratic oath very seriously,” Stephens said. “He loves science, but his first duty of care is to his patients.”

Google’s relentlessness in 2017, too, spooked the repository’s leaders, according to an email reviewed by ProPublica. Google’s lawyer put “pressure” on the head of tissue operations to sign the agreement, which he declined to do. Leaders of the center became “uncomfortable” and discontinued discussions, according to the DOD email.

Though he banged on doors in the Pentagon and Congress, Simon was not able to convince the Obama administration to include the JPC in then-Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot. Simon left the JPC in 2018, his hopes for a modernization of the library dashed. But then a Pentagon advisory board got wind of the JPC collection, and everything changed.

“The Smartest People on Earth”

In March of 2020, the Defense Innovation Board announced a series of recommendations to digitize the JPC collection. The board called for a pilot project to scan a large initial batch of slides — at least 1 million in the first year — as a prelude to the massive undertaking of digitizing all 55 million slides.

“My worldview was that this should be one of the highest priorities of the Defense Department,” William Bushman, then acting deputy undersecretary of personnel and readiness, told ProPublica. “It has the potential to save more lives than anything else being done in the department.”

As the pathology center prepared to launch its pilot, the staff talked about a scandal that occurred just 40 miles north.

Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman who died of cancer in 1951 while being treated at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital. Without her or her family’s knowledge or consent, and without compensation, her cells were replicated and commercialized, leading to groundbreaking advances in medicine but also federal reforms on the use of patient cells for research.

Like Lacks’ cancer cells, every specimen in the archive, the JPC team knew, represented its own story of human mortality and vulnerability. The tissue came from veterans and current service members willing to put their lives on the line for their country. Most of the samples came from patients whose doctors discovered ominous signs from biopsies and then sent the specimens to the center for second opinions. Few signed consent forms agreeing to have their samples used in medical research.

The pathology center hired two experts in AI ethics to develop ethical, legal and regulatory guidelines. Meanwhile, the pressure to cooperate with Google hadn’t gone away.

In the summer of 2020, as COVID-19 surged across the country, Olson was stationed at a naval lab in Guam, working on an AI project to detect the coronavirus. That project was managed by a military group based out of Silicon Valley known as the Defense Innovation Unit, a separate effort to speed the military’s development and adoption of cutting-edge technology. Though the group worked with many tech companies, it had gained a reputation for being cozy with Google. The DIU’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, sat just across the street from the Googleplex, the tech giant’s headquarters. Olson joined the group officially that August.

Olson’s COVID-19 work earned him Navy Times’ coveted Sailor of the Year award as well as the attention of a man who would become a powerful ally in the DOD, Thomas “Pat” Flanders.

Flanders was the chief information officer of the sprawling Defense Health Agency, which oversaw the military’s medical services, including hospitals and clinics. A garrulous Army veteran, Flanders questioned the wisdom of running the pilot project without first getting funding to scan all of the 55 million slides. He wanted the pathology staff to hear about the work Olson and Google had done scanning pathology slides in San Diego and see if a similar public-private partnership could be forged with the JPC.

Over the objections of Moncur, the JPC’s director, Flanders insisted on having Olson attend all the pathology center’s meetings to discuss the pilot, according to internal emails.

In August 2020, the JPC published a request for information from vendors interested in taking part in the pilot project. The terms of that request specified that no feedback would be given to companies about their submissions and that telephone inquiries would not be accepted or acknowledged. Such conversations could be seen as favoritism and could lead to a protest by competitors who did not get this privilege.

But Flanders insisted that meeting Google was appropriate, according to Moncur’s statements to DOD lawyers.

In a video conference call, Flanders told the Google representatives they were “the smartest people on earth” and said he couldn’t believe he was “getting to meet them for free,” according to written accounts of the meeting provided to DOD lawyers.

Flanders asked Google to explain its business model, saying he wanted to see how both the government and company might profit from the center’s data so that he could influence the requirements on the government side — a remark that left even the Google representatives “speechless,” according to a compilation of concerns raised by DOD staffers.

To Moncur and others in attendance, Flanders was actively negotiating with Google, according to Moncur’s statement to DOD lawyers.

To the astonishment of the center staff, Flanders asked for a second meeting between Google and the JPC team.

Concern about Flanders’ conduct echoed in other parts of the DOD. A lawyer for Defense Digital Service, a team of software engineers, data scientists and product managers assigned to assist on the project, wrote that Flanders ignored legal warnings. He described Flanders as a “cowboy” who in spite of warnings about his behavior was not likely “to fall out of love with Google.”

In an interview with ProPublica, Flanders disputed claims that he was biased toward Google. Flanders said his focus has always been on scanning and storing the slides as quickly and economically as possible. As for his lavish praise of Google, Flanders said he was merely trying to be “kind” to the company’s representatives.

“People took offense to that,” Flanders said. “It’s just really pettiness on the part of people who couldn’t get along, honestly.”

A spokesperson for the Defense Health Agency said it was “totally appropriate” for Flanders to ask Google about its business model. “This is part of market research,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that no negotiation occurred at the meeting and that all government stakeholders had been invited to attend.

Moncur referred calls to a JPC spokesperson. A spokesperson for the JPC said in a statement that “Moncur was concerned about meeting with vendors during the RFI period.”

“An Arm of Google”

In late 2020, the modernization team received more troubling news. In a slide presentation for the JPC describing other AI work with Google and the military, Olson disclosed that the company had “made offers of employment, which I have declined.” But then he suggested the offer might be revived in the future, writing, “we mutually agreed to table the matter.” He said he had “no other conflicts of interest to declare.” Google told ProPublica it had never directly made Olson a job offer, though a temp agency it used did.

More facts surfaced. Olson also had a Google corporate email address. And he had access to Google corporate files, according to internal communications from concerned DOD staff members. Google said it is common for its research partners in the government to have these privileges.

“I am more worried than ever that DIU’s influence will destroy this acquisition,” a DOD lawyer wrote, referring to efforts to find vendors for the pilot project. He called DIU “essentially an arm of Google.”

At the time, a DIU lawyer defended Olson. The lawyer said Olson had “no further conflict of interest issues” and had done nothing improper because the job offer had been made three years earlier, in 2017. An ethics officer at the DOD Standards of Conduct Office agreed.

Today, a spokesperson in the Office of the Secretary of Defense told ProPublica the department was committed to modernizing the repository “while carefully observing all applicable legal and ethical rules.”

Olson’s friend and lawyer, Stephens, said Olson had been upfront, disclosing the job offer to the innovation unit’s lawyer as well as in the conflict-of-interest section of his slide presentation. He said Olson had declined the offer, which was withdrawn. “He’s not some kind of Google secret agent.”

Stephens said the JPC would have been much further down the road had it cooperated with Olson. Stephens said it became apparent to Olson that Moncur was “essentially ignoring” a “gold mine that could help a lot of people.”

“Niels is the tenacious doctor who is just trying to do the science and build a coalition of partners to get this thing done,” Stephens said. “I think he’s the hero of this story.”

Google Turns to Congress

In 2021, the pathology center selected one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world, Johns Hopkins — which plans to erect a building honoring Henrietta Lacks — to assist it in scanning slides. It picked two small technology companies to start building tools to let pathologists search the archive.

Google wanted to be selected, and in a confidential proposal, it offered to help the repository build up its own slide-scanning capabilities.

When Google was not selected for the pilot project, the company went above the JPC leaders’ heads. Google claimed in a letter to Pentagon leaders that the company had been unfairly excluded from “full and open competition.” In that August 2021 letter, Google argued that the nation’s security was at stake. It asked the DOD to “consider allowing Google Cloud” and other providers to compete to ensure the “nation’s ability to compete with China in biotechnology.”

Time was of the essence, Google warned. “The physical slides at the JPC are degrading rapidly each day. … Without further action, the slides will continue to degrade and some may ultimately be damaged beyond repair.”

Google stepped up its advocacy campaign. The company deployed a lobbying firm, the Roosevelt Group — which boasts of its ability to “leverage” its connections to secure federal business opportunities to its clients — to raise doubts about the JPC’s pilot project. Their efforts worked. In little-noticed language in a report written to accompany the 2023 Defense Authorization Act, the House Armed Services Committee expressed its concern about the speed of the scanning process and the choice of technology, which the committee claimed would not allow the “swift digitization of these deteriorating slides.”

The committee had its own ideas of how the pathology center’s work should be carried out, suggesting that the center work in tandem with the DIU, using an augmented reality microscope whose software was engineered by Google.

In a statement, the Roosevelt Group told ProPublica it was “proud” of its work for Google. The firm said it helped the company “educate professional staff of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees over concerns about the lack of an open procurement process for digitization of slides.” The group chided DOD officials for being “unwilling to provide answers to Congress around the lack of progress on the JPC digitization effort.”

The pathology center staff was dismayed by the committee’s recommendations that it work with Olson’s group.

In a video conference meeting late last summer with Armed Services Committee staff, the leaders of the pathology center attempted to rebut the House committee report. The JPC’s work was going as planned, they said, noting that a million slides had been scanned. And the pathology center was collaborating with the National Institutes of Health to develop AI tools to help predict prognoses for cancer treatments.

The House Armed Services Committee ordered Pentagon leaders to “conduct a comprehensive assessment” on the digitization effort and to provide a briefing to the committee on its findings by April 1, 2023.

In a statement in response to ProPublica’s questions about the bill, Ladd, the Google spokesperson, acknowledged the company’s influence efforts on Capitol Hill. “We frequently provide information to congressional staff on issues of national importance,” Ladd said. The statement confirmed that the company suggested “language be inserted” into the 2023 Defense Authorization Act calling for a “comprehensive assessment” of the digitization effort.

“Despite efforts from Google and many at the Department of Defense, our work with JPC unfortunately never got off the ground, and the physical repository of pathology slides continues to deteriorate,” Ladd said. “We remain optimistic that if the repository could be properly digitized, it would save many American lives, including those of our service members.”

On this last point, even Google’s critics are in accord. A properly funded project would cost taxpayers a few hundred million dollars — a minuscule portion of the $858 billion defense budget and a small price if the lifesaving potential of the collection is realized.

Last year, as tensions grew with Google, the modernization team at the repository launched a publicity campaign to call attention to the project and the high ethical stakes.

An entire panel discussion was devoted to the JPC effort at the 2021 South by Southwest conference. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I want to make sure we do it right, we do it responsibly and we do it ethically,” said Steven French, the DOD cloud computing engineer assigned to assist the repository.

Then without mentioning Google’s name, he added a Shakespearean barb. “There’s plenty of vendors, plenty of companies, plenty of people,” French said, “who are more than willing to do this and extract a pound of flesh from us in the process.”

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On December 1, the Army announced that the 3rd Battalion, 75th Army Rangers are now fielding a dedicated quadcopter, built for military use. The Rangers are the second Army formation to field the Skydio-built RQ-28A drones. The fact that these drones are being used in more training shows how important quadcopters have become on the modern battlefield.

When it comes to personal, commercial, or hobbyist drones, the quadcopter is easily the most familiar form. With four rotors to balance weight and provide redundancy, quadcopters are simple to launch and land. Plus, they provide a stable platform for a camera to be mounted. Commercial quadcopters are so competent and useful, in fact, that they have ended up in military exercises for the better part of a decade. 

What has been trickier is getting commercial-quality quadcopters, without the assumed risks of unsecured commercial communications. Securing a specifically military-ready quadcopter for cheap has long been a goal of the Army.

“The Skydio RQ-28A is the Army’s first program of record quadcopter. It is a new and disruptive organic capability that is fielded to the platoon echelon in the form of a portable rucksack Vertical Take Off and Lift, small, unmanned aircraft,” the Army said in a release. “It provides Warfighters with enhanced situational awareness and a standoff capability in urban and complex terrain, enabling accurate reconnaissance and surveillance of targets of interest.”

In other words, the drones let soldiers scout in cities, forests, and hills. Video from the drones lets a platoon, or group of 36 or so soldiers, see what is around them, especially when sight might be obstructed by obstacles, like buildings or boulders. All of these functions could, largely, be done with commercial quadcopters. And for militaries without the massive funding of the United States, that is often what was done.

Off the shelf

After Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, quadcopters became a part of the static warfare along fixed positions in the Donbas region. In 2018, Ukrainian forces released a video showing them using a modified DJI Mavic quadcopter to drop a grenade on separatist-held trenches. Since the February 2022 invasion, soldiers in both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries have made extensive use of commercial quadcopters. These drones let soldiers see the area around where they are fighting, and inform how they move through terrain. The drones are also useful spotters for artillery and mortar fire, increasing accuracy of existing weapons. As some Russian veterans returning from the front noted, fighting without quadcopters meant operating like “blind kittens.”

For years, the US Army and other parts of the Pentagon also explored the potentials of off-the-shelf quadcopters. But in 2017, the Army moved to ban the use of DJI, and in 2018, the Department of Defense sent a memo suspending the military from purchasing off-the-shelf drones, citing cybersecurity concerns. These concerns primarily arose because the drones were made by DJI, China’s hobbyist drone giant, which could pose a national cybersecurity risk to the US military.

In an independent audit funded by DJI, the concerns were mostly though not entirely dismissed, and the drones still make their way into military-adjacent testing. It was DJI drones that Raytheon destroyed in a field test with a laser, for example. A 2017 Navy evaluation of DJI drones, used as the basis for the Navy ban, noted that the drones were also cheap enough to be treated as expendable, and recommended mitigation strategies for cyber vulnerabilities. 

However, despite the advancements that have been made in adapting commercial drones, the Army has decided instead to pursue the development of a dedicated military quadcopter, which it is now fielding. 

Mission set

The RQ-28A drone itself weighs less than 5 pounds, can be transported in a hard-case, and can be carried onto the field in a rucksack. Ultimately, the Army expects to field 480 of the drones in 2023, with a total of 1,083 delivered by the end of March 2025. These drones will be piloted using an existing government controller, which works with the existing drones. 

In September, the Army fielded the RQ-28A for the first time with the Small UAS Master Trainer Schoolhouse at Fort Benning, Georgia. That school also trans soldiers on other small drones, like the hand-tossed fixed-wing Raven scout. For training on the RQ-28A, the school received 30 drone systems.

As The War Zone notes, the RQ-28A is likely based on Skydio’s X2D drone, which means they probably share similar features such as 35 minutes of flight time and the ability to communicate and send video from up to 3.6 miles away. 

In the field, these drones can mean the difference between what soldiers can see with their own eyes, and detecting an ambush waiting ahead and tucked away out of sight. However, for the RQ-28A to truly match the utility of the commercial drones it is emulating, it will need to be as expendable in battle. What makes battlefield quadcopters so useful is that they not only offer an overhead video of combat, but that they can be abandoned without real loss if need be.

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To fire artillery faster, the US Army is turning to robotic arms. On December 1, Army Futures Command awarded a $1 million contract to Sarcos Technology and Robotics Corporation to test a robot system that can handle and move artillery rounds. 

Every artillery piece is, in essence, a tube that combines the artillery shell with an explosive propellant, hurling a projectile and pain far away to someone else. The rate of artillery fire is determined by how quickly the crew can aim, load, and reload the gun. For artillery on the ground, that’s a matter of drill and skill, training the humans to lift and load, and clear and seal guns as fast as possible without dropping an artillery round that can weigh over 90 pounds. 

As such, the Army hopes that robotics can help with this process. “The Sarcos robotic ammunition handling solution leverages a dexterous robotic arm that was designed to be integrated into the U.S. Army’s fleet of Self-Propelled Howitzer Systems,” the company said in a release.

A self-propelled artillery system is a long-range gun mounted on a vehicle, usually a tracked and to some extent an armored one, that looks at a distance like a tank with a very large gun. The Army’s self-propelled howitzer is the venerable M109 Paladin, whose earliest models entered service in 1963. The Paladin has been upgraded at least 15 times in its long service, with new production models adapting to better technology and changing needs in combat.

Operating a Paladin at present takes a crew of six. The driver directs the vehicle, the gunner aims the weapon, three ammunition handlers load and ready the weapon, and a commander oversees the whole operation. Fitting three people in the back of the Paladin to lift and load ammunition means specifically finding recruits who can fit within the vehicle’s confines. Those people must also endure the stress of repeatedly lifting and loading rounds at the pace of battle.

[Related: The US’s latest assist to Ukraine: Rocket launchers with a 43-mile range]

For the Extended Range Cannon Artillery, the Army’s latest iteration of the Paladin-derived design, the Army is hoping to double the range of its artillery, while keeping pace with the complex tasks of firing and calibrating shots. Depending on ammunition, a Paladin today can hit targets at a range of 11 to 15 miles away. The Extended Range version, which has been thoroughly redesigned since the 1963 models, will have a range of 40 miles. 

“The Extended Range Cannon Artillery system is used extensively in the U.S. Army for long range precision firing, but the downside to this system is the weight of the ammunition needing to be hand-loaded by Soldiers in the field,” Reeg Allen, vice president of business development, Sarcos, said in a release.

An automated system, using robot arms to fetch and ready artillery rounds, would function somewhat like a killer version of a vending machine arm. The human gunner could select the type of ammunition from internal stores, and then the robotic loader finds it, grabs it, and places it on a lift. 

If it sounds futuristic, a system like this is actually already in use. This is how the automated loader of the Panzerhaubitze 2000 self-propelled howitzer works. That gun is in service with several nations, including Germany and Ukraine. The use of the automated system requires one fewer human artillery crew member in the vehicle. The PzH 2000 also has an automated loader for outside the vehicle, allowing soldiers to carry ammunition from trucks or nearby storage and restock the vehicle in the field, without having to crawl into the confined space of the artillery crew compartment.

[Related: What to know about the Caesars, the gigantic truck-mounted artillery units France sent Ukraine]

Testing the new automated system means ensuring not just that it can lift and load artillery, but that it can also handle the rigors of war. Any useful hardware must be able to absorb the shock and vibration of driving, as well as handling the environmental factors in which it operates, from intense heat to sharp cold, as well as erosion from sand, dust, and humidity.

Should the robot arm perform as expected in testing, it will eliminate a job that is all repetitive strain. The robot, lifting and loading ammunition, is now an autonomous machine, automating the dull and menial task of reading rounds to fire.

Improved speed and reduced crewing of artillery are always broadly good objectives, and the ongoing war in Ukraine has emphasized the continuing role of artillery on modern battlefields. Self-propelled artillery offers a way for armies to shoot and scoot, unleashing salvos and then relocating before retaliation. Unlike high-end rock and missile systems like the HIMARs, self-propelled artillery can deliver that barrage using much lower cost artillery shells.

Watch an automated loader for a PzH 2000 in action below: 

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Starlink announced earlier this week the debut of Starshield. This new venture will ostensibly serve as the company’s defense industry counterpoint with the US military as its first customer. First launched in 2019 through Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture, Starlink aims to provide high-speed, reliable satellite internet service virtually anywhere on Earth within the next few years via a satellite constellation numbering in the tens of thousands. Over 3,000 small Starlink satellites are already in low Earth orbit to offer internet connectivity within 40 countries so far, according to the company’s count.

As CNBC reported earlier this week, details are currently vague regarding Starshield’s full scope, although the venture’s official website explains it “leverages SpaceX’s Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts.” The site also lists three areas of “initial focus,” including imagery, communications, and hosted payloads that will allow government contracts to ostensibly hitch a ride on Starshield rockets for separate projects.

[Related: SpaceX says it can no longer fund Ukraine’s Starlink access.]

Starshield will also offer “inter-satellite laser communications” links that can be joined with partner satellites “so as to connect other companies’ government systems ‘into the Starshield network,’” explains CNBC.

Starshield will likely deepen SpaceX’s ties with the Department of Defense, which has long been the umbrella company’s most lucrative and largest customer. The US military previously made it clear that it is determined to expand its next-generation satellite capabilities—earlier this year, the Pentagon announced $1.8 billion in contracts for companies including Northrop Grumman and Lockheed-Martin. Starshield’s debut shows SpaceX is aiming to cement its place among the largest and most influential defense contractors, and is leaning into its security features to do so. Its website boasts “additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely, meeting the most demanding government requirements.”

[Related: A solar storm blasted 40 SpaceX satellites out of orbit.]

Although Starshield’s debut represents a major new market for Elon Musk’s company, Starlink itself is already being used for military operations in Ukraine as national forces work to repel Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country. Earlier this fall, Musk threatened to withdraw Starlink access to Ukraine, citing mounting costs, although later backtracked on the statement.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is not restricting its upcoming partnerships to purely military organizations. In October, the company began discussions with longtime customers at NASA about ways to potentially “bump” the Hubble Telescope into a higher orbit. If successful, it could extend the iconic project’s lifespan by another few years.

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To confuse Russian aircraft, Ukraine reportedly has access to a training tool from the United States. Known as “Threat Emitters,” they are a way for pilots to learn the signatures of hostile aircraft and missiles, allowing them to safely practice identifying and reacting to combat situations in training. In simulated scenarios, pilots learn how their sensors would perceive real threats, and can safely plan and adapt to the various anti-aircraft weapons they might encounter. The net effect is that pilots learn to fight against a phantom representation of air defenses, in preparation for the real thing.

But when brought to actual war, the emitters in turn are a way to make an enemy’s sensors less reliable, confounding adversarial pilots about what is real and what is merely an electromagnetic mirage.

These “low-cost emitters were built for ranges inside the U.S. but now are in the hands of Ukrainians,” reported Aviation Week, citing Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr. “The emitters can replicate surface-to-air missiles and aircraft, and are a cheap, innovative way to further complicate the air picture for Russia.”

One such system is the Joint Threat Emitter. There are two major components to the system: a command unit that lets soldiers operate it, and trailer-mounted radar threat emitters. A command unit can control up to 12 different threat emitters, and each emitter can simulate up to six threats at once. 

These emitters help pilots train on their sensors, practicing for war when far from conflict. In 2013, the Air Force and Navy set up Joint Threat Emitters at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. Both the Navy and Air Force operate from the island, and as the American territory closest to North Korea and China, Guam is prominently featured in war plans around either country. 

“When [pilots] go to a real-world situation, they won’t see anything that we haven’t thrown at them before,” Staff Sgt. Rick Woltkamp, a ground radar systems craftsman with the Idaho Air National Guard, said in 2013. “We simulate a ground attack, and the pilot will react and respond accordingly to the simulation.”

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

Development and use of the tech goes back two decades. In 2002, the Air Force selected Northrop Grumman to develop the Joint Threat Emitter over the next 10 years as a “high-fidelity, full-power threat simulator that is capable of generating radar signals associated with threat systems” that will “better enable aircrews to train in modern war environments.”

Some of the signals it can generate mimic surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery, both of which threaten planes but require different countermeasures. One example of a non-missile air defense system is the ZSU-23, built by the Soviet Union. The ZSU is an armored vehicle with anti-aircraft guns pointed on a turret that uses a radar dish to guide its targeting. As a Soviet-made system, ZSU-23 systems were handed down to successor states, and are reportedly in operation by both the militaries of Ukraine and Russia.

When used for training purposes, the Joint Threat Emitters let pilots perceive and adapt to the presence of enemies, beyond visual line of sight. At these distances, pilots rely largely on sensor readings to see and anticipate the danger they are flying into. One way for them to adapt might be to pick a new route, further from the anti-air radars. Another would be to divert the attack to knock out anti-air systems first.

[Related: How electronic warfare could factor into the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

In Ukraine, the likely use case for these emitters is to augment the country’s existing air defenses. Using the emitters to project air-defense signals across the battlefield—signals identical to known and real Ukrainian air defenses—could mask where the actual defenses are. Real defenses lurking in a sea of mirage defenses, simulated but not backed up by the actual weapons, is a vexing proposition for an attacker. Discovering what is real means probing the defenses with scouts (or hoping that satellite imagery provides a timely update). But because the emitters, like the weapons they emulate, can be driven around, even a view from space cannot accurately pin down a fixed location for long.

Russia’s air force has struggled to achieve air superiority over Ukraine since it invaded in February 2022. Existing air defenses, from vintage human-portable missiles to newer arrivals, put planes and helicopters at real risk for attack. Videos of Russian helicopters lobbing rockets, increasing range while greatly reducing accuracy, suggest that even in the war’s earliest months Russian pilots were afraid of existing Ukrainian anti-air defenses. 

While the threat emitters alone do not offer any direct way to shoot down aircraft, having them in place makes Russia’s work of attacking from the sky that much harder. Even if a threat emitter is found and destroyed, it likely means that Russia spent ammunition hitting a decoy target, while missing a real and tangible threat.

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The US Army just announced that it has made a historic decision about how its soldiers will be transported around battlefields in the future. After considering two different options—a helicopter from Sikorsky and Boeing and an aircraft from Bell Textron—it said that it is moving forward with the latter. 

Bell’s creation is called the V-280 Valor. But although it can take off and land vertically like a helicopter, it’s technically not a helicopter. It’s a tiltrotor aircraft. With the V-280, Bell won the Army’s competition to create the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA. “The FLRAA is intended to eventually replace the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, which has been in service for more than four decades,” the Army said in a press release on Dec. 5. 

“It’s the biggest Army helicopter decision in 40 years, since they selected the Black Hawk,” says J.J. Gertler, a senior associate in the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is the Army selecting what will be its main transport helicopter for an entire generation.”

With a tiltrotor aircraft, the rotors do what its name suggests—they can tilt. What that means in practice is that they can direct the thrust they produce towards the ground to allow it to take off and land vertically, and then adjust their positions to send that thrust backwards in forward flight, like the propellers on a traditional aircraft. The wing to which those tilting rotors are attached provides the aircraft with lift as it cruises forward. “There’s nothing out there that can compete with a tiltrotor when it comes to speed and range,” Bell’s program director for the FLRAA program, Ryan Ehinger, told PopSci last year. 

Bell says that the V-280 has traveled faster than 345 mph. The numbers that Sikorsky has revealed for how fast its candidate can go are less than 300 mph. 

The other tiltrotor aircraft in service today is the V-22 Osprey, which is made by Bell together with Boeing. But the V-280 Valor differs from the larger Osprey in some key ways, one of which is that when the rotors tilt on the Valor, the engines do not. Comparing the Valor to the Osprey, “the basic technology of tilting rotors is the same—all of the details are different,” Gertler says. “Bell learned extensively from the V-22 experience.”

[Related: Tilting rotors could help make Bell’s speedy new aircraft the next Black Hawk]

Bell’s competition from Sikorsky and Boeing in the FLRAA contest was a craft called the Defiant X, which sports a compound coaxial design: Two top rotors, one stacked on top of the other, spin in opposite directions from each other. This design was chosen to avoid a problem that occurs with traditional helicopters when they try to travel very quickly: When a helicopter’s blade retreats through the air in the opposite direction of the one the aircraft is traveling in, it can lose lift. 

“This was a fascinating competition because it wasn’t just between two helicopters—it was between two visions of what rotorcraft should be, or could be, in the future,” Gertler says. 

The Defiant X helicopter shares a design approach with a smaller Sikorsky helicopter called Raider X that’s a candidate for a separate competition called FARA. That program also involves Bell, with its 360 Invictus, which is a more traditional helicopter that has partially detachable wings. Meanwhile, the US Air Force’s next-gen bomber, revealed last week, shares a similar name as one of these candidates: the B-21 Raider. 

In a statement following the Army’s decision on the FLRAA program announcement, Sikorsky said that they “remain confident” in their candidate and that they “will evaluate our next steps after reviewing feedback from the Army.”

Now that the contract has been awarded, Gertler notes that it could be protested. If Sikorsky and Boeing ask for a review, for example, it might slow down the process. 

It will be some time before the FLRAA is fielded and soldiers are flying around in a Bell-made tiltrotor—likely not until the next decade. Defense News noted that this new aircraft will start doing Black-Hawk-like tasks “around 2030.”

The post The Army’s Black Hawk helicopter replacement is a speedy tiltrotor aircraft appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Imagine that a soldier has a tiny computer device injected into their bloodstream that can be guided with a magnet to specific regions of their brain. With training, the soldier could then control weapon systems thousands of miles away using their thoughts alone. Embedding a similar type of computer in a soldier’s brain could suppress their fear and anxiety, allowing them to carry out combat missions more efficiently. Going one step further, a device equipped with an artificial intelligence system could directly control a soldier’s behavior by predicting what options they would choose in their current situation.

While these examples may sound like science fiction, the science to develop neurotechnologies like these is already in development. Brain-computer interfaces, or BCI, are technologies that decode and transmit brain signals to an external device to carry out a desired action. Basically, a user would only need to think about what they want to do, and a computer would do it for them.

BCIs are currently being tested in people with severe neuromuscular disorders to help them recover everyday functions like communication and mobility. For example, patients can turn on a light switch by visualizing the action and having a BCI decode their brain signals and transmit it to the switch. Likewise, patients can focus on specific letters, words or phrases on a computer screen that a BCI can move a cursor to select.

However, ethical considerations have not kept pace with the science. While ethicists have pressed for more ethical inquiry into neural modification in general, many practical questions around brain-computer interfaces have not been fully considered. For example, do the benefits of BCI outweigh the substantial risks of brain hacking, information theft and behavior control? Should BCI be used to curb or enhance specific emotions? What effect would BCIs have on the moral agency, personal identity and mental health of their users?

These questions are of great interest to us, a philosopher and neurosurgeon who study the ethics and science of current and future BCI applications. Considering the ethics of using this technology before it is implemented could prevent its potential harm. We argue that responsible use of BCI requires safeguarding people’s ability to function in a range of ways that are considered central to being human.

Expanding BCI beyond the clinic

Researchers are exploring nonmedical brain-computer interface applications in many fields, including gaming, virtual reality, artistic performance, warfare and air traffic control.

For example, Neuralink, a company co-founded by Elon Musk, is developing a brain implant for healthy people to potentially communicate wirelessly with anyone with a similar implant and computer setup.

In 2018, the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a program to develop “a safe, portable neural interface system capable of reading from and writing to multiple points in the brain at once.” Its aim is to produce nonsurgical BCI for able-bodied service members for national security applications by 2050. For example, a soldier in a special forces unit could use BCI to send and receive thoughts with a fellow soldier and unit commander, a form of direct three-way communication that would enable real-time updates and more rapid response to threats.

To our knowledge, these projects have not opened a public discussion about the ethics of these technologies. While the U.S. military acknowledges that “negative public and social perceptions will need to be overcome” to successfully implement BCI, practical ethical guidelines are needed to better evaluate proposed neurotechnologies before deploying them.

Utilitarianism

One approach to tackling the ethical questions BCI raises is utilitarian. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that strives to maximize the happiness or well-being of everyone affected by an action or policy.

Enhancing soldiers might create the greatest good by improving a nation’s warfighting abilities, protecting military assets by keeping soldiers remote, and maintaining military readiness. Utilitarian defenders of neuroenhancement argue that emergent technologies like BCI are morally equivalent to other widely accepted forms of brain enhancement. For example, stimulants like caffeine can improve the brain’s processing speed and may improve memory.

However, some worry that utilitarian approaches to BCI have moral blind spots. In contrast to medical applications designed to help patients, military applications are designed to help a nation win wars. In the process, BCI may ride roughshod over individual rights, such as the right to be mentally and emotionally healthy.

For example, soldiers operating drone weaponry in remote warfare today report higher levels of emotional distress, post-traumatic stress disorder and broken marriages compared to soldiers on the ground. Of course, soldiers routinely elect to sacrifice for the greater good. But if neuroenhancing becomes a job requirement, it could raise unique concerns about coercion.

Neurorights

Another approach to the ethics of BCI, neurorights, prioritizes certain ethical values even if doing so does not maximize overall well-being.

Proponents of neurorights champion individuals’ rights to cognitive liberty, mental privacy, mental integrity and psychological continuity. A right to cognitive liberty might bar unreasonable interference with a person’s mental state. A right to mental privacy might require ensuring a protected mental space, while a right to mental integrity would prohibit specific harms to a person’s mental states. Lastly, a right to psychological continuity might protect a person’s ability to maintain a coherent sense of themselves over time.

BCIs could interfere with neurorights in a variety of ways. For example, if a BCI tampers with how the world seems to a user, they might not be able to distinguish their own thoughts or emotions from altered versions of themselves. This may violate neurorights like mental privacy or mental integrity.

Yet soldiers already forfeit similar rights. For example, the U.S. military is allowed to restrict soldiers’ free speech and free exercise of religion in ways that are not typically applied to the general public. Would infringing neurorights be any different?

Human capabilities

A human capability approach insists that safeguarding certain human capabilities is crucial to protecting human dignity. While neurorights home in on an individual’s capacity to think, a capability view considers a broader range of what people can do and be, such as the ability to be emotionally and physically healthy, move freely from place to place, relate with others and nature, exercise the senses and imagination, feel and express emotions, play and recreate, and regulate the immediate environment.

We find a capability approach compelling because it gives a more robust picture of humanness and respect for human dignity. Drawing on this view, we have argued that proposed BCI applications must reasonably protect all of a user’s central capabilities at a minimal threshold. BCI designed to enhance capabilities beyond average human capacities would need to be deployed in ways that realize the user’s goals, not just other people’s.

For example, a bidirectional BCI that not only extracts and processes brain signals but delivers somatosensory feedback, such as sensations of pressure or temperature, back to the user would pose unreasonable risks if it disrupts a user’s ability to trust their own senses. Likewise, any technology, including BCIs, that controls a user’s movements would infringe on their dignity if it does not allow the user some ability to override it.

A limitation of a capability view is that it can be difficult to define what counts as a threshold capability. The view does not describe which new capabilities are worth pursuing. Yet, neuroenhancement could alter what is considered a standard threshold, and could eventually introduce entirely new human capabilities. Addressing this requires supplementing a capability approach with a fuller ethical analysis designed to answer these questions.

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On Friday, the public finally got a glimpse at the Air Force’s next bomber, the B-21 Raider. Northrop Grumman, which is producing it, rolled out the futuristic flying machine at a ceremony in Palmdale, California, on Dec. 2. It’s a stealthy aircraft, meaning that it’s designed to have a minimal radar signature. It’s also intended to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons. 

The new aircraft will eventually join a bomber fleet that currently consists of three different aircraft types: the old, not-stealthy B-52s, the supersonic B-1Bs, and the B-2 flying wing, which is the B-21’s most direct ancestor. 

Here’s what to know about the B-21 Raider.

A throwback to 1988

At the B-21’s unveiling, the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, referred to the new plane as “the first bomber of the 21st century.” Indeed, the bomber models it will eventually replace include the 1980s-era aircraft, the B-2 Spirit. 

As Peter Westwick recounts in his history of low-observable aircraft in the United States, Stealth, two aircraft makers competed against each other to build the B-2. Northrop prevailed against Lockheed to build the stealth bomber, while Lockheed had previously beaten Northrop when it came to creating the first stealth fighter: the F-117. Northrop scored the contract to build the B-2 in late 1981, and rolled out the craft just over seven years later, in 1988. 

The 1988 roll-out event, Westwick writes, included “no fewer than 41 Air Force generals,” and an audience of 2,000 people. “A tractor towed the plane out of the hangar, the crowd went wild, the press snapped photos, and then the tractor pushed it back out of sight,” he writes. It flew for the first time in 1989.

[Related: The B-21 bomber won’t need a drone escort, thank you very much]

Today, the B-2 represents the smallest segment of the US bomber fleet, by the numbers. “We only bought 21 of them,” says Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at Metrea Strategic Insights. “One has crashed, one is used for testing, and at any given time, several others will be in maintenance—so the reality is we have far too few stealthy bombers in our inventory, and the only way to get more was to design and build a whole new bomber.” 

The new bomber

The B-21, when it does fly, will join the old group of bombers. Those planes, such as the B-1, “are really aging, and are hard to keep in the air—they’re very expensive to fly, and they just don’t have the capabilities that we need in the bomber fleet of today and in the future,” Harrison says. The B-52s date to the early 1960s; one B-52 pilot once told Popular Science that being at the controls of that aircraft feels like “flying a museum.” If the B-52 is officially called the Stratofortress, it’s also been called the Stratosaurus. (A likely future scenario is that the bomber fleet eventually becomes just two models: B-52s, which are getting new engines, and the B-21.)

[Related: Inside a training mission with a B-52 bomber, the aircraft that will not die]

With the B-21, the view offered by the unveiling video is just of the aircraft from the front, a brief vision of a futuristic plane. “They’re not likely to reveal the really interesting stuff about the B-21,” observes Harrison. “What’s most interesting is what they can’t show us.” That includes internal as well as external attributes. 

Publicly revealing an aircraft like this represents a calculated decision to show that a capability exists without revealing too much about it. “You want to reveal things that you think will help deter Russia or China from doing things that might provoke us into war,” he says. “But, on the other hand, you don’t want to show too much, because you don’t want to make it easy for your adversary to develop plans and technologies to counter your capabilities.”

Indeed, the way that Secretary of Defense Austin characterized the B-21 on Dec. 2 walked that line. “The B-21 looks imposing, but what’s under the frame, and the space-age coatings, is even more impressive,” he said. He then spoke about its range, stealth attributes, and other characteristics in generalities. (The War Zone, a sibling website to PopSci, has deep analysis on the aircraft here and has interviewed the pilots who will likely fly it for the first time here.)

Mark Gunzinger, the director for future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, says that the B-21 rollout, which he attended, “was very carefully staged.” 

[Related: The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery]

“There were multiple lights on each side of the aircraft that were shining out into the audience,” he recalls. “The camera angles were very carefully controlled, reporters were told what they could and could not do in terms of taking photos, and of course, the aircraft was not rolled out all the way—half of it was still pretty much inside the hanger, so people could not see the tail section.” 

“The one word you heard the most during the presentation from all the speakers was ‘deterrence,'” Gunzinger adds. Part of achieving that is signaling to others that the US has “a creditable capability,” but at the same time, “there should be enough uncertainty about the specifics—performance specifics and so forth—so they do not develop effective countermeasures.”

The B-21 rollout concluded with Northrup Grumman’s CEO, Kathy Warden, who mentioned the aircraft’s next big moment. “The next time you see this plane, it’ll be in the air,” she said. “Now, let’s put this plane to bed.” 

And with that, it was pushed back into the hanger, and the doors closed in front of it. 

Watch the reveal video, below.

The post Our first look at the Air Force’s new B-21 stealth bomber was just a careful teaser appeared first on Popular Science.

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On November 29, the Department of Defense released its annual report on the military power of China. The document offers a public-facing look at how the military of the United States assesses the only country it truly considers to be a potential rival. Most strikingly, the report suggests that not only is China expanding its nuclear arsenal, but it is potentially on track to field 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035.

Nuclear warheads are hardly the only measure of a nation’s destructive power, but they’re easily the most eye-catching. China already has the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, behind Russia and the United States. 

In the report, the Pentagon estimates China’s arsenal to currently be over 400 warheads. The Federation of American Scientists, which produces an independent assessment of nuclear forces, estimated China’s arsenal at over 350 warheads as of early 2022. Getting to 1,500 warheads by 2035 would require China to produce 85 warheads a year, every year, until then.

Nuclear numbers

China’s arsenal, while large and growing, is relatively in keeping with the arsenals of India, Pakistan, the UK, and France. More specifically, India is estimated by the Federation to have 160 warheads while France has 290. (North Korea and Israel, with 20 and 90, respectively, have the fewest.) 

These arsenals are all an order of magnitude or two smaller than the 5,428 for the United States, and 5,977 for Russia. That’s a huge change in scale, with the world’s largest arsenal roughly 300 times as big as the world’s smallest. It’s also a divide largely determined by history. The United States and the Soviet Union, from which Russia inherited its nuclear arsenals, were the first two countries to develop and test atomic weapons, and they did so in the context of the Cold War, after the United States used two atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

Importantly, the arsenals of the United States and Russia remain bound by arms control treaties, most crucially the New START treaty. While the US and Russia both maintain thousands of warheads in stockpiles or reserves, they both actively deploy roughly 1,600 warheads each. That’s comparable to the total the Pentagon estimates China to be working towards.

Throughout the Cold War, arsenal increases were driven by advances in technology and changes in strategy. More warheads in more missiles, including missiles that could carry and launch multiple warheads at once, developed as an approach to guaranteeing destruction in the face of developments around sophisticated defenses, like missile interceptors or silos hardened against nuclear attack. New technologies, like the continued development by Russia, China, and the United States of hypersonic weapons, could similarly bend arsenal design to more warheads, ensuring that the missiles launched in an attack can cause sufficient harm upon arrival. 

Launching points

Warheads are the smallest unit of a nuclear arsenal. They are, after all, the part that creates the explosions. But a nuclear warhead on its own is just a threat waiting to be sent somewhere far away. What really determines the effectiveness of warheads is the means available to launch them.

In the United States, there exists what’s known as the nuclear triad: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) launched from silos, submarine-launched missiles, and weapons delivered by planes. But even that seemingly simple triad fails to capture the complexity of launch. The United States can fire Air Launched Cruise Missiles with nuclear warheads from bombers, a weapon that travels at a different trajectory than gravity bombs or ballistic missiles.

The Pentagon report outlines China’s platforms across air, sea, and land. Air is covered by China’s existing H-6N bomber class. At sea, China has six operational nuclear-armed submarines, with development expected on a next-generation nuclear-armed submarine this decade. On land, China has both road-mobile missile launcher-erector trucks, which can relocate and launch long-range missiles across the country, and growing silo fields, capable of housing ICBMs underground.

The distribution of warheads across submarines, planes, road-mobile missiles, and silos matters, because it can suggest what kind of nuclear war a country anticipates or wants to deter. Silos are especially notable because they are designed to launch in retaliation to a first strike, like submarines, but unlike submarine-launched missiles, silos are specifically placed to attract incoming attack, diverting enemy firepower away from civilians or military command as a missile sink.

Road-mobile missiles, instead, are vulnerable when found, but can be relocated to avoid strikes like submarines and bombers, only with the added feature that they are visible from space. The act of signaling—when one nation uses the position and readiness of nuclear weapons to communicate with other nations indirectly—is tricky, but one of the signs countries look for is obvious mobilization seen from satellite photography. 

Ultimately, the increase in warhead numbers suggests a growing arsenal, though it is hard to know what the end state of that arsenal will be. Producing nuclear weapons is hard, dangerous work. Wielding them, even as a deterrent, is risky as well. 

What is certain, at least, is that the days of talking about Russia and the United States as the world’s predominant nuclear powers may be trending towards an end. Cold War arms control and limitation treaties, which halted and then meaningfully reduced arsenal sizes, were done in the context of two countries agreeing together. Reducing arsenals in the 21st century will likely be a multi-party effort. 

The post A snapshot of the world’s nuclear weapons—and how the numbers are changing appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article originally published on Task & Purpose.

Master Sgt. Leah Curtin had four years of experience fixing F-15 fighter jets when she showed up to Luke Air Force Base, Arizona in 2014 to learn how to fix the much newer F-35 Lightning II. Despite her experience on the older jet, Curtin and her fellow maintainers soon realized that the F-35 is a different sort of beast.

“We were kind of trying to figure out how to maintain this brand new aircraft that is so different from legacy” aircraft, such as the F-15 or F-16, Curtin told Task & Purpose. What Curtin may not have known at the time was that the jet she was learning how to fix was not just a new platform to master — it was a new kind of maintenance that could have an impact on how the Air Force fights a possible war against China or other distant foes.

“We’ve had multiple units doing some really good things on how to take small teams and move forward,” as in closer to the fight, Lt. Gen. Michael Loh, director of the Air National Guard, told reporters in September at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Maryland. Loh pointed out Curtin, who can perform multiple maintenance specialties on the F-35.

“Now think about that. You’re only trained to be a crew chief or trained to be avionics or hydraulics or engines. She actually took the time to learn four specialties,” Loh said.

Back in 2014, Curtin was still learning the ropes of the F-35. Fighter aircraft are complicated machines, and mastering how to fix them takes time for both individual airmen and for maintenance squadrons. Curtin and her colleagues had to start building that knowledge base from the ground up.

“It was definitely a learning curve,” said the crew chief, who noted that the F-35 had its first flight in 2006 and arrived at its first base in 2011. It was practically an infant compared to the F-15s Curtin was used to, which first entered service in 1976. But the crew chief and her colleagues were ready to take on the challenge.

“With safety in mind, we were always like, ‘we’ll just figure it out,’” said Curtin, who pointed out that engineers from Lockheed Martin, the F-35 manufacturer, were also there to guide the way.

One of the biggest differences between the F-35 and older jets is that F-35 maintainers can simply hook a laptop up to the jet to test out its flight controls and other diagnostics.

“This jet actually reports faults, and it tells you what’s wrong,” said Curtin, who is currently assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard’s 158th Fighter Wing. “It’s not a perfect system. I don’t think there’s any perfect system out there. But it really can pinpoint if you have a bad sensor or bad filter or anything like that.”

One of the perks of a self-diagnosing jet is that it means maintainers do not necessarily have to get their hands dirty to find out what the problem is, which they might do with previous jets.

“Ask any crew chief who worked on an F-15 or an F-16 or an A-10, we would tell you that we don’t get as dirty as we used to on the older aircraft,” Curtin said. “When those jets broke, they broke hard, but people worked really hard to fix them.”

Part of the reason the older jets break so hard is simply that they are so old. It is similar to an old car, which might require more tender loving care and replacement parts than a car straight off the assembly line, the crew chief explained.

“Right now, we just don’t have a lot of breaks with the hydraulic system, fuel system,” or other components, Curtin said. “That could happen, you know, 20 years down the road. But at this point, these jets are already lasting pretty well.”

What makes the F-35 special is not just its young age or self-diagnosing software: it’s how all the subsystems talk with each other through software to improve the jet’s performance. That means sometimes F-35 maintenance involves simply updating the software. While the system integration improves the aircraft’s efficiency, it also blurs the lines between maintenance specialties.

“This jet is already like a flying computer and a lot of the systems already talk to each other,” Curtin said. “So why can’t our maintainers be able to do more than just what their training guideline is telling them to do?”

Curtin became one of the first airmen to participate in the F-35 nose-to-tail program, where maintainers pick up basic skills from outside their usual specialty. For example a fuels or avionics expert might learn the basics of how the F-35’s weapons systems work.

“We don’t actually load the munition, but we’re able to do troubleshooting on a [weapons] rack if a bomb did not drop or if it is having an issue communicating with the aircraft,” Curtin explained. “So I’m still an expert in my crew chief career field, but I’m kind of like a jack of all trades in everything else.”

The master sergeant particularly enjoys working on the F-35 engine, which she never had a chance to do on the F-15. Curtin explained that the new jet’s engine breaks down into five modules, each of which can be replaced if necessary. 

“That’s probably my favorite part — is working on the engines — where we can actually pull the engine modules apart and replace them,” she said. “When you put it back together and the aircraft flies you’re like ‘yeah, I put that motor together.’”

Curtin is not the only maintainer getting to know the F-35 from nose to tail. The airman said there are about 25 other maintainers picking up similar skills in Vermont. The advantage of an Air National Guard unit like Curtin’s is that air national guardsmen do not have to rotate to another duty location every few years like their active-duty counterparts. Instead, airmen can stay at one base and build up expertise on the aircraft there. That expertise could pay off in a major conflict where the military may have a limited number of seats to send deep into the Pacific or elsewhere.  

“When we are deployed somewhere and we have to go to X location for two weeks with six jets, we don’t have to bring such a huge amount of people,” Curtin explained. “We could have a weapons expert who has been trained to launch and recover a jet, or change a tire, or do some servicing.”

Figuring out how to get the job done with fewer people and aircraft is a major problem for the Air Force. Part of the impetus is funding: Air Force senior leaders do not expect the service to grow any time soon, both in terms of its enlisted force and in terms of an ongoing pilot shortage that makes trained aviators an increasingly scarce resource. The manpower shortage, plus a small fleet of aircraft that is generally older than the airmen flying and fixing them, means the service wants to pack each airman and aircraft with as much operational flexibility as possible.

Sometimes that flexibility takes the form of using B-52 bombers as transport aircraft or, vice versa, using C-17 transport aircraft as bomb trucks. But for many enlisted airmen, it takes the form of a concept called “multi-capable airmen,” which means the Air Force is encouraging airmen to become Swiss Army knives who can work outside their usual job specialty. Though some airmen have criticized the concept as being a fresh coat of paint on the phrase “do more with less,” service leaders say it will be an essential trait to help airmen survive a future fight. 

Multi-capable airmen is one tenet of a larger strategy called agile combat employment, where the Air Force wants to complicate an enemy’s targeting process by operating smaller airfields across the theater of war, in contrast to the sprawling air bases built up in the United States and in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror. 

The theory is that those large bases present juicy, all-eggs-in-one-basket targets for enemies in a future fight. Instead, the Air Force hopes to deploy smaller, more distributed airfields so that if any one airfield were destroyed, the operation as a whole could keep running. All of which is to say that the multirole maintenance airmen training at the Vermont Air National Guard are right in line with the larger Air Force’s preparations for a future fight.

“I would say one multi-capable airman could probably do the job of at least three people,” Curtin said. 

The Vermont air guardsmen tested out the concept this summer, when 35 airmen from the 158th Fighter Wing deployed from Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany to Amari Air Base, Estonia to see if they could operate with a smaller footprint than usual. The airmen completed 28 sorties and 76 flying hours, which was a success according to a press release about the exercise.

“The proof of concept was effective at showing NATO partners that the USAF was able to rapidly deploy to allied nations and perform 5th-generation fighter aircraft operations at non-USAF locations,” Tech. Sgt. Justin Oddy, 158th Operations Support Squadron airfield manager, said at the time. “The [agile combat employment] concept spans across the entire Air Force mission and when it comes to sortie generation, this small task force showed just how effective the concept is and will continue to be with allied support.”

The operation may not have been so successful without Curtin, who over the years has become a mentor for younger maintainers in her unit. Now that she is in a leadership/supervisor role, the crew chief does not get as much time working on the F-35 as she used to, but helping other airmen provides its own rewards.

“I don’t get to play with the jet as much as I would like, but being able to watch my airmen grow into who I was as an expert is awesome to see,” Curtin said “Knowing that I helped train them to be the best maintainers that they can be …  it just makes me really proud to be a crew chief in the Air Force.”

Jets are not the only things that need support: people do too. Curtin was thankful for her parents, sisters and her partner, David Cruson, a fellow maintainer with eight years of experience on the F-35 and 10 on the F-15, for their support.

“They have been my biggest cheerleaders and I couldn’t thank them enough,” she said.

The post Meet a maintainer keeping the F-35 ‘flying computer’ in top shape appeared first on Popular Science.

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On November 29, San Francisco’s government voted 8 to 3 to authorize the use of lethal weapons by police robots. The vote and authorization, which caught national attention, speaks directly to the real fears and perils regarding the use of robotics and remote-control tools domestically. The vote took place in the context of a 2021 law enacted by California mandating that police get approval from local governing authorities over what equipment it uses and how it does so. 

As the the San Francisco Chronicle reported, city Supervisor Aaron Peskin told his colleagues: “There could be an extraordinary circumstance where, in a virtually unimaginable emergency, they might want to deploy lethal force to render, in some horrific situation, somebody from being able to cause further harm,” offering a rationale for why police may want to use a robot to kill.

Police robots are not new, though the acquisition of military-grade robots was bolstered by a program that offered local police departments surplus military goods. Bomb squad robots, used heavily in Iraq and Afghanistan to relocate and safely dispose of roadside bombs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, were offered to police following the drawdowns of US forces from those countries in the 2010s. 

Many of the tools that ultimately end up in police hands first see their debut in military contexts, especially in counter-insurgency or irregular warfare. Rubber bullets, a now-ubiquitous less-lethal police weapon, have their origin in the wooden bullets of British Hong Kong and the rubber bullets of British forces in Northern Ireland. MRAPS, the massive heavy armored vehicles hastily produced to protect soldiers from bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, have also seen a second post-war life in police forces.

Bomb squad robots are remarkable, in part, because they are a tool for which the military and police applications are the same. A robot with a gripper and a camera, remotely controlled over a long tether, can inspect a suspicious package, sparing a human life in the event of detonation. Police and military bomb squads even train on the robots together, sharing techniques for particularly tricky cases. 

San Francisco’s government voted to allow police, with explicit authorization from “one of two high-ranking SFPD leaders” to authorize the lethal use of an armed robot, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle also notes that “the department said it has no plans to outfit robots with a gun,” instead leaving the killing to explosives mounted on robots.

Past precedent

There is relevant history here: In the early hours of July 8, 2016, police in Dallas outfitted an explosive to a Remotec Andros Mark V-A1 and used it to kill an armed suspect. The night of July 7, the suspected shooter had fired on seven police officers, killing five. Dallas police surrounded the suspect and exchanged gunfire during a five-hour standoff in a parking garage. The Dallas Police Department had operated this particular Remotec Andros bomb squad robot since 2008. 

On that night in July, the police attached a bomb to the robot’s manipulator arm. Operated by remote control, the robot’s bomb killed the suspect, while the lifeless robot made it through the encounter with only a damaged manipulator arm. The robot gripper arms are designed to transport and relocate found explosives to a place where they can be safely detonated, sometimes with charges placed by the robot.

While Dallas was a groundbreaking use of remote-control explosives, it fit into a larger pattern of police using human-set explosives, most infamously the 1985 MOVE bombing by Philadelphia Police, when a helicopter delivered two bombs onto a rowhouse and burned it down, as well as 65 other houses. 

Flash bang grenades are a less-lethal weapon used by police and militaries, creating a bright light and loud sound as a way to incapacitate a person before police officers enter a building. These weapons, which are still explosive, can cause injury on contact with skin, and have set fires, including one that burned a home and killed a teenager in Albuquerque, New Mexico in July 2022.

The authorization to arm robots adds one more category of lethal tools to an institution already permitted to do violence on behalf of the state. 

Remote possibilities

Bomb squad robots, which come in a range of models and can costs into the six figures, are a specialized piece of equipment. They are often tethered, with communications and controls running down a large wire to humans, ensuring that the robot can be operated despite interference in wireless signals. One of the ways these robots are used is to facilitate negotiations, with a microphone and speaker allowing police to safely talk to a cornered suspect. In 2015, California Highway Patrol used a bomb squad robot to deliver pizza to a knife-armed man standing over a highway overpass, convincing the man to come down. 

The possibility that these robots could instead be used to kill, as one was in 2016, makes it harder for the robots to be used for non-violent resolution of crises with armed people. In the Supervisors’ hearing, references were made to both the 2017 Mandalay Bay shooting in Las Vegas and the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, though each is a problem at best tangentially related to armed robots. In Las Vegas, the shooter was immediately encountered by an armed guard, and when police arrived they were able to breach rooms with explosives they carried. In Uvalde, the use of explosives delivered by robot would only have endangered children, who were already waiting for the excruciatingly and fatally long police response to the shooter.

By allowing police to turn a specialized robot into a weapon, San Francisco is solving for a problem that does not meaningfully exist, and is making a genuinely non-lethal tool into a threat. It also sets a precedent for the arming of other machines, like inexpensive quadcopter drones, increasing the distance between police and suspects without leading to arrests or defused situations. 

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The past year has been marked by serious challenges, from the ongoing climate emergency, a subsequent increase in extreme forest fire frequency, and the devastating war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. But we’ve also seen true innovation in the field of crisis response. More exact location systems will help emergency services find people in trouble quicker. Better respirator technology is rolling out, designed to help wildland firefighters breathe a little easier. And fire trucks are finally starting to go electric. This year’s best emergency services and defense innovations offer paths out of tight spots, aiming to create a safer future—or at least a better way to handle its myriad disasters.

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Find it here.

Grand Award Winner 

Wildland Firefighter Respirator by TDA Research: A lightweight, field-rechargeable respirator for forest firefighters

TDA

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Forest fire fighters need a lightweight wearable respirator to protect them from inhaling smoke. The Wildland Firefighter Respirator, by TDA Research, uses a hip-mounted pump to pull air through a HEPA filter, channeling it to a secure but loose-fitting half-mask (a helpful feature for people who haven’t had the chance to shave while in the field). A sensor in the system detects air flow direction, letting the pump only blow at full strength when the user inhales. Importantly, the device weighs just 2.3 pounds, which is only about 10 percent the weight of a typical urban firefighting Self Contained Breathing Apparatus. About the size of a 1-liter water bottle, the respirator is powered by a lithium-ion battery pack. To recharge in the field or away from a generator, that pack can also draw power from 6 AA batteries. Bonus: Even though it was designed for safety professionals, the device could also become civilian protective gear in fire season.

Connect AED by Avive: Connecting defibrillators to those in need, faster

Avive

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Avive’s Connect AED (Automated External Defibrillator) is designed to be a life-saving device that’s also smart. The devices can automatically do daily maintenance checks to ensure they can perform as needed, thanks to WiFi, cellular, bluetooth, and GPS. Plus, with that connectivity, 911 operators could alert nearby Connect AED holders to respond to a called-in cardiac arrest, saving time and possibly someone’s life. Once a person has been defibrillated, Connect’s connectivity also lets emergency room doctors see data the device collected, such as the patient’s heart rhythm, as well as the device’s shock history, complete with timestamps. The Connect AED also has a backpack-like form factor and touch screen for intuitive use.

Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations by Ames Research Center: Letting drone pilots clear skies for aerial emergency vehicles 

Ames Research Center

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The sky above a forest fire can be a dangerous, crowded place, and that was before forest fire fighters added drones joined the mix. Developed by NASA, the Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations project (STEReO) is developing tools for managing the complicated airspace above an emergency. In the spring of 2022, a NASA team field-tested a STEReO’s suitcase-sized prototype device, called the UASP-Kit, to monitor drones safely in the open airspace around prescribed burns. By tracking transponders on crewed aircraft, the UASP-Kit can play a sound through tablet speakers, alerting drone operators when helicopters and planes fly close to where they are operating. That hopefully lets drone pilots get their equipment to safety without risking aerial collision.

Locate Before Route by AT&T: Pinpointing the emergency 

AT&T

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When a person in an emergency calls 911 for help, that call is routed, based on its location, to the closest 911 operator. For cell phones, that meant matching the call to the nearest tower and hoping it sent the call to dispatch in the right county. But in May 2022, AT&T announced the nationwide rollout of a better system. Leaning on the improved location services on iOS and Android phones, AT&T’s Locate Before Route feature can pinpoint the location of the emergency call within 50 meters, sometimes even as precisely as 15 meters. This better location information should allow the call to be routed to the best dispatch center, ideally helping responders arrive faster. That data can only be used for 911 purposes, and helps first responders get where they’re needed quickly, nationwide.

GridStar Flow by Lockheed Martin: Helping to power defense with renewable energy

Lockheed Martin

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The US military is a massive consumer of fossil fuels, but if it wants to use more renewable energy, it needs a way to store that electricity to power vital functions. GridStar Flow, developed by Lockheed Martin for the US Army, is a massive battery complex that takes advantage of the space of Colorado’s Fort Carson to go big. It will store up to 10 megawatt-hours of juice, thanks to tanks of charged electrolytes and other equipment. Construction at Fort Carson broke ground on November 3, but the company has already tested out a smaller flow battery in Andover, Massachusetts. Using electrolytes that can be derived from commodity chemicals, GridStar Flow offers a power storage and release system that can help smooth the energy flow from renewable sources.

Volterra Electric Firetruck by Pierce: A more sustainable, quieter fire truck

Pierce

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Fire trucks are big, powerful vehicles, but they run on diesel, a polluting fossil fuel. The Pierce Volterra truck can deliver all that power on an electric charge, and it can also run on diesel fuel if need be. Already in use with the Madison, Wisconsin fire department, but with contracts to expand to Portland, Oregon and Gilbert, Arizona underway this year, the Volterra has enough battery power for a full day as an electric vehicle. The electric power helps complement a transition to renewable energy, but it also comes with immediate benefit to the firefighters: the vehicle doesn’t spew exhaust into the station. The quiet of the electric engine also lets firefighters coordinate better on the drive, and can help cries for help be heard when the responders arrive on site.

Vampire Drone by L3Harris: Taking down drones from kilometers away

L3Harris

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Drones are increasingly a part of modern battles, seen in wars across the globe but especially with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with both countries using a range of uncrewed aircraft to scout and fight. In August 2022, the Department of Defense announced it would send a new tool to aid Ukrainian forces as a way to counter Russian drones. Made by L3Harris, the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) system is a rocket launcher and sensor kit that can be mounted to a range of vehicles, providing a means to damage and destroy drones at a range of at least three miles. The laser-guided rockets, directed by a human operator, explode with a proximity fuse, making near misses into effective takedowns. 

Emergency SOS via satellite by Apple: Locating lost hikers with satellites

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For hikers lost in remote parts of the United States and Canada, calling for help means hoping for cell phone coverage, or waiting for a serendipitous rescue. But Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite, announced September 2022, will let people with an iPhone 14 transmit emergency messages via satellite, provided they can’t first establish a cellular connection. Texters will have a tap-through menu to create an information-dense but data-light report, and provided trees or mountains don’t block the signal, they can transmit crucial information, like what kind of injuries someone has sustained. With a clear view of the sky and fifteen seconds, a cry for help can reach space and then, even better, rescuers on Earth.

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The entertainment category for Best of What’s New used to primarily contain devices meant for consuming content. But that’s changed. While our Grand Award Winner goes to a big-budget movie this year, you’ll find an increasing number of devices meant for actually making content. Self-flying drones, all-encompassing camera rigs, and even high-end monitors give people the opportunity to make their own content rather than simply consuming it. Other items on this list—primarily the earbuds—provide a reminder that content is a constant part of our lives. We’ve changed the content we consume for entertainment, but more than that, we’ve changed the way we interact with it. And these gadgets help shape that relationship.

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Find it here.

Grand Award Winner

Top Gun: Maverick by Skydance Media/Paramount: A high-speed upgrade to practical filmmaking

Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films

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We’re all too used to watching computer-generated action sequences in movies. When Hulk smashes up the scene or aliens attack a city, we know it’s fake. The sequel to Top Gun, which arrived in May—36 years after the original—did it differently. Actors trained in real aircraft to prepare to climb into Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets, and when they did, they experienced crushing G forces as the jets maneuvered at speeds that ranged from about 250 mph to more than 400. To film it, the studio turned to custom cameras carefully mounted within the cockpits, and other aircraft like the L-39 CineJet shot while airborne, too. That approach, plus scenes shot on both the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carriers, all add up to give the film a degree of excitement and verisimilitude that’s rare. While the film is still a product of Hollywood that made some use of CGI, and doubles as a recruiting vehicle for the Navy, we still salute its commitment to capturing the thrill and speed of Naval aviation.

Freestyle Projector by Samsung: An advanced projector that handles its own setup process

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Samsung’s Freestyle fixes one of our biggest complaints with projectors: that moving them to find the perfect angle is a pain. The floating, tube-shaped all-in-one projector is attached to its frame on a pair of hinges, which lets it be tilted up or down with very little force. The Freestyle can be twisted a full 180 degrees, allowing it to be pointed forward for a traditional viewing experience, or vertically to play games on your ceiling. You can use your phone to enable “smart calibration,” which adjusts its brightness and color settings based on the color of your walls and the room’s lighting conditions. The Freestyle’s fun form factor and smart settings are complemented by impressive hardware features, like native 1080p resolution, stereo speakers, and an HDMI port for connecting external devices. There’s also a USB-C port in case you’d like to connect the Freestyle to a high-capacity power bank to take it on the go.

Frame TV Anti-Glare Matte Display by Samsung: A 4K TV that isn’t afraid of a bright room

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A couple of years ago, Samsung imagined a creative way to make use of a large, borderless, high-resolution screen when you’re not using it to watch videos or play games: displaying famous artwork on your wall. The problem was the TV’s LCD panel, which reflected light and made older paintings look like they were displayed on a screen rather than a canvas. That changes with the second-generation Frame, which has an anti-reflective matte display. Despite the change in technologies, Samsung says you’ll still be able to see a billion colors on the screen, and that it’ll continue to automatically adjust its color balance based on your brightness preferences. If you can’t justify the cost of an original Rembrandt, Samsung’s new Frame will be the next best thing.

Linkbuds by Sony: Earbuds that mix your audio with the real world

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Sony created its LinkBuds to be the antithesis of noise-canceling headphones. They let outside sound in so you never need to take them out. The buds have a hard-shelled body, which means they won’t create a tight seal around your ear, and boast a circular cutout, which Sony calls an open ring. The ring gives LinkBuds their unique look, and is also where the earbuds’ driver is located. Sound is fed from the ring through the bud into your ear, along with some noise from the outside world. You’ll hear cars honking, airplane engines, and people on the street. But if you’re a runner who wants to hear a vehicle approach, this is a feature, not a bug.

QC II earbuds by Bose: Active noise cancellation that works across every frequency

Bose

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Typical noise-canceling headphones have trouble blocking out sound in the middle frequencies between roughly 120Hz and 400Hz. That allows sounds like voices to occasionally get through. Bose has totally reconfigured its noise-canceling algorithm and hardware setup in order to fill in that ANC gap without creating uncomfortable ear pressure or compromising audio quality. The company adjusted its noise cancellation and tuning to a user’s body by measuring the way a chime reflects off the inside of your ears back to the earbuds’ microphones. The attention to detail paid off, as outside noises are greatly reduced even if you’re not listening to music. Bose offers three listening modes by default, but you can create custom ones using the company’s app if you’d like to crank active noise cancellation all the way up, or mellow it out.

Ronin 4D by DJI: An all-encompassing cinema rig and steadicam for creators on a budget

DJI

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DJI’s Ronin 4D rig looks like a futuristic weapon pulled from a Star Wars flick. In reality, it’s a full-featured cinema rig that combines a number of essential movie-making tools into one compact and extremely stable camera rig. The modular system includes DJI’s flagship Zenmuse camera, which can capture 6K raw video at up to 60 fps or 4K video at up to 120 fps. It also boasts a full-frame sensor and interchangeable camera mounts. The whole imaging rig sits on a 4-axis gimbal that stabilizes footage so convincingly that it sometimes looks like it was shot on a dolly or a crane. Because the whole system is modular, you can swap parts like monitors, storage devices, batteries, and audio gear on the fly and customize it for your shooting needs.

Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED Gaming Monitor by Dell: The first gaming monitor with a new brighter version of OLED tech

Dell

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OLED monitors typically provide unmatched contrast, image quality, and color reproduction, but they lack brightness. Quantum dot (or QLED) displays crank up the illumination, but lose some of the overall image impact found on an OLED. Enter QD-OLED. Like a typical OLED display, each pixel provides its own backlight. But the addition of quantum dots adds even more illumination, giving it a total peak brightness of 1,000 lumens while maintaining the certified HDR black levels to create ridiculous levels of contrast. And with its 175Hz native refresh rate, and super-fast 0.1-second response time, you can’t blame this pro-grade gaming monitor if you’re always getting eliminated mid-game.

Arctis Nova Pro Headset for Xbox by SteelSeries: A gaming headset that works across all of your machines

SteelSeries

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Gaming headsets typically require players to pick a platform for compatibility when you buy them. Some work with a console as well as a PC, but SteelSeries has given its Arctis Nova Pro headset the hardware it needs to work with Xbox, PS5, PC, and even the Nintendo Switch—all at the press of a button. Its secret lies in the GameDAC (short for digital audio converter), which connects to multiple systems and pumps out high-res certified sound with 360-degree spatial audio from whatever source you choose. Plush ear cups and a flexible suspension band ensure comfort, even during long, multi-platform gaming sessions.

Skydio 2+ drone by Skydio: A drone that follows commands or flies itself

Skydio

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Crashing a drone is bad for your footage—and your budget. But this high-end flying machine avoids obstacles with an advanced system that adjusts more than 500 times per second to prevent disaster. A fish-eye lens allows the drone to see 360 degrees around the craft. A dual-core Nvidia chipset generates a 3D-world model with more than 1 million data points per second to identify and avoid anything that might get in its way. With all those smarts, creatives can simply tell the drone to track them or program complex flight paths and the Skydio2+ will capture 4K video at 60 fps on its own. The drone also comes with more than 18 predetermined paths and programs that can make even basic action look worthy of a Mountain Dew commercial.

Dione soundbar by Devialet: True surround sound on a stick

Devialet

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Most soundbars allow buyers a chance to expand their audio system and add satellite speakers or at least a subwoofer. The Dione is different. It’s a totally stand-alone system that relies on nine 41mm drivers and eight built-in subwoofers in order to fulfill the entire sonic range you need to enjoy everything from high-pitched tire squeals to rumbling explosions. Thanks to its Dolby Atmos integration, it mimics a true 5.1.2 surround sound system. The sphere in the center of the bar contains one of the 41mm drivers; it rotates to allow the soundbar to achieve its spatial audio ambitions, whether it’s sitting on a TV stand or mounted somewhere around the television. Devialet’s Speaker Active Matching technology watches over the entire array to make sure none of the individual drivers surpass their optimal operating frequencies, and it even has a dynamic EQ mode that brings up dialog—so you can finally turn off the closed captioning and still understand what the actors are saying.

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In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that wasn’t even the most important event to materialize in space this year—more on the James Webb Space Telescope in a moment. Back on Earth, innovation also reached new heights in the aviation industry, as a unique electric airplane took off, as did a Black Hawk helicopter that can fly itself. 

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here.

Innovation of the Year

The James Webb Space Telescope by NASA: A game-changing new instrument to see the cosmos 

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Once a generation, an astronomical tool arrives that surpasses everything that came before it. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is just such a creation. After more than two decades and $9.7 billion in the making, JWST launched on December 25, 2021. Since February of this year, when it first started imaging—employing a mirror and aperture nearly three times larger in radius than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope—JWST’s vibrant images have captured the attention of the world.

The JWST can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can peek at exoplanets, seeing them directly where astronomers would have once had to reconstruct meager traces of their existence. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter, something Hubble could only glimpse.

While Hubble circles in low Earth orbit, JWST instead sits hundreds of thousands of miles farther away, in Earth’s shadow. It will never see sunlight. There, protected even further by a multi-layer sunshield thinner than a human fingernail, the telescope chills at -370 degrees F, where JWST’s infrared sight works best. Its home is a fascinating location called L2, one of several points where the sun and Earth’s gravities balance each other out. 

All this might just be JWST’s prologue. Since the telescope used less fuel than initially anticipated when reaching its perch, the instrument might have enough to last well past its anticipated 10-year-long window. We can’t wait to see what else it dazzles us with.

Parallel Reality by Delta: A screen customized for you

Delta

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You’ve probably found yourself running through an airport at some point, squinting up at a screen filled with rows of flight information. A futuristic new offering from Delta and a startup called Misapplied Sciences aims to change that. At Detroit Metro Airport, an installation can show travelers customized information for their flight. A scan of your boarding pass in McNamara Terminal is one way to tell the system who you are. Then, when you look at the overhead screen, you see that it displays only personalized data about your journey, like which gate you need to find. The tech behind the system works because the pixels in the display itself can shine in one of 18,000 directions, meaning many different people can see distinct information while looking at the same screen at the same time. 

Electronic bag tags by Alaska Airlines: The last tag you’ll need (for one airline)

Alaska Airlines

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Believe it or not, some travelers do still check bags, and a new offering from this Seattle-based airline aims to make that process easier. Flyers who can get an electronic bag tag from Alaska Airlines (at first, 2,500 members of their frequent flier plan will get them, and in 2023 they’ll be available to buy) can use their mobile phone to create the appropriate luggage tag on this device’s e-ink display while at home, up to 24 hours before a flight. The 5-inch-long tag itself gets the power it needs to generate the information on the screen from your phone, thanks to an NFC connection. After the traveler has done this step at home, they just need to drop the tagged bag off in the right place at the airport, avoiding the line to get a tag. 

Alice by Eviation: A totally electric commuter airplane 

Eviation

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The aviation industry is a major producer of carbon emissions. One way to try to solve that problem is to run aircraft on electric power, utilizing them just for short hops. That’s what Eviation aims to do with a plane called Alice: 8,000 pounds of batteries in the belly of this commuter aircraft give its two motors the power it needs to fly. In fact, it made its first flight in September, a scant but successful eight minutes in the air. Someday, as battery tech improves, the company hopes that it can carry nine passengers for distances of 200 miles or so. 

OPV Black Hawk by Sikorsky: A military helicopter that flies itself 

Sikorsky

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Two pilots sit up front at the controls of the Army’s Black Hawk helicopters, but what if that number could be zero for missions that are especially hazardous? That’s exactly what a modified UH-60 helicopter can do, a product of a DARPA program called ALIAS, which stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. The self-flying whirlybird made its first flights with zero occupants on board in February, and in October, it took flight again, even carrying a 2,600-pound load beneath it. The technology comes from helicopter-maker Sikorsky, and allows the modified UH-60 to be flown by two pilots, one pilot, or zero. The idea is that this type of autonomy can help in several ways: to assist the one or two humans at the controls, or as a way for an uninhabited helicopter to execute tasks like flying somewhere dangerous to deliver supplies without putting any people on board at risk. 

Detect and Avoid by Zipline: Drones that can listen for in-flight obstacles

Zipline

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As drones and other small aircraft continue to fill the skies, all parties involved have an interest in avoiding collisions. But figuring out the best way for a drone to detect potential obstacles isn’t an easy problem to solve, especially since there are no pilots on board to keep their eyes out and weight is at a premium. Drone delivery company Zipline has turned to using sound, not sight, to solve this conundrum. Eight microphones on the drone’s wing listen for traffic like an approaching small plane, and can preemptively change the UAV’s route to get out of the way before it arrives. An onboard GPU and AI help with the task, too. While the company is still waiting for regulatory approval to totally switch the system on, the technique represents a solid approach to an important issue.

DART by NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory: Smashing into an asteroid, for good 

NASA

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Earthlings who look at the sky in fear that a space rock might tumble down and devastate our world can now breathe a sigh of relief. On September 26, a 1,100-pound spacecraft streaked into a roughly 525-foot-diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at over 14,000 mph. NASA confirmed on October 11 that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)’s impact altered Dimorphos’s orbit around its companion asteroid, Didymos, even more than anticipated. Thanks to DART, humans have redirected an asteroid for the first time. The dramatic experiment gives astronomers hope that perhaps we could do it again to avert an apocalypse.

CAPSTONE by Advanced Space: A small vessel on a big journey

Advanced Space

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Some lunar craft fill up whole rooms. On the other hand, there’s CAPSTONE, a satellite that can fit on a desk. Despite control issues, CAPSTONE—which launched on June 28—triumphantly entered lunar orbit on November 13. This small traveler is a CubeSat, an affordable design of mini-satellite that’s helped make space accessible to universities, small companies, and countries without major space programs. Hundreds of CubeSats now populate the Earth’s orbit, and although some have hitched rides to Mars, none have made the trip to the moon under their own power—until CAPSTONE. More low-cost lunar flights, its creators hope, may follow.

The LSST Camera by SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory: A 3,200-megapixel camera

SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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Very soon, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the high desert of Northern Chile will provide astronomers with what will be nearly a live-feed view of the southern hemisphere’s sky. To do that, it will rely on the world’s largest camera—with a lens 5 feet across and matching shutters, it will be capable of taking images that are an astounding 3,200 megapixels. The camera’s crafters are currently placing the finishing touches on it, but their impressive engineering feats aren’t done yet: In May 2023, the camera will fly down to Chile in a Boeing 747, before traveling by truck to its final destination.

The Event Horizon Telescope by the EHT Collaboration: Seeing the black hole in the Milky Way’s center

ESO

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Just a few decades ago, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart, was a hazy concept. Now, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), we have a blurry image of it—or, since a black hole doesn’t let out light, of its surrounding accretion disc. The EHT is actually a global network of radio telescopes stretching from Germany to Hawaii, and from Chile to the South Pole. EHT released the image in May, following years of painstaking reconstruction by over 300 scientists, who learned much about the black hole’s inner workings in the process. This is EHT’s second black hole image, following its 2019 portrait of a behemoth in the galaxy M87.

Starliner by Boeing: A new way of getting to the ISS 

Boeing

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After years of budget issues, technical delays, and testing failures, Boeing’s much-awaited Starliner crew capsule finally took to the skies and made it to its destination. An uncrewed test launch in May successfully departed Florida, docked at the International Space Station (ISS), and landed back on Earth. Now, Boeing and NASA are preparing for Starliner’s first crewed test, set to launch sometime in 2023. When that happens, Starliner will take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and NASA will have more than one option to get astronauts into orbit. There are a few differences between the two: Where Crew Dragon splashes down in the sea, Starliner touches down on land, making it easier to recover. And, where Crew Dragon was designed to launch on SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets, Starliner is more flexible. 

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BACK IN 2008, the Navy had a problem with an aging version of its F/A-18 fighter jet: A crack had appeared on a plane’s wing, and officials thought the issue might not be isolated to this one aircraft. The military branch set out to inspect hundreds of its pricey jets for this same structural issue.

Nobody wants a fracture in the wing of their aircraft. Or, you know, anywhere on an aircraft. Catching and diagnosing issues like these is one idea motivating a new company called RadiantNano. Co-founders Matthew Alpert and Leslie Dewan want to make radiographic imaging—using radiation to make pictures—easier, cheaper, and literally more flexible. They’ve created a technology that uses a novel material called Novskite to do just that—it could basically take an X-ray of the aforementioned aircraft and catch such structural issues. What’s more, the material can also identify the presence of ionizing radiation (that’s the scary kind of radiation) and reveal the characteristics of its source.

“Radiation is this very powerful and exceptionally underutilized tool for seeing the world around us,” says Dewan. The idea is that through the invisible, more of the world becomes knowable.

The Department of Defense is interested in that vision. Earlier this year, RadiantNano was selected to take part in the National Security Innovation Network’s (NSIN) Propel program—which gives early-stage companies access to DOD bigwigs and can help them tweak their technology toward military applications. 

There’s a spectrum of reasons that the military might be interested in getting an image of the inside of, say, a shipping container. Or knowing if radiation is present, and if so, what’s causing it. Technology like RadiantNano’s could be useful not just for checking jet airframes for cracks, but trucks for dirty bombs. At the same time, you may encounter their innovation at a future doctor’s visit if you fall off your roller skates. RadiantNano is, in other words, trying to give soldiers and spies what they want—while providing something useful to civilians too. 

A scintillating beginning 

RadiantNano got its start partly because its founders wanted to boost not just image-making but also radiation detection and identification—improving a set of tools that has existed for more than a century. You’re probably familiar with the old click-click-click of Geiger counters. But those kinds of devices aren’t the only game in town anymore. One of several options for a radiation-hunter is a type of material called a scintillator. Scintillators alert humans to energetic emissions in a different way: They emit their own light, which photodetectors inside the device then pick up and translate into information. The characteristics of that light—its brightness, the particular wavelengths it’s pumping out—reveal what type, and what level, of radiation is lurking around. That’s how Novskite works, lighting up with visible light when X-rays hit it. But unlike some other scintillators, the novel material is sensitive, high-resolution, and relatively inexpensive. It also doesn’t rely on rare-Earth minerals that often come from countries the DOD doesn’t want to deal with (such as China) and which, like toilet paper, can also be subject to supply chain disruptions. 

In detector form, an approach that RadiantNano initially pursued, the company’s tech works like scintillation detectors of old, translating that light into information internally. But the material can also be molded into a thin, flexible sheet—a high-tech Fruit Roll-Up—that makes it easy to deploy. In that form, the material is useful for imaging, and can act like X-ray film. 

Here’s how it works: Couple the scintillator with an array of photodiodes and shine X-rays at it. It will absorb those and re-emit visible light, which the photodiodes will then pick up and turn into a digital image. If you put an object between the X-ray source and the scintillator, the digital image will show an X-ray-vision picture of that object. Because RadiantNano’s stuff is more sensitive than the stuff your physician currently has, you’d get a lower dosage of X-rays than is currently required to diagnose your broken ankle. 

In that way, it could also take radiographic images of, say, vehicles crossing the border into the US. When the company began, they were also interested in using the detector form of the scintillator to pick up and identify sources of radiation that might be wheeling their way into the country.

That’s big business for the US government. Just ask scientist Richard Kouzes, an emeritus researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He has been in the hazardous detection industry for around half a century, working both on basic science and on national security applications. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory heads up the deployment of radiation detectors at US borders on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, and Kouzes was initially the scientist in charge of specifying the requirements for such devices at all crossings. “If you drive across the Canadian border or the Mexican border, you may see these big yellow pillars,” he says. Those are the fruits of the program he worked on, meant to make sure people aren’t smuggling nuclear or radiological material in or out.

Such devices have come a ways since the field started around 130 years ago, when Henri Becquerel first discovered that radiation existed. Geiger counters clicked onto the scene in the early 1900s. But detectors haven’t necessarily improved as much over the years as you’d think. “It’s been what I would consider a relatively slow evolution of technology,” says Kouzes.

Of course, better materials have come along, and so have better electronics, making instruments of various types more sensitive, their results more detailed, and their designs more flexible. “There’s always a push to do better,” says Kouzes.

Still, he continues, “a lot of the detectors that are used today still have roots in some of those old detection technologies.” And there’s room—and money—for improvement, at least in the national-security sector, where questions and concerns abound.

Worst-case scenarios go like this: Maybe someone’s schlepping cobalt-60 over the Canadian border. Maybe a shipping container has surprise cargo, like a dirty bomb. 

Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency has to inspect and monitor nuclear power plants and other reactors, along with stockpiles of substances like plutonium, to make sure everybody has the amounts and types of dangerous material they’re supposed to, and not a secret weapons program. 

The solar sell 

Some of those thorny problems were compelling to the company as it got its start. But Alpert, co-founder and chief technology officer at RadiantNano, and a chemical engineer by training, didn’t intend to get into the radiation detection business at all. Instead, he started out in the radiation conversion business—changing the sun’s rays into electrical energy. 

As a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the 2010s, he was toiling away on next-generation solar cells, trying to make them more usable and efficient. Alpert had helped invent a new material that could potentially accomplish both those goals. It was a modified version of perovskite, the name for a crystal structured like a diamond embedded in a cube with a core. Perovskite crystals, of various compositions, are a favorite replacement for silicon in solar cells. But Alpert’s was different, because he’d added nanoparticles to the regular recipe, a sprinkling he hoped would up its game. The configuration and composition that the company now uses is called Novskite, a name Alpert gave the material.

It was an interesting idea, but there were obstacles to commercialization. And so, like any good soon-to-be-startup-founder, he pivoted. “Turns out that a lot of the things that make a material good for solar cells actually make it good for radiation detection as well,” he says. He became part of a startup accelerator, joined up with Dewan, and was on the way to seeing the world differently.

At the beginning, the team wasn’t overly familiar with why the military might be interested in their scintillator. Their technology—and all technology the National Security Innovation Network supports—is called “dual-use,” meaning it has a use for regular civilians and a use for the military. It was only when a colleague at the Department of Homeland Security got in touch that one of Novskite’s potential defense uses came into focus. The contact said that he needed a new radiation detector for border security, as Alpert recalls, and wanted to know if they could help. 

“And it turns out, we figured out we could,” says Alpert.

Current border detectors work a little like metal detectors, he continues. You go through them, and if they detect radiation, they say so. But they give a yes-or-no, binary answer. But not every “yes” means “danger.” Bricks, concrete, and bananas also blast radiation out. So do granite countertops. But the information coming out of RadiantNano’s scintillation device would both detect radiation and show the unique fingerprint of different emissive substances, so officials could tell the difference between kitty litter and uranium.

That’s the “detector” version of RadiantNano’s toolset, and part of the company’s original vision. 

“Our material has a lot of potential benefits when being used for detection,” says Dewan. “But as we developed it, we realized that we’re also well-suited to radiographic imaging, which is a much larger market. The majority of our work now focuses on imaging applications.”

That’s perhaps still useful at the border, and in defense more broadly. A radiographic image of the inside of a truck driving into, say, Buffalo could provide insights into its cargo. An X-ray shot of a ship, on the other hand, could show a crack in the hull before it gets too big and makes the ship sink. On the flip side, a RadiantNano imager could scan you to see if your bones have cracks. 

Looking for defensive angles

The National Security Innovation Network was into the company and its tech’s potential applications, selecting RadiantNano as one of 16 startups in its Propel cohort this year, and setting them up for guidance and mentorship. 

NSIN itself started up in 2016, and it exists today as a component of the Defense Innovation Unit, and also under deputy managing director Justin Dunnicliff. Its goal is to help small companies navigate defense contracting. “There’s really not a clear pathway,” Dunnicliff says.

That’s because the problems the DOD needs to solve can be opaque—invisible, perhaps—if you are not yourself the DOD. “Everything is classified, even if it’s not really a classified problem,” Dunnicliff says. “The DOD is huge and labyrinthine. How do you even find the right office to talk to?”

Programs like Propel help bond startups to the right offices, and break the ice between government offices and the small companies’ coworking spaces and academic buildings.

To do that at all, though, NSIN first has to find the innovators it desires. “We need to be present in the communities that we want to engage with,” Dunnicliff says—namely, colleges that spit out people like Alpert, who spit out technology companies. “We would embed people at universities,” Dunnicliff says. He himself hunkered down at the University of Washington for a while, learning about what researchers were up to, and brainstorming how that work might be slanted to help the DOD.

That’s not always something academics are aware is even a possibility. “Everyone in DC knows about working for the Department Defense, the national security sector,” he says. “But you get to the West Coast, and it’s not as readily apparent for them, what the opportunities are, whether it’s even a thing that they want to do.”

A lot of people are interested in exploring it, Dunnicliff says, because it’s a new and novel set of problems, and scientists love that stuff (the fact that the DOD gets almost uncountably more money than science agencies probably doesn’t hurt either). But some researchers, of course, beg off. “There are obviously people who don’t want to do work with the DOD, and that’s fine,” Dunnicliff says.

RadiantNano’s founders wanted to work on this national-security side, and NSIN’s Propel is smoothing that path. The co-founders recently attended a demo day, where they showed off their tech and pitched potential funders, met startup accelerators, and hung out with DOD hotshots. They also have regular meetings with Propel partners to figure out how to get inside the proverbial and literal Pentagon. “Having a guide through that process—this, at times sometimes, byzantine process was really, really helpful for us,” says Dewan, RadiantNano’s co-founder and CEO. 

An X-ray image, in a way, of how things work on the inside.

Read more PopSci+ stories.

The post An inside look at the radiation-sensing material that’s on the Pentagon’s radar appeared first on Popular Science.

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On a cloudy Christmas morning last year, a rocket carrying the most powerful space telescope ever built blasted off from a launchpad in French Guiana. After reaching its destination in space about a month later, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending back sparkling presents to humanity—jaw-dropping images that are revealing our universe in stunning new ways.

Every year since 1988, Popular Science has highlighted the innovations that make living on Earth even a tiny bit better. And this year—our 35th—has been remarkable, thanks to the successful deployment of the JWST, which earned our highest honor as the Innovation of the Year. But it’s just one item out of the 100 stellar technological accomplishments our editors have selected to recognize. 

The list below represents months of research, testing, discussion, and debate. It celebrates exciting inventions that are improving our lives in ways both big and small. These technologies and discoveries are teaching us about the nature of the universe and treating diseases, but they’re also giving us better ways of entertaining and expressing ourselves. 

With 10 categories spanning from aerospace to sports and outdoors, the list is a doozy. We’ve got Naval fighter jets on the big screen and TikTok filters on your phone. There’s gear to help you explore the great outdoors, and devices to help you improve your health and home. We’ve got gadgets galore, a very long suspension bridge, and an EV with a range of 747 miles. So buckle up, and explore the winners below. 

• Aerospace
• Engineering
• Gadgets
• Health
• Entertainment
• Personal Care
• Emergency Services and Defense
• Automotive
• Sports and Outdoors
• Home

Aerospace

In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that wasn’t even the most important event to materialize in space this year—more on the JWST in a moment. Back on Earth, innovation also reached new heights in the aviation industry, as a unique electric airplane took off, as did a Black Hawk helicopter that can fly itself. 

Innovation of the Year

The James Webb Space Telescope by NASA: A game-changing new instrument to see the cosmos 

NASA

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Once a generation, an astronomical tool arrives that surpasses everything that came before it. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is just such a creation. After more than two decades and $9.7 billion in the making, JWST launched on December 25, 2021. Since February of this year, when it first started imaging—employing a mirror and aperture nearly three times larger in radius than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope—JWST’s vibrant images have captured the attention of the world.

The JWST can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can peek at exoplanets, seeing them directly where astronomers would have once had to reconstruct meager traces of their existence. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter, something Hubble could only glimpse.

While Hubble circles in low Earth orbit, JWST instead sits hundreds of thousands of miles farther away, in Earth’s shadow. It will never see sunlight. There, protected even further by a multi-layer sunshield thinner than a human fingernail, the telescope chills at -370 degrees F, where JWST’s infrared sight works best. Its home is a fascinating location called L2, one of several points where the sun and Earth’s gravities balance each other out. 

All this might just be JWST’s prologue. Since the telescope used less fuel than initially anticipated when reaching its perch, the instrument might have enough to last well past its anticipated 10-year-long window. We can’t wait to see what else it dazzles us with.

Parallel Reality by Delta: A screen customized for you

Delta

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You’ve probably found yourself running through an airport at some point, squinting up at a screen filled with rows of flight information. A futuristic new offering from Delta and a startup called Misapplied Sciences aims to change that. At Detroit Metro Airport, an installation can show travelers customized information for their flight. A scan of your boarding pass in McNamara Terminal is one way to tell the system who you are. Then, when you look at the overhead screen, you see that it displays only personalized data about your journey, like which gate you need to find. The tech behind the system works because the pixels in the display itself can shine in one of 18,000 directions, meaning many different people can see distinct information while looking at the same screen at the same time. 

Electronic bag tags by Alaska Airlines: The last tag you’ll need (for one airline)

Alaska Airlines

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Believe it or not, some travelers do still check bags, and a new offering from this Seattle-based airline aims to make that process easier. Flyers who can get an electronic bag tag from Alaska Airlines (at first, 2,500 members of their frequent flier plan will get them, and in 2023 they’ll be available to buy) can use their mobile phone to create the appropriate luggage tag on this device’s e-ink display while at home, up to 24 hours before a flight. The 5-inch-long tag itself gets the power it needs to generate the information on the screen from your phone, thanks to an NFC connection. After the traveler has done this step at home, they just need to drop the tagged bag off in the right place at the airport, avoiding the line to get a tag. 

Alice by Eviation: A totally electric commuter airplane 

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The aviation industry is a major producer of carbon emissions. One way to try to solve that problem is to run aircraft on electric power, utilizing them just for short hops. That’s what Eviation aims to do with a plane called Alice: 8,000 pounds of batteries in the belly of this commuter aircraft give its two motors the power it needs to fly. In fact, it made its first flight in September, a scant but successful eight minutes in the air. Someday, as battery tech improves, the company hopes that it can carry nine passengers for distances of 200 miles or so. 

OPV Black Hawk by Sikorsky: A military helicopter that flies itself 

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Two pilots sit up front at the controls of the Army’s Black Hawk helicopters, but what if that number could be zero for missions that are especially hazardous? That’s exactly what a modified UH-60 helicopter can do, a product of a DARPA program called ALIAS, which stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. The self-flying whirlybird made its first flights with zero occupants on board in February, and in October, it took flight again, even carrying a 2,600-pound load beneath it. The technology comes from helicopter-maker Sikorsky, and allows the modified UH-60 to be flown by two pilots, one pilot, or zero. The idea is that this type of autonomy can help in several ways: to assist the one or two humans at the controls, or as a way for an uninhabited helicopter to execute tasks like flying somewhere dangerous to deliver supplies without putting any people on board at risk. 

Detect and Avoid by Zipline: Drones that can listen for in-flight obstacles

Zipline

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As drones and other small aircraft continue to fill the skies, all parties involved have an interest in avoiding collisions. But figuring out the best way for a drone to detect potential obstacles isn’t an easy problem to solve, especially since there are no pilots on board to keep their eyes out and weight is at a premium. Drone delivery company Zipline has turned to using sound, not sight, to solve this conundrum. Eight microphones on the drone’s wing listen for traffic like an approaching small plane, and can preemptively change the UAV’s route to get out of the way before it arrives. An onboard GPU and AI help with the task, too. While the company is still waiting for regulatory approval to totally switch the system on, the technique represents a solid approach to an important issue.

DART by NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory: Smashing into an asteroid, for good 

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Earthlings who look at the sky in fear that a space rock might tumble down and devastate our world can now breathe a sigh of relief. On September 26, a 1,100-pound spacecraft streaked into a roughly 525-foot-diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at over 14,000 mph. NASA confirmed on October 11 that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)’s impact altered Dimorphos’s orbit around its companion asteroid, Didymos, even more than anticipated. Thanks to DART, humans have redirected an asteroid for the first time. The dramatic experiment gives astronomers hope that perhaps we could do it again to avert an apocalypse.

CAPSTONE by Advanced Space: A small vessel on a big journey

Advanced Space

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Some lunar craft fill up whole rooms. On the other hand, there’s CAPSTONE, a satellite that can fit on a desk. Despite control issues, CAPSTONE—which launched on June 28—triumphantly entered lunar orbit on November 13. This small traveler is a CubeSat, an affordable design of mini-satellite that’s helped make space accessible to universities, small companies, and countries without major space programs. Hundreds of CubeSats now populate the Earth’s orbit, and although some have hitched rides to Mars, none have made the trip to the moon under their own power—until CAPSTONE. More low-cost lunar flights, its creators hope, may follow.

The LSST Camera by SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory: A 3,200-megapixel camera

SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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Very soon, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the high desert of Northern Chile will provide astronomers with what will be nearly a live-feed view of the southern hemisphere’s sky. To do that, it will rely on the world’s largest camera—with a lens 5 feet across and matching shutters, it will be capable of taking images that are an astounding 3,200 megapixels. The camera’s crafters are currently placing the finishing touches on it, but their impressive engineering feats aren’t done yet: In May 2023, the camera will fly down to Chile in a Boeing 747, before traveling by truck to its final destination.

The Event Horizon Telescope by the EHT Collaboration: Seeing the black hole in the Milky Way’s center

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Just a few decades ago, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart, was a hazy concept. Now, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), we have a blurry image of it—or, since a black hole doesn’t let out light, of its surrounding accretion disc. The EHT is actually a global network of radio telescopes stretching from Germany to Hawaii, and from Chile to the South Pole. EHT released the image in May, following years of painstaking reconstruction by over 300 scientists, who learned much about the black hole’s inner workings in the process. This is EHT’s second black hole image, following its 2019 portrait of a behemoth in the galaxy M87.

Starliner by Boeing: A new way of getting to the ISS 

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After years of budget issues, technical delays, and testing failures, Boeing’s much-awaited Starliner crew capsule finally took to the skies and made it to its destination. An uncrewed test launch in May successfully departed Florida, docked at the International Space Station (ISS), and landed back on Earth. Now, Boeing and NASA are preparing for Starliner’s first crewed test, set to launch sometime in 2023. When that happens, Starliner will take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and NASA will have more than one option to get astronauts into orbit. There are a few differences between the two: Where Crew Dragon splashes down in the sea, Starliner touches down on land, making it easier to recover. And, where Crew Dragon was designed to launch on SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets, Starliner is more flexible. 

Engineering

Zero-emissions vehicles, artificial intelligence, and self-charging gadgets are helping remake and update some of the most important technologies of the last few centuries. Personal devices like headphones and remote controls may be headed for a wireless, grid-less future, thanks to a smaller and more flexible solar panel. Boats can now sail human-free from the UK to the US, using a suite of sensors and AI. Chemical factories, energy facilities, trucks and ships are getting green makeovers as engineers figure out clever new ways to make them run on hydrogen, batteries, or other alternative, non-fossil fuel power sources.

Grand Award Winner

1915 Çanakkale by the Republic of Turkey: The world’s longest suspension bridge

Çanakkale Motorway Bridge Construction Investment Operation

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An international team of engineers had to solve several difficult challenges to build the world’s largest suspension bridge, which stretches 15,118 feet across the Dardanelles Strait in Turkey. To construct it, engineers used tugboats to float out 66,000-ton concrete foundations known as caissons to serve as pillars. They then flooded chambers in the caissons to sink them 40 meters (131 feet) deep into the seabed. Prefabricated sections of the bridge deck were carried out with barges and cranes, then assembled. Completed in March 2022, the bridge boasts a span between the two towers that measures an incredible 6,637 feet. Ultimately the massive structure shortens the commuting time across the congested strait, which is a win for everyone.

NuGen by Anglo American: World’s largest hydrogen fuel cell EV

Anglo American

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When carrying a full load of rock, the standard issue Komatsu 930E-5 mining truck weighs over 1 million pounds and burns 800 gallons of diesel per work day. Collectively, mining trucks emit 68 million tons of carbon dioxide each year (about as much as the entire nation of New Zealand). This company’s solution was to turn to hydrogen power, and so Anglo American hired American contractor First Mode to hack together a hydrogen fuel cell version of their mining truck. It’s called NuGen. Since the original Komatsu truck already had electric traction motors, powered by diesel, the engineers replaced the fossil-fuel-burning engine with eight separate 800-kw fuel cells that feed into a giant 1.1 Mwh battery. (The battery further recaptures power through regenerative braking.)  Deployed at a South African platinum mine in May, the truck refuels with green hydrogen produced using energy from a nearby solar farm.

Hydeal España by ArcelorMittal, Enagás, Grupo Fertiberia and DH2 Energy: The biggest green hydrogen hub

Negro Elkha – stock.adobe.com

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Hydrogen can be a valuable fuel source for decarbonizing industrial processes. But obtaining the gas at scale requires using energy from natural gas to split water into hydrogen and oxygen with electrical currents. To be sustainable, this process needs to be powered with renewables. That’s the goal of an industrial consortium in Spain, comprised of the four companies listed above. It’s beginning work on HyDeal España, set to be the world’s largest green hydrogen hub. Solar panels with a capacity of 9.5 GW will power electrolysers that will separate hydrogen from water at an unprecedented scale. The project will help create fossil-free ammonia (for fertilizer and other purposes), and hydrogen for use in the production of green steel. The hub is scheduled to be completed in 2030, and according to its estimates, the project will reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of Spain by 4 percent. 

DALL-E 2 by Open AI: A groundbreaking text-to-image generator

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Art students will often mimic the style of a master as part of their training. DALL-E 2 by Open AI takes this technique to a scale only artificial intelligence can achieve, by studying hundreds of millions of captioned images scraped from the internet. It allows users to write text prompts that the algorithm then renders into pictures in less than a minute. Compared to previous image generators, the quality of the output is getting rave reviews, and there are “happy accidents” that feel like real creativity. And it’s not just artists—urban planning advocates and even a reconstructive surgeon have used the tool to visualize rough concepts.

The P12 shuttle by Candela: A speedy electric hydrofoil ferry

Candela

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When the first Candela P12 electric hydrofoil goes into service next year in Stockholm, Sweden, it will take commuters from the suburbs to downtown in about 25 minutes. That’s a big  improvement from the 55 minutes it takes on diesel ferries. Because the P12 produces almost no wake, it is allowed to exceed the speed restrictions placed on other watercraft; it travels at roughly 30 miles per hour, which according to the company makes it the world’s fastest aquatic electric vessel. Computer-guided stabilization technology aims to make the ride feel smooth. And as a zero-emissions way to avoid traffic congestion on bridge or tunnel chokepoints without needing to build expensive infrastructure, the boats are a win for transportation.

Bioforge by Solugen: Zero-emission chemical factory

Solugen

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Petrochemical plants typically require acres of towering columns and snaking pipes to turn fossil fuels into useful products. In addition to producing toxic emissions like benzene, these facilities put out 925 million metric tons of greenhouse gas every year, according to an IEA estimate. But outside Houston, Solugen built a “Bioforge” plant that produces 10,000 tons of chemicals like fertilizer and cleaning solutions annually through a process that yields zero air emissions or wastewater. The secret sauce consists of enzymes: instead of using fossil fuels as a feedstock, these proteins turn corn syrup into useful chemicals for products much more efficiently than conventional fossil fuel processes– and at a competitive price. These enzymes even like to eat pieces of old cardboard that can’t be recycled anymore, turning trash into feedstock treasure. Solugen signed a deal this fall with a large company to turn cardboard landfill waste into usable plastics.

HydroSKIN by ILEK/U of Stuttgart: Zero-Emissions Cooling

Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK), University of Stuttgart

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Air conditioners and fans already consume 10 percent of the world’s electricity, and AC use is projected to triple by the year 2050. But there are other ways to cool a structure. Installed in an experimental building in Stuttgart, Germany, an external facade add-on called HydroSKIN employs layers of modern textiles to update the ancient technique of using wet cloth to cool the air through evaporation. The top layer is a mesh that serves to keep out bugs and debris. The second layer is a thick spacer fabric designed to absorb water—from rain or water vapor when it’s humid out—and then facilitate evaporation in hot weather. The third layer is an optional film that provides additional absorption. The fourth (closest to the wall of the building) is a foil that collects any moisture that soaks through, allowing it to either be stored or drained.  A preliminary estimate found that a single square meter of HydroSKIN can cool an 8x8x8 meter (26x26x26 feet) cube by 10 degrees Kelvin (18 degrees F).

Powerfoyle by Exeger: Self-charging gadgets

Exeger

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Consumer electronics in the U.S. used about 176 terawatt hours of electricity in 2020, more than the entire nation of Sweden. Researchers at the Swedish company Exeger have devised a new architecture for solar cells that’s compact, flexible, and can be integrated into a variety of self-charging gadgets. Silicon solar panels generate power cheaply at massive scale, but are fragile and require unsightly silver lines to conduct electricity.  Exeger’s Powerfoyle updates a 1980s innovation called dye-sensitized solar cells with titanium dioxide, an abundant material found in white paint and donut glaze, and a new electrode that’s 1,000 times more conductive than silicon. Powerfoyle can be printed to look like brushed steel, carbon fiber or plastic, and can now be found in self-charging headphones by Urbanista and Adidas, a bike helmet, and even a GPS-enabled dog collar.

The Mayflower by IBM: Uncrewed trans-Atlantic voyage

IBM

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Collecting data in the corrosive salt waves and high winds of the Atlantic can be dull, dirty, and dangerous. Enter the Mayflower, an AI-captained, electrically-powered ship. It has 30 sensors and 16 computing devices that can process data onboard in lieu of a galley, toilets, or sleeping quarters. After the Mayflower successfully piloted itself from Plymouth in the UK to Plymouth, MA earlier this year—with pit stops in the Azores and Canada due to mechanical failures—the team is prepping a vessel more than twice the size for a longer journey. The boat is designed to collect data on everything from whales to the behavior of eddies or gyres at a hundredth the cost of a crewed voyage and without risking human life. The next milestone will be a 12,000 mile trip from the UK to Antarctica, with a return trip via the Falkland Islands.

The Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities by NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric: A triple threat of renewable energy

Portland General Electric

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In Oregon, the Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities, co-owned by NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric (PGE), is combining solar, wind, and battery storage to bring renewable energy to the grid at utility scale. Key to the equation are those batteries, which stabilize the intermittency of wind and solar power. All told, it touts 300 megawatts of wind, 50 megawatts of solar, and 30 megawatts of battery storage capable of serving around 100,000 homes, and it’s already started producing power. The facility is all part of the Pacific Northwestern state’s plan to achieve 100-percent carbon-free electricity by 2040. 

Gadgets

Over the past 15 years or so, smartphones have consumed many familiar gizmos. Calculators, TV remotes, cameras, and other standalone devices have converged into the smartphone that lives in our pockets. Recently, however, that trend has slowed. Phones have been iteratively improving with increasingly granular updates. The gadget and computer market has felt more diverse as more and more devices find their niche outside the confines of a smartphone. That includes hardcore computer hardware, VR and AR devices, and even smart-home tech. Our winner this year addresses the ever-present disparity in the ways we use electronic devices, because gadgets should ultimately give us as many options as possible for how we interact with them.

Grand Award Winner

Adaptive Accessories by Microsoft: Making computers accessible to all

Microsoft

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Microsoft’s Adaptive Mouse might not look very advanced. It’s a simple, squircle-shaped device with two buttons, a scroll wheel, and several slots around its edges. You’re not meant to use it as it ships, however. This mouse is one of Microsoft’s Accessible Accessories that easily connect to custom, 3D-printed attachments to accommodate a wide variety of users with different physical needs. The Microsoft Adaptive Hub allows people to connect up to three of the Accessible Accessories to any computer. Compatible devices include an Adaptive D-pad button, an Adaptive Dual Button, and an Adaptive Joystick button, all of which can accommodate people with limited mobility through the Shapeways 3D printing platform. The hub connects via USB-C or Bluetooth wireless, so it can integrate third-party accessibility devices along with Microsoft’s own accessories. The company plans to continue expanding the platform to help ensure the most people can interact with their computers in ways not previously possible with common mice and keyboards.

C1 Webcam by Opal: A webcam that goes beyond its hardware

Opal

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Computational photography relies on software and processing power in order to make camera hardware perform well above its technical capabilities, which is what makes your smartphone camera so good at what it does. The Opal C1 draws heavily on computational photography to apply those same improvements to a webcam. It relies on a smartphone imaging chip previously found in older Google Pixel phones, which stands to reason since the Opal was developed by a former Google designer, Kenny Sweet. Right out of the box, the camera corrects for common issues like heavy backlighting, mixed lighting (which can make you look sickly), and overly contrasty ambient illumination. People can also customize the look they want based on their environment or personal tastes.

Arc GPUs by Intel: A new chip to shake up the graphics processor market

Intel

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The market for graphics processing units (or GPUs) isn’t very crowded. Two companies, AMD and Nvidia, have dominated for decades. Chipmaker Intel abandoned its GPU ambitions more than 10 years ago—until this year’s release of its Arc hardware. These graphics cards deliver surprisingly powerful performance for even more surprisingly affordable prices. The Arcs’ strength comes from their efficiency. The top-end A770 card isn’t meant to take on the most powerful models from other brands. Instead, at just $329, it provides 1440p gaming for players who might otherwise have to rely on wimpy integrated graphics or an older and outdated card. That should rally gamers who want solid graphics performance without having to shell out the money and power required to run the increasingly ridiculous flagship graphics cards on the market right now.

Ultra Reality Monitor by Brelyon: AR and VR without the headset

Brelyon

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Typical virtual reality headsets create shallow stereoscopic depth by showing each eye a slightly different perspective of the same scene. Brelyon’s new Ultra Reality monitor relies on a more complex phenomenon called monocular depth modulation, which allows the eye to focus deeper into a scene just as it could in the real world. Brelyon’s combination of optics and display tech fill a viewer’s field of vision with 3D images that simulate a 120-inch display—with a device the size of a typical gaming monitor. The eye can focus at various depths in the scene, which makes the display feel as though it extends far beyond the physical bounds of the hardware. Eventually, tech like this could, on a much larger scale, essentially create a Star Trek-like Holodeck that creates room-scale VR without the need for a headset.

Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs by AMD: A big leap in processing performance

AMD

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CPUs (or central processing units) get faster all the time. AMD’s latest Ryzen 7000 Series chips, however, represent more than an iterative jump of pure processing power. These powerful little chips rely on a brand new architecture that AMD calls Zen 4. It’s built on a 5nm process, which doesn’t indicate the actual physical size of the transistors, but rather their density on the chip. By moving to this architecture, AMD has created the fastest CPUs to date for creative and gaming purposes. AMD’s plans for these chips go beyond personal computers and extend out into its commercial data center hardware. But for now, they’ll render those Adobe Premiere edits with the quickness.

OLED Flex LX3 TV by LG: A screen that goes from flat to curved and back again

LG

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Curved displays can immerse you in a viewing or video game experience. Try watching content with a group, however, and that curve becomes a hindrance as the picture loses contrast and color accuracy for everyone sitting off-center. LG’s new 42-inch OLED, however, can rest completely flat for group viewing, then mechanically adjust its curvature with built-in motors. It curves all the way to 900R, which is just shy of the human eye’s natural shape. Because it’s an OLED, this TV offers superior contrast and color reproduction no matter what orientation you choose. Plus, it offers a full suite of advanced features, including HDMI 2.1 and an anti-reflective coating to keep the picture glare-free.

Quest Pro VR by Meta: A VR headset that ropes in reality

Meta

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Until a company convinces us to collectively install Matrix-style data jacks in the backs of our skulls, headsets will be our way into the metaverse. Meta’s new flagship headset offers capabilities well beyond its Quest 2 VR headset that earned a Best of What’s New award in 2020. The Quest Pro features front-facing cameras, which add a mixed-reality element to the overall experience. It can pump a real-time feed of the outside world into high-res displays while integrating digital elements as if they really exist. Replace your desk with a virtual workspace. Get real-time directions on how to fix a piece of machinery. Play fantastical games in a hyper-realistic setting. We’ve seen devices that have promised this kind of AR/VR synergy before, but Meta has brought it a very real step closer to actual reality.

Z9 Mirrorless Camera by Nikon: A professional camera with almost no moving parts

Nikon

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Take the lens off a high-end mirrorless camera and you’ll still find a mechanical shutter that moves up and down when you take a shot. That’s not the case with Nikon’s Z9. This pro-grade mirrorless camera relies entirely on a super-fast, stacked imaging sensor that’s capable of shooting up to 30 fps at its full 45.7-megapixel resolution or up to 120 fps if you only need 11 megapixels. In making this switch, Nikon increased the camera’s overall speed and removed its biggest moving part, which tends to be the first piece that needs repair after heavy use. The Z9 can shoot detailed, high-res raw files for the studio, super-fast bursts of small jpegs for sports, and even 8K video for cinema shooters. And yes, it will shoot the fanciest selfies you’ve ever seen.

Archer Omni Router by TP-Link: A router that transforms to augment wireless connectivity

TP-Link

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Single-point routers have fallen out of fashion thanks to the popularity of mesh Wi-Fi systems, but TP-Link’s AXE200 Omni could change all that. At the push of a button, each of its four antennas move automatically to optimize its signal based on where you need the internet most in your home. Positioning router antennas has been annoying for nearly 20 years, so it’s refreshing to see a major networking company take the hassle out of it. The various arrangements can throw signals evenly around an area or divert the antennas in order to focus coverage in one specific direction. Under the hood, the AXE200 is a monster of a router. By adopting Wi-Fi 6e, the router can reach speeds of up to 11 Gbps, and its eight-core processor manages antenna movement and enables HomeShield, a built-in security system.

Matter Smart Home Platform by the Connectivity Standards Alliance: Sync your whole smart home

Matter

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Smart home gadgets are stubborn and territorial. Their refusal to play together nicely can throw a wrench in anyone’s plans to build an automated electronic utopia around the house. The Connectivity Standards Alliance aims to change that with Matter. It’s a set of standards that ensure smart devices—even those designed to work with specific smart assistants—can talk to each other during the setup process and forever after in regular use. The first iteration includes smart plugs, thermostats, lights, and just about anything else you control with Siri, Alexa, or whatever other assistant you’ve chosen. As devices evolve, so will the standards, so hopefully you’ll never have to struggle through a long setup or an unresponsive device again.

12S Ultra Smartphone by Xiaomi: A smartphone camera with evolved hardware

Xiaomi

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Smartphone cameras rely heavily on processing and AI to make their videos and images perform outside the bounds of the built-in hardware. Xiaomi has taken a different approach with its 12S Ultra Android phone, however. It has a truly impressive and relatively huge array of 1-inch and ½-inch sensors behind lenses designed by iconic German manufacturer Leica. It still provides the AI and computational capabilities you’d expect from a modern flagship phone camera, but it backs up the processing with hardware well beyond what you’ll find in a typical device. The 50-megapixel main camera takes full advantage of a 1-inch Sony sensor—similar to what you’d find in a dedicated camera. The ultra-wide and telephoto cameras both sport ½-inch chips that are also much bigger than most of their smartphone competition. That extra real estate allows for better light gathering and overall image capture before the computing hardware crunches a single pixel.

Phone (1) by Nothing: Light-based notifications help kick the screen habit

Nothing

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From the front, Nothing’s debut phone looks a lot like a typical flagship Android device. Flip the phone over, however, and you’ll find Nothing’s extremely clever light-based notification system, designed to let users know what’s happening on their device without having to look at the screen. Users can customize the lights (Nothing calls them glyphs) in a surprising number of ways. For instance, individual contacts can have their own light pattern that flashes whenever they call. A strip of LEDs at the bottom of the device can act as a battery charge indicator or give feedback from the built-in Google Assistant. The circular ring of lights around the center surround the Qi wireless charging pad, which can top up a pair of earbuds. Beyond the built-in functions, the lights are deeply customizable and will only gain more functionality in future updates. After all, anything that helps look at our phone screens less is OK with us.

Car Crash Detection by Apple: Smart sensors that can save a life in an accident

Apple

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One of the most advanced features of this year’s iPhone and Apple Watch models is one the company hopes you’ll never have to use. Car Crash detection uses an iPhone 14 Pro’s or Apple Watch 8’s upgraded gyroscope, which can measure up to 256 G of force, and checks for changes 3,000 times per second. This data, along with information collected by an accelerometer and the built-in barometer, can sense the change in a car’s cabin pressure caused by a deployed airbag. Once it detects a crash, the watch will automatically send emergency services to your location if you don’t respond to an alert within a few seconds. Your device will also give you the option to manually call emergency services if you’re conscious but need help. The feature is enabled by default, and the information your phone collects is never shared with Apple or a third party.

Health

Almost three years into the pandemic, the spotlight isn’t just on COVID medicine anymore. While booster shots and take-home antiviral pills gave us new tools to fight the infectious disease, health researchers and drug makers regained momentum in other crucial areas, like organ transplants, STI prevention, and white-whale therapies for alopecia and HIV. At the same time, AI deepened its role as a diagnostic aid, while mental health services got an accessibility boost across the US. We know the pandemic isn’t over—and other pathogens and illnesses are likely lurking undetected—but the progress we make in medical labs, factories, and care centers can help nurse societies back to health before the next storm hits.

Grand Award Winner

AuriNova by 3DBio Therapeutics: A replacement ear that’s made from ear cells

3DBio

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About 1,500 people in the US are born each year with absent or underdeveloped external ears. Traditional reconstruction techniques might fix the cosmetic issue, but a new 3D-printed ear transplant, called AuriNovo, offers a living substitute. The implant is made with proteins, hydrogel, and a patient’s own cells, giving it far more flexibility than any constructed with synthetic materials; plus, the procedure is less invasive than, say, transplanting tissue from a patient’s ribs. To build the replacement, a surgeon first takes a sample of an individual’s ear tissue to separate and culture the cartilage-making cells. Then, based on a 3D scan of the fully formed ear on the patient, the part is printed with collagen-based “bio ink” and surgically inserted above the jaw. A 20-year-old woman from Mexico was the first to get the implant this June. 3DBio Therapeutics, the New York-based regenerative medicine company behind AuriNovo, hopes to use the technology to one day create other replacement body parts, like noses, spinal discs, and larger organs. 

Paxlovid by Pfizer: The first take-home treatment for COVID-19

Pfizer

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COVID therapies have come a long way since the start of the pandemic, and now include several antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies. But Pfizer’s Paxlovid was the first oral treatment for the disease to receive emergency authorization from the FDA, meaning it can be obtained with a prescription. It’s also highly effective: Clinical trials show it reduces hospitalization and death from the virus up to 90 percent more than a placebo. The remedy is a combination of two pills: nirmatrelvir, which prevents the novel coronavirus from replicating, and ritonavir, which causes the body to metabolize nirmatrelvir more slowly. The drug does have downsides—it can interact with other medications and sometimes causes a foul aftertaste. Plus, rare cases of rebound COVID symptoms and positive tests have occurred in people following Paxlovid treatment, although research indicates that the latter might be related to the immune system responding to residual viral RNA. Still, it represents a crucial new safeguard for healthcare providers and the public.

EVO Visian Implantable Collamer Lenses by STAAR Surgical: Combining the perks of contacts and laser surgery

STAAR Surgical

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Most cases of nearsightedness and astigmatism, which is blurred vision caused by an irregularly shaped cornea, can be fixed with laser eye surgery. But the procedure requires some corneal tissue to be removed and often leaves recipients with lingering dry eyes. EVO ICL provides an alternative with a minimally invasive new way to correct or reduce both conditions. During the approximately hour-long procedure, a flexible collagen-containing lens is implanted between the iris and natural lens. The implant is meant to sit in the eye permanently, but can also be plucked out by an ophthalmologist if needed. In published clinical trial results, close to 88 percent of patients reported 20/20 or better and nearly all achieved 20/32 or better distance vision after six months. The lenses also block some UV rays for added protection.

Olumiant by Eli Lilly and Incyte: Long-term relief for severe alopecia

Eli Lilly and Incyte

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More than 300,000 people of all ages in the US live with severe alopecia areata, a condition that causes the immune system to attack hair follicles, leading to patchy baldness on the scalp and elsewhere. Hair loss in the nose and ears can affect patients’ hearing and allergies, and a lack of eyelashes can leave people vulnerable to eye irritation from dust. Olumiant, the first medication to secure the FDA’s approval for severe alopecia, can help hair grow back over the entire body. It belongs to a group of drugs called JAK inhibitors, which block certain inflammation-promoting enzymes. It was originally greenlit by the agency in 2018 to treat some forms of rheumatoid arthritis, but in clinical trials for alopecia, it helped roughly a third of participants to regrow up to 80 percent of their hair by 36 weeks, and nearly half after a year. Other JAK inhibitors in development could provide alternatives for patients who don’t fully respond to Olumiant.

AIR Recon DL by GE Healthcare: Sharper MRIs in half the time

GE Healthcare

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Laying motionless for an hour or longer in a magnetic scanner can be a claustrophobic and sometimes nauseating experience. A next-level neural network by GE Healthcare reduces the stress on patients, while filtering out visual noise from movement or faulty processing. The software combs through raw radio-wave data from MRI machines and turns the most accurate bits into high-resolution 3D images. Originally, the AI-reconstructed images had to be stitched together—but the updated tech, which received FDA approval this September, delivers in one go. The speedy precision can cut exam times in half, help hospitals and clinics serve more patients, and possibly improve the rate of diagnosis by giving radiologists a much cleaner view of tissues, bones, masses, and more.

ONE Male Condom by ONE: Latex that works for anal sex

ONE

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At first glance this condom isn’t all that different from those by other brands. It’s made from natural latex, comes in three thicknesses, and has a wide range of sizes for best fit. But the contraceptive is the first to also be clinically tested for STI protection during anal sex—and has proven to be extremely effective. In studies involving 252 male-male couples and 252 male-female couples, the condoms had a less than 2-percent chance of breakage, slippage, discomfort, and adverse events (which included urinary tract infections and bacteria and viruses spread during sex). With such a healthy showing, the company earned the FDA nod to label the product as “safe for anal sex.” With widespread availability, there’s hope that the condom can help beat back a record rise in chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and other STIs.

Bivalent COVID-19 vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech: A one-shot-fits-all approach

Ringo Chiu, AFP via Getty Images

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One of the niftiest features of mRNA vaccines such as Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID shots is that they can be tweaked and scaled up quickly to keep up with an ever-changing virus. This August, the FDA authorized the first bivalent COVID boosters, modified with new genetic data to target both the original version of SARS-CoV-2 and the Omicron sub-variants BA.4 and BA.5. Just how much added protection the bivalent shots offer against the latest versions of COVID remains to be seen, although in early results, the Pfizer-BioNTech booster increased antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants by up to 11 times, while the Moderna booster did so by up to 15 times. Experts anticipate that the bivalent COVID vaccines, which are available to all adults and children ages 5 and older in the US, could save thousands of lives if the virus surges again this winter. 

Umbilical cord blood transplant for HIV by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Weill Cornell Medicine: The right cells for viral resistance

NIH

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There are now three official cases of patients in long-term HIV remission—but this one might be the most promising for the millions around the world living with the virus. In 2017, an unidentified American received a blood transplant packed with genes that were resistant to the pathogen behind AIDS. More than four years later, her doctors at Weill Cornell Medicine confirmed that the procedure at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center had indeed made her free of the disease. The miraculous sample was specifically taken from a relative’s umbilical cord blood cells, which were still in the process of maturing and specializing, making it easier for the transplant to take. Previous attempts to cure the disease depended on bone marrow donations that carry a mutated gene only known in Northern Europeans. This alternative treatment makes transplants more accessible for patients from other ethnic backgrounds, so their bodies can fight HIV in the long run as well.

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by SAMSHA: Streamlining the call for help 

SAMHSA

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When you have a general emergency, you might call 911. But for people experiencing a mental crisis, the number has been a lot less intuitive. This July, however, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, run by the US Department of Health and Human Services since 2005, fully switched over to a three-digit code that’s easy to punch in: 988. The shortcut was years in the making, but required major collaboration with the Federal Communication Commission to connect every phone service provider to the alternative number. Since it went live, officials have reported shorter hold times and a 45-percent increase in use compared to August 2021, including on a specialized veteran hotline. The service shakeup also came with $177 million for states and tribes to support the transition in different ways, like alleviating surcharges, setting up call centers, and integrating crisis relief with existing or new emergency responses.

eCoin Peripheral Neurostimulator by Valencia Technologies: A discreet implant for bladder control 

Valencia Technologies

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Pads, vaginal seals, and skin patches can be a burden for anyone who has to deal with urinary incontinence on a daily basis. A new electrode device, about as small as a nickel and implanted above the ankle, nips the issue in the bud in a more private and convenient way. Incontinence typically occurs when the muscles in and around the bladder contract too often or too much. To prevent leaks and constant trips to the toilet, the eCoin sends low-key shocks through the tibial nerve, targeting the pelvic organs and relaxing the bladder wall. A doctor can control the intensity of the pulses with a remote, making the device more customizable for a broad range of patients. Neurostimulators have become a vanguard treatment for different nervous system conditions, including chronic back pain and even paralysis—but few are so adaptable as this.

Entertainment

The entertainment category for Best of What’s New used to primarily contain devices meant for consuming content. But that’s changed. While our Grand Award Winner goes to a big-budget movie this year, you’ll find an increasing number of devices meant for actually making content. Self-flying drones, all-encompassing camera rigs, and even high-end monitors give people the opportunity to make their own content rather than simply consuming it. Other items on this list—primarily the earbuds—provide a reminder that content is a constant part of our lives. We’ve changed the content we consume for entertainment, but more than that, we’ve changed the way we interact with it. And these gadgets help shape that relationship.

Grand Award Winner

Top Gun: Maverick by Skydance Media/Paramount: A high-speed upgrade to practical filmmaking

Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films

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We’re all too used to watching computer-generated action sequences in movies. When Hulk smashes up the scene or aliens attack a city, we know it’s fake. The sequel to Top Gun, which arrived in May—36 years after the original—did it differently. Actors trained in real aircraft to prepare to climb into Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets, and when they did, they experienced crushing G forces as the jets maneuvered at speeds that ranged from about 250 mph to more than 400. To film it, the studio turned to custom cameras carefully mounted within the cockpits, and other aircraft like the L-39 CineJet shot while airborne, too. That approach, plus scenes shot on both the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carriers, all add up to give the film a degree of excitement and verisimilitude that’s rare. While the film is still a product of Hollywood that made some use of CGI, and doubles as a recruiting vehicle for the Navy, we still salute its commitment to capturing the thrill and speed of Naval aviation.

Freestyle Projector by Samsung: An advanced projector that handles its own setup process

Samsung

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Samsung’s Freestyle fixes one of our biggest complaints with projectors: that moving them to find the perfect angle is a pain. The floating, tube-shaped all-in-one projector is attached to its frame on a pair of hinges, which lets it be tilted up or down with very little force. The Freestyle can be twisted a full 180 degrees, allowing it to be pointed forward for a traditional viewing experience, or vertically to play games on your ceiling. You can use your phone to enable “smart calibration,” which adjusts its brightness and color settings based on the color of your walls and the room’s lighting conditions. The Freestyle’s fun form factor and smart settings are complemented by impressive hardware features, like native 1080p resolution, stereo speakers, and an HDMI port for connecting external devices. There’s also a USB-C port in case you’d like to connect the Freestyle to a high-capacity power bank to take it on the go.

Frame TV Anti-Glare Matte Display by Samsung: A 4K TV that isn’t afraid of a bright room

Samsung

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A couple of years ago, Samsung imagined a creative way to make use of a large, borderless, high-resolution screen when you’re not using it to watch videos or play games: displaying famous artwork on your wall. The problem was the TV’s LCD panel, which reflected light and made older paintings look like they were displayed on a screen rather than a canvas. That changes with the second-generation Frame, which has an anti-reflective matte display. Despite the change in technologies, Samsung says you’ll still be able to see a billion colors on the screen, and that it’ll continue to automatically adjust its color balance based on your brightness preferences. If you can’t justify the cost of an original Rembrandt, Samsung’s new Frame will be the next best thing.

Linkbuds by Sony: Earbuds that mix your audio with the real world

Sony

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Sony created its LinkBuds to be the antithesis of noise-canceling headphones. They let outside sound in so you never need to take them out. The buds have a hard-shelled body, which means they won’t create a tight seal around your ear, and boast a circular cutout, which Sony calls an open ring. The ring gives LinkBuds their unique look, and is also where the earbuds’ driver is located. Sound is fed from the ring through the bud into your ear, along with some noise from the outside world. You’ll hear cars honking, airplane engines, and people on the street. But if you’re a runner who wants to hear a vehicle approach, this is a feature, not a bug.

QC II earbuds by Bose: Active noise cancellation that works across every frequency

Bose

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Typical noise-canceling headphones have trouble blocking out sound in the middle frequencies between roughly 120Hz and 400Hz. That allows sounds like voices to occasionally get through. Bose has totally reconfigured its noise-canceling algorithm and hardware setup in order to fill in that ANC gap without creating uncomfortable ear pressure or compromising audio quality. The company adjusted its noise cancellation and tuning to a user’s body by measuring the way a chime reflects off the inside of your ears back to the earbuds’ microphones. The attention to detail paid off, as outside noises are greatly reduced even if you’re not listening to music. Bose offers three listening modes by default, but you can create custom ones using the company’s app if you’d like to crank active noise cancellation all the way up, or mellow it out.

Ronin 4D by DJI: An all-encompassing cinema rig and steadicam for creators on a budget

DJI

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DJI’s Ronin 4D rig looks like a futuristic weapon pulled from a Star Wars flick. In reality, it’s a full-featured cinema rig that combines a number of essential movie-making tools into one compact and extremely stable camera rig. The modular system includes DJI’s flagship Zenmuse camera, which can capture 6K raw video at up to 60 fps or 4K video at up to 120 fps. It also boasts a full-frame sensor and interchangeable camera mounts. The whole imaging rig sits on a 4-axis gimbal that stabilizes footage so convincingly that it sometimes looks like it was shot on a dolly or a crane. Because the whole system is modular, you can swap parts like monitors, storage devices, batteries, and audio gear on the fly and customize it for your shooting needs.

Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED Gaming Monitor by Dell: The first gaming monitor with a new brighter version of OLED tech

Dell

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OLED monitors typically provide unmatched contrast, image quality, and color reproduction, but they lack brightness. Quantum dot (or QLED) displays crank up the illumination, but lose some of the overall image impact found on an OLED. Enter QD-OLED. Like a typical OLED display, each pixel provides its own backlight. But the addition of quantum dots adds even more illumination, giving it a total peak brightness of 1,000 lumens while maintaining the certified HDR black levels to create ridiculous levels of contrast. And with its 175Hz native refresh rate, and super-fast 0.1-second response time, you can’t blame this pro-grade gaming monitor if you’re always getting eliminated mid-game.

Arctis Nova Pro Headset for Xbox by SteelSeries: A gaming headset that works across all of your machines

SteelSeries

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Gaming headsets typically require players to pick a platform for compatibility when you buy them. Some work with a console as well as a PC, but SteelSeries has given its Arctis Nova Pro headset the hardware it needs to work with Xbox, PS5, PC, and even the Nintendo Switch—all at the press of a button. Its secret lies in the GameDAC (short for digital audio converter), which connects to multiple systems and pumps out high-res certified sound with 360-degree spatial audio from whatever source you choose. Plush ear cups and a flexible suspension band ensure comfort, even during long, multi-platform gaming sessions.

Skydio 2+ drone by Skydio: A drone that follows commands or flies itself

Skydio

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Crashing a drone is bad for your footage—and your budget. But this high-end flying machine avoids obstacles with an advanced system that adjusts more than 500 times per second to prevent disaster. A fish-eye lens allows the drone to see 360 degrees around the craft. A dual-core Nvidia chipset generates a 3D-world model with more than 1 million data points per second to identify and avoid anything that might get in its way. With all those smarts, creatives can simply tell the drone to track them or program complex flight paths and the Skydio2+ will capture 4K video at 60 fps on its own. The drone also comes with more than 18 predetermined paths and programs that can make even basic action look worthy of a Mountain Dew commercial.

Dione soundbar by Devialet: True surround sound on a stick

Devialet

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Most soundbars allow buyers a chance to expand their audio system and add satellite speakers or at least a subwoofer. The Dione is different. It’s a totally stand-alone system that relies on nine 41mm drivers and eight built-in subwoofers in order to fulfill the entire sonic range you need to enjoy everything from high-pitched tire squeals to rumbling explosions. Thanks to its Dolby Atmos integration, it mimics a true 5.1.2 surround sound system. The sphere in the center of the bar contains one of the 41mm drivers; it rotates to allow the soundbar to achieve its spatial audio ambitions, whether it’s sitting on a TV stand or mounted somewhere around the television. Devialet’s Speaker Active Matching technology watches over the entire array to make sure none of the individual drivers surpass their optimal operating frequencies, and it even has a dynamic EQ mode that brings up dialog—so you can finally turn off the closed captioning and still understand what the actors are saying.

Personal Care

Our new pandemic normal made soothing stress and monitoring our health the main goals of most personal care products in 2021. But this year saw a flood of launches geared at leaving home and showing off: vibrant cosmetics, anti-aging formulas and gizmos, and skincare products designed to protect from outdoor pollutants. From a multi-dimensional hair dye that draws upon the iridescence of butterfly wings to an end-of-life solution that nourishes the Earth instead of polluting it, these 10 wellness and beauty products stood out above the rest, offering true innovations in a world too often flooded with trendy buzzwords and empty promises.

Grand Award Winner

AR Beauty Tutorials on TikTok by Grace Choi: Filters that aim to educate, not manipulate

Grace Choi

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Most TikTok filters let you play pretend and “try on” makeup—or, more insidiously, warp the shape of your face to fit an unattainable standard—but a new generation of augmented reality overlays aim to teach you something instead. Grace Choi, a Harvard MBA known for creating 2020 BOWN winner Mink’s makeup palette printer, changed the conversation this year with a digital brow stencil and contouring filter. While tutorials often assume the viewer shares the same face shape as the demonstrator, Choi notes that her filter can map out the slopes and dips of each user’s unique features and guide their makeup placement accordingly. The technique—which involves using contrasting light and dark pigment to subtly highlight some parts of your facial structure and minimize others—is notoriously tough to master using videos, as ideal pigment placement varies depending on bone structure. Choi’s filter instantly creates an easy-to-follow diagram, showing you exactly where to apply your makeup to make your cheekbones pop and your jaw look more defined.

YSL Beauté Rouge Sur Mesure by L’Oreal: Personalized lipstick, made on-demand

YSL

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Whether you want your lipstick to match the sunset or your blouse, the Yves Saint Laurent Beauté Rouge Sur Mesure can produce any hue with the touch of a few buttons. The handheld system uses color cartridges in swappable palettes of red, nude, orange, and pink to create thousands of personalized shades. The accompanying app lets you scan any object for reference, or peruse a color wheel for inspiration. You can even try the color on virtually before the gadget mixes it up for you. A hydrating lipstick packed with pigment emerges at the top of the device into a chic, removable YSL palette—perfect for on-the-go touch-ups.

Gro Ageless by Vegamour: A duo that keeps you from going gray

Vegamour

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Less than 30 percent of hair graying is dictated by your genes, according to a 2016 study in Nature. Instead, it’s predominantly driven by stress, excess UV exposure, diet, and smoking. Increased inflammation damages melanocytes, the pigment-producing cells in the hair, and saps them of their hue. Research suggests that maintaining healthy levels of B vitamins, copper, zinc, and selenium can safeguard melanocytes from damage. Vegamour’s Gro Ageless system includes oral supplements to combat those deficits from within, along with a serum that penetrates the hair follicle to stimulate melanocyte stem cells. The plant-based products add shine to strands, improve the texture of aging tresses, and can even help restore color as new hair grows in.

Smoke Alarm Drops by Pour Moi: A serum that shields your skin from wildfire smoke

Pour Moi

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It’s no secret that our planet is in trouble—and that means your skin is, too. Pour Moi Smoke Alarm Drops mark the first serum formulated specifically to protect skin when it’s exposed to smoke. Some skincare products that lock moisture in can also trap in pollutants. The resulting oxidative stress (an imbalance in a body’s ability to remove toxins or repair damage) can lead to sagging due to collagen loss, fine lines and wrinkles, and rough texture. Pour Moi’s drops address this by creating a shield within the skin’s surface layer, using hyaluronic acid, emollients, and soothing and repairing botanicals.

Dr. Harris Anti-Wrinkle Sleep Mask by CurrentBody: An eye mask that melts stress as you sleep

CurrentBody

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This mask aims to help you get your beauty sleep—literally and figuratively. The inside of the Dr. Harris Anti-Wrinkle Sleep Mask is lined with slightly raised silicone dots. Each presses imperceptibly against some of the 17,000-plus touch receptors in the skin of your face. Those receptors convert mechanical pressure into electrical signals for your autonomic nervous system, telling your brain to unfurrow your brow. Wearing the eye covering for just 15 minutes can help relax your muscles and make it easier to drift off to slumber. And since it smooths out your forehead, it also reduces the appearance of wrinkles between your eyebrows for up to five hours.

The Loop Cocoon by Loop Biotech: The world’s first living coffin

Loop Biotech

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It’s time to close the loop on the circle of life. Modern burial practices pump heaps of toxic chemicals into the ground and cremation pollutes the air with greenhouse gasses. Over the last several years, several solutions for greener burials have emerged—California has even given human composting the green light—but for most people, such alternatives have remained out of reach or even illegal. This year, Dutch company Loop Biotech became the first to offer a “living coffin” for sale to the general public. The Cocoon is made of dried mycelium, which is the cobweb-like filament that forms mushrooms and other fungi. This substance creates a sturdy coffin that breaks down once exposed to moist soil. In less than two months, it degrades entirely and seeds the burial site with mushrooms. The fungi then helps the corpse biodegrade more quickly, breaking down heavy metals and pollutants in its tissues so it can nourish surrounding plants instead of poisoning them.

TheraFace PRO by Therabody: The utility player of facial gadgets

Therabody

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There are nearly endless beauty gadgets you can buy to scrub, massage, and even electrify your face into submission. Some of them even work: Microcurrents can temporarily soften wrinkles, lymphatic drainage can briefly depuff swollen sinuses, and LED lights can kill acne-causing bacteria and stimulate skin-plumping collagen. But implementing an arsenal of such tools takes deep pockets (and a big medicine cabinet). Enter the TheraFace Pro. In addition to offering the percussive massage the brand is known for—appropriately toned down for the delicate bones of the face—the device’s suite of magnetic attachments also provide hot and cold compresses, microcurrent treatments, deep facial cleaning, and multi-hued LED light therapy. Whether you need to soothe a sore jaw muscle or induce a dewy glow for a special event, the TheraFace makes it downright sensible to own an absurd array of skincare gizmos.

Colour Alchemy by The Unseen and Schwarzkopf Professional: The world’s first holographic hair dye

The Unseen and Schwarzkopf Professional

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Most people who color their hair are looking for multi-faceted, prismatic hues—ones with slight variations that catch the light for a more interesting (and often more natural-looking) visual effect. That usually means lightening some pieces of hair, darkening others, and using multiple shades of toners and dyes. Colour Alchemy by The Unseen harnesses the power of physics to create a totally new kind of hair color: a temporary dye that turns hair strands into light-scattering prisms. The products rely on structural color—the same principle that gives beetle shells and butterfly wings iridescent hues using cellular shape instead of actual pigment. The result is hair that shifts across a spectrum of vibrant color when exposed to changes in temperature (like a blast of cool air) or light (like a camera flash). Unlike most temporary dyes, Colour Alchemy shows up on dark tresses without any bleaching. In fact, dark hair provides the best base for its sun-scattering holographic crystals.

Venom Go by Hyperice: A pocket-sized recovery tool that melts sore muscles in a flash 

Hyperice

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Recovery brand Hyperice has designed a super-portable gadget that melts muscle tension fast. The company’s Venom line, which combines vibration and targeted heat to create not-your-grandpa’s-heating-pad wearables, first launched a few years ago. But this update gave the fitness community something to buzz about. The electronic portion of the Venom Go is small enough to fit in a pocket, and you can use the simple button interface anywhere. Just slap one of the reusable adhesive patches onto the place you want to treat, snap the magnetic device into place, and turn it on for instant heat and soothing vibration.

Super Stay Vinyl Ink Longwear Liquid Lipcolor by Maybelline: A lipstick that truly lasts for hours

Maybelline

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Many lipsticks claim to be transfer-proof, but tell-tale signs prove otherwise—ruby stains on a coffee cup, pink smudges inside a face mask, berry splotches after a smooch. Products that truly offer longevity usually manage the feat by drying with a plaster-like finish, leaving your lips feeling like drywall (and sometimes flaking as badly, too). Maybelline Vinyl Ink promises 16 hours of wear without any of those pitfalls. Seven years of research involving some 100 scientists are behind its dual-phase formula, which combines a long-wear pigment with an emollient silicone resin for moisture and shine. The two components purposefully stay separated until application, when the user shakes the tube to combine them—a process that borrows the trick protein shaker bottles use to blend powder and water on the go.

Emergency Services and Defense

The past year has been marked by serious challenges, from the ongoing climate emergency, a subsequent increase in extreme forest fire frequency, and the devastating war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. But we’ve also seen true innovation in the field of crisis response. More exact location systems will help emergency services find people in trouble quicker. Better respirator technology is rolling out, designed to help wildland firefighters breathe a little easier. And fire trucks are finally starting to go electric. This year’s best emergency services and defense innovations offer paths out of tight spots, aiming to create a safer future—or at least a better way to handle its myriad disasters.

Grand Award Winner 

Wildland Firefighter Respirator by TDA Research: A lightweight, field-rechargeable respirator for forest firefighters

TDA

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Forest fire fighters need a lightweight wearable respirator to protect them from inhaling smoke. The Wildland Firefighter Respirator, by TDA Research, uses a hip-mounted pump to pull air through a HEPA filter, channeling it to a secure but loose-fitting half-mask (a helpful feature for people who haven’t had the chance to shave while in the field). A sensor in the system detects air flow direction, letting the pump only blow at full strength when the user inhales. Importantly, the device weighs just 2.3 pounds, which is only about 10 percent the weight of a typical urban firefighting Self Contained Breathing Apparatus. About the size of a 1-liter water bottle, the respirator is powered by a lithium-ion battery pack. To recharge in the field or away from a generator, that pack can also draw power from 6 AA batteries. Bonus: Even though it was designed for safety professionals, the device could also become civilian protective gear in fire season.

Connect AED by Avive: Connecting defibrillators to those in need, faster

Avive

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Avive’s Connect AED (Automated External Defibrillator) is designed to be a life-saving device that’s also smart. The devices can automatically do daily maintenance checks to ensure they can perform as needed, thanks to WiFi, cellular, bluetooth, and GPS. Plus, with that connectivity, 911 operators could alert nearby Connect AED holders to respond to a called-in cardiac arrest, saving time and possibly someone’s life. Once a person has been defibrillated, Connect’s connectivity also lets emergency room doctors see data the device collected, such as the patient’s heart rhythm, as well as the device’s shock history, complete with timestamps. The Connect AED also has a backpack-like form factor and touch screen for intuitive use.

Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations by Ames Research Center: Letting drone pilots clear skies for aerial emergency vehicles 

Ames Research Center

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The sky above a forest fire can be a dangerous, crowded place, and that was before forest fire fighters added drones joined the mix. Developed by NASA, the Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations project (STEReO) is developing tools for managing the complicated airspace above an emergency. In the spring of 2023, a NASA team field-tested a STEReO’s suitcase-sized prototype device, called the UASP-Kit, to monitor drones safely in the open airspace around prescribed burns. By tracking transponders on crewed aircraft, the UASP-Kit can play a sound through tablet speakers, alerting drone operators when helicopters and planes fly close to where they are operating. That hopefully lets drone pilots get their equipment to safety without risking aerial collision.

Locate Before Route by AT&T: Pinpointing the emergency 

AT&T

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When a person in an emergency calls 911 for help, that call is routed, based on its location, to the closest 911 operator. For cell phones, that meant matching the call to the nearest tower and hoping it sent the call to dispatch in the right county. But in May 2022, AT&T announced the nationwide rollout of a better system. Leaning on the improved location services on iOS and Android phones, AT&T’s Locate Before Route feature can pinpoint the location of the emergency call within 50 meters, sometimes even as precisely as 15 meters. This better location information should allow the call to be routed to the best dispatch center, ideally helping responders arrive faster. That data can only be used for 911 purposes, and helps first responders get where they’re needed quickly, nationwide.

GridStar Flow by Lockheed Martin: Helping to power defense with renewable energy

Lockheed Martin

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The US military is a massive consumer of fossil fuels, but if it wants to use more renewable energy, it needs a way to store that electricity to power vital functions. GridStar Flow, developed by Lockheed Martin for the US Army, is a massive battery complex that takes advantage of the space of Colorado’s Fort Carson to go big. It will store up to 10 megawatt-hours of juice, thanks to tanks of charged electrolytes and other equipment. Construction at Fort Carson broke ground on November 3, but the company has already tested out a smaller flow battery in Andover, Massachusetts. Using electrolytes that can be derived from commodity chemicals, GridStar Flow offers a power storage and release system that can help smooth the energy flow from renewable sources.

Volterra Electric Firetruck by Pierce: A more sustainable, quieter fire truck

Pierce

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Fire trucks are big, powerful vehicles, but they run on diesel, a polluting fossil fuel. The Pierce Volterra truck can deliver all that power on an electric charge, and it can also run on diesel fuel if need be. Already in use with the Madison, Wisconsin fire department, but with contracts to expand to Portland, Oregon and Gilbert, Arizona underway this year, the Volterra has enough battery power for a full day as an electric vehicle. The electric power helps complement a transition to renewable energy, but it also comes with immediate benefit to the firefighters: the vehicle doesn’t spew exhaust into the station. The quiet of the electric engine also lets firefighters coordinate better on the drive, and can help cries for help be heard when the responders arrive on site.

Vampire Drone by L3Harris: Taking down drones from kilometers away

L3Harris

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Drones are increasingly a part of modern battles, seen in wars across the globe but especially with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with both countries using a range of uncrewed aircraft to scout and fight. In August 2022, the Department of Defense announced it would send a new tool to aid Ukrainian forces as a way to counter Russian drones. Made by L3Harris, the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) system is a rocket launcher and sensor kit that can be mounted to a range of vehicles, providing a means to damage and destroy drones at a range of at least three miles. The laser-guided rockets, directed by a human operator, explode with a proximity fuse, making near misses into effective takedowns. 

Emergency SOS via satellite by Apple: Locating lost hikers with satellites

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For hikers lost in remote parts of the United States and Canada, calling for help means hoping for cell phone coverage, or waiting for a serendipitous rescue. But Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite, announced September 2022, will let people with an iPhone 14 transmit emergency messages via satellite, provided they can’t first establish a cellular connection. Texters will have a tap-through menu to create an information-dense but data-light report, and provided trees or mountains don’t block the signal, they can transmit crucial information, like what kind of injuries someone has sustained. With a clear view of the sky and fifteen seconds, a cry for help can reach space and then, even better, rescuers on Earth.

Automotive

We may be decades away from replacing fossil-fuel-powered vehicles with a fully electric fleet, but at the same time, EVs have continued their impressive gains on US roadways. But the most innovative companies in the automotive industry are looking beyond just batteries and charging infrastructure. They’re making the most of what we’ve got while doing the heavy lifting that goes unnoticed: Making vehicles lighter, more aerodynamic, more useful, and less wasteful. They’re also giving us faster and extremely entertaining cars—and we’re here to honor their technical brilliance.

Grand Award Winner

Vision EQXX by Mercedes-Benz: The slipperiest EV

Mercedes

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This year, Mercedes-Benz introduced a one-off, world-beating car with an altruistic purpose: To make the most out of the heavy batteries at the core of the growing EV fleet. The numbers for the Vision EQXX are otherworldly for an EV: 3,900 pounds of car and 747 miles on a single charge. It’s slow by EV and gasoline standards, yet modesty was the mission. So how did they do it? Here’s one trick: Its body can extend its sweptback tail at speed another eight inches, helping cut drag by half that of a normal sedan or crossover. To further augment efficiency, Mercedes-Benz opted for a Formula 1 subframe, magnesium wheels, tiny side-view mirrors, and a 100-kWh battery that the company claims is half the size and almost a third lighter than the powerpack in their production EQS sedan. Reducing mass and improving efficiency are old mechanical concepts that all manufacturers need to revisit if EVs are to succeed in the gasoline era. For that to happen, however, the breakthroughs must be this dramatic. Though it’s only a concept, the Vision EQXX may be the spark that ignites that reality.

Uconnect 5 by Jeep: Putting the passenger in command

Jeep

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Large SUVs typically allow the people in the back to zone out and watch whatever’s on the screens in front of them. But in the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, all the fun is in the shotgun seat—and won’t distract the driver. The Uconnect 5 infotainment system can run up to eight independent displays, including a 10.3-inch touchscreen built into the passenger-side dash. To reduce distraction, Jeep tints the display so it’s a faint glow to the driver while still looking bright to the passenger. You can connect an Xbox to the HDMI port, stream a ton of titles with the built-in Amazon Fire TV, control the 360 cameras, and set the navigation system by sending a chosen route to three of the driver displays. Best of all, there’s no ugly screen-mounting hardware to clutter the polished black dash.

Pilot Sport EV by Michelin: When tires go electric

Michelin

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Electric vehicles—performance models especially—put the strain of extra mass and torque onto their tires. The Pilot Sport EV is the first of a growing segment of EV-specific treads designed to improve both range and grip. Typically, a manufacturer can increase range by reducing the rolling resistance—the slowing effects of friction—at the expense of grip. These Michelins find balance by putting different parts of the tire in charge of handling torque and mass: The center of the tire has a grippier compound to take the brunt of an EV’s torque, while the shoulders are optimized for lower rolling resistance. It’s a mix they honed over the last eight years on Formula E racers. Compared to the company’s gold standard, the Pilot Sport 4S, the Pilot Sport EV increases range by as much as 20 percent with nearly the same level of traction. 

Android Automotive OS by Google: A car OS from an OS company

Google

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Google’s suite of car-specific software has been mediocre for the past several years. Android Auto projects a limited array of Android apps onto a car’s infotainment display; then there’s regular old Android, which is tablet software that many automakers modify for their vehicles. In either instance, their interfaces feel half-baked. Enter Android Automotive OS, which is Google’s first operating system developed specifically and only for cars. Through it, the voice assistant, maps, keyboards, and the Play store run faster and function more intuitively than a smartphone connected to Android Auto or Apple CarPlay ever could. Thanks to it, the experience on the latest Volvo, Polestar, and Chevrolet vehicles is dramatically better than anything those automakers had ever coded themselves.

GR Corolla by Toyota: A three-cylinder powerhouse

Toyota

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In 2022, it’s rare to see automakers develop all-new gasoline engines. To see Toyota craft an engine with as much output per liter as a Bugatti Chiron? That’s a cosmic event. The G16E-GTS spews 300 turbocharged ponies from three tiny cylinders displacing only 1.6 liters. This is the ferocious heart of the 2023 GR Corolla, an ordinary-looking hatchback. On the Morizo Edition, the turbocharger pumps 26.3 PSI of air through the intake—a monstrous amount that the fortified engine block can handle. First offered overseas in the smaller GR Yaris, this engine transforms the humdrum Corolla—the world’s best-selling car of all time—into an everyday sports car. It’s comfortable, practical, gets 28 mpg on the highway, and will absolutely embarrass a Porsche on a twisty road. 

FC1-X by Nitro: Rally racing at its most extreme

Nitro

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The FC1-X is what happens when motorcycle stuntman and record-breaking rally driver Travis Pastrana and a Swedish race team agree that Red Bull’s Rallycross is too slow. The FC1-X is a custom, 1000-horsepower electric car that zaps to 60 mph in 1.5 seconds and can land a 100-foot jump. A major reason: The car’s silicon carbide inverter is a fraction of the size and weight of a typical EV’s inverter—the device that converts the battery’s DC output to AC for the motors—and the battery can handle major power draws without overheating. It’s unique to Pastrana’s Nitro Rallycross series. As it evolves, FC1-X stands to influence the next generation of EVs—for both the track and the road.

Super Cruise by General Motors: Best hands-free system

GM

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General Motors’ Super Cruise strikes an ideal balance between hands-free driving assistance—giving the human operator a break—and safety. Using a network of laser-scanned highways at 10 times the accuracy of a GPS map with a full suite of ultrasonic, radar, and infrared cameras, Super Cruise can operate on more than 400,000 miles of marked US highways, including executing automatic lane changes. Most important, however, is when it won’t operate: Super Cruise will disable the system for the entire drive if the driver looks away for too long, a road is unmapped, the vehicle’s data connection goes dark, or any number of failure points to keep the person behind the wheel engaged. Next up is Ultra Cruise, which promises “door-to-door” hands-free driving, but that may be years away.

Hummer EV by GMC: A maneuverable behemoth

GMC

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Let’s get this out of the way. From the standpoint of energy consumption, the GMC Hummer EV is wasteful—and, at nearly 10,000 pounds, it’s a behemoth. Its battery pack is twice the capacity of the best Tesla Model S but delivers 80 percent of the EPA-estimated range compared to that vehicle. But underneath this super truck’s extravagance is a mind-blowing method of four-wheel steering. CrabWalk sounds too ridiculous and motion sickness-inducing to be true, but it is: All four wheels can steer the truck diagonally. The rear rims steer in tandem with the front at up to 10 degrees, enough to let this massive vehicle dance sideways like a crustacean that needs to parallel park, moving up to 25 mph. 

Nevera by Rimac: The most powerful production car

Rimac

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A Croatian scientist who converted his broken BMW to run on electricity is now, at age 34, the CEO of a hypercar company that’s fresh off a merger with Bugatti. Mate Rimac’s dream machine, the 1877-horsepower Nevera, has four electric motors and the stiffest carbon fiber monocoque—that’s a combination of the car’s frame and body—around. It’s the world’s fastest EV: 258 mph. Car enthusiasts with $2.4 million to blow will soon show us the evidence. But more importantly, Rimac’s other partners, which include Hyundai and Porsche, will benefit from the company’s EV expertise in future cars costing a fraction of that price.

MotoE by Ducati: The hottest electric racing bike

Ducati

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The heavy batteries that can be packaged easily in a car are harder to incorporate into a motorcycle that needs to balance. Instead of allowing a bulky, off-the-shelf battery pack to dictate the bike’s design, Ducati designed the battery on its MotoE—which the entire field of the 2023 FIM MotoE World Cup will ride—so that it functions as an integral part of the bike’s central frame instead of a bulky add-on. Two separate cooling systems (one for the 18-kWh battery, the other for the 150-hp motor and inverter) ensure the MotoE can sustain 171 mph and then pit for a recharge without needing to cool down. It might not be the first electric racing bike, but it is the first such bike that customers will ultimately want to ride on the road. 

Sports and Outdoors

This year’s sports and outdoor innovations make our adrenaline-filled adventures smarter, while going easier on the Earth. On land, a bike helmet can be broken down and recycled at the end of its life. In the snow, a ski that helps you tear down the mountain can also be similarly repurposed. But the best sports and outdoor tech this year helps us communicate better—whether that be a new system for catchers to relay plays to pitchers, or a satellite safety beacon that keeps you connected to family and friends. One winner represents both: an electric joy ride that makes careening through the water easy, fun, and carbon-neutral.

Grand Award Winner

Orca Carbon by Taiga: A silent, safer emission-free joy ride

Taiga

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Personal watercraft like Jet Skis are fun to ride, but this year’s winner makes them greener. Historically, personal watercrafts—or PWCs—operate on fossil fuel, emit noise up to 115 decibels, and leak unburned gasoline into the water. Enter the Taiga Orca Carbon, which takes electric vehicles aquatic. (The company built upon what it learned from its line of electric snowmobiles.) This PWC replaces the gas tank with lithium-ion batteries, which power the jet-drive impeller, creating an electric vessel that is silent and emission-free. The powertrain is located in the bottom of the hull for better handling and performance, which creates a safer ride. The Taiga Orca Carbon broadens the accessibility of on-water exploration, and shows that ditching the engine doesn’t have to decrease the fun.

Canyon Packs by Slot: Gear designed for desert rappelling

Slot

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Adventurers who go canyoneering squeeze through narrow sandstone passages, sometimes while walking in or swimming through a river, and nearly always must also manage technical gear like ropes and belay devices. Slot’s Guide 50L and Rapide 38L canyoneering packs are specifically designed with these desert conditions in mind, with an innovative rope management system. A divider separates rope from gear and allows users to feed out only the amount of line they need—from 15 to 200 feet—for each rappel. The bag keeps the rest of the rope organized inside, along with the rest of your equipment. The result is a more efficient and safer system that eliminates the need to uncoil and recoil rope for each rappel.

Stealth driver by TaylorMade: A club that’s one tough cookie

TaylorMade

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Drivers suffer the most damage compared to other golf clubs, experiencing 30,000 Gs of force in one swing. Carbon fiber—a lightweight, strong material—usually cracks under that amount of power, which led clubmakers to use flexible titanium faces for their drivers. But TaylorMade changes the golf club game with its new StealthDriver, finding a way to use carbon after all. Its light face can handle plenty of strokes, higher ball speeds, and longer drives, thanks to its 60 layers of carbon, reduced weight, and aerodynamic shape. Despite the changes, it still gives off the satisfying thwack golfers love from a club with an all-metal head.  

Piston Pro X by Kuat: An easy-loading and safe bike rack

Kuat

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Bike racks are notoriously difficult and annoying to load. Most require two hands, which makes securing a bicycle while holding the rack open almost impossible if you’re flying solo. But Kuat’s Piston Pro features smooth-opening, hydro-pneumatic arms that you can operate with just one hand and let you fasten a bike by the tires without touching the frame. The company also incorporates brake lights into the bike rack. The sleek, eye-catching piece of gear holds ebikes too; a separate ramp for electric bikes assists with loading. And a 12mm lock keeps everything secure.

Myelin Helmet by POC Sports: A lid that’s recyclable

POC Sports

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Bike helmets are typically in service for five to 10 years, then they head for the landfill. But the POC Myelin helmet gets a new life when its time protecting a rider’s head is over. The headpiece may look like a regular cycling helmet at first, but inside its clean design hides a host of advanced technical details, such as adhesive-free assembly, a recycled fabric outer shell, and cutaway fasteners. These allow the helmet to be separated into individual pieces at the end of its life for easy recycling in your home’s blue bin, or at your local recycling center.

Fuel EXe by Trek Bikes: An electric mountain bike with a no-engine feel

Trek Bikes

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Typical ebikes deliver a whiny hum and noticeable surge when you pedal with the assist they offer. Other riders can find the noise obnoxious, too. But the Trek Fuel EXe is the best new “SL,” or superlight ebike, blurring the line between purely human-powered and pedal-assist bikes. Trek partnered with German robotics manufacturer TQ to develop the new HPR50 motor, which forgoes noisy belts and gears in favor of a refined system; it’s smaller, quieter, and more durable than traditional ebike motors. The result is a sleek, powerful ride with a smooth boost that’s hard to distinguish from your own pedaling power.

The ePE membrane by Gore: A new type of waterproof tech from an old-school company

Gore

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Gore, the company that invented the waterproof but breathable GORE-TEX membrane in 1968, is back with a new material that aims to take planet-polluting chemicals out of outerwear. After more than seven years of development and rigorous testing, Gore built upon its experience with expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE), polymer processing, and materials science to create an expanded polyethylene (ePE) membrane that’s thin, light, and strong. The new material is also free of environmentally damaging perfluorochemicals (PFCs) and made with recycled nylon and polyester, resulting in a reduced carbon footprint. You can find the new ePE membrane—which has set a new standard in waterproofing—in GORE-TEX products like the Patagonia Storm Shift jacket and pants.

PitchCom by PitchCom Sports: A 150-year baseball problem, solved

PitchCom Sports

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Signs in baseball vary from team to team and player to player: Catchers flash two fingers so the pitcher knows to hurl a fastball; coaches use signs to tell a baserunner if they should bat or bunt. However, the opposing team can read these signs and use them to their own advantage, making sign-stealing a 150-year-old problem. Now PitchCom Sports—which created a wrist transmitter for catchers and a receiver for inside the pitcher’s hat—has relieved professional players of the threat of intercepted signals. Phrases like “fastball” and “good job!” are pre-loaded as .mp3 files onto the PitchCom device and played when the catcher or coach presses the button. Only the people wearing the PitchCom receiver can hear the play. And, the commands can be played in any language, so all players on the team know the play.

Salem Dyneema Down Parka by Foehn: A puffy jacket that doesn’t wear down

Foehn

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Down jackets are known for their warmth—and their short life span. Sportswear company Foehn solves inevitable wear and tear by incorporating Dyneema, an incredibly strong synthetic fiber previously used in backpacks and other outdoor gear. The tough new garment combines high-performance insulation with the practically indestructible Dyneema to create a jacket that won’t rip while out on tundra escapades or be slashed by a dog’s untrimmed nails. It’s a lifetime investment for outdoor enthusiasts and those just looking for a tough, stylish, warm piece of kit.

The inReach Messenger by Garmin: A gadget for staying always connected

Garmin

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Satellite communicators can be expensive, tricky to connect to a signal when you need it, and are typically used for extreme outdoor adventures or emergencies only. (Or they require the newest iPhone, as we highlight in our Emergency Services and Defense category.) The Garmin inReach Messenger is designed for more everyday pursuits: when entering a deadzone during a road trip or staying connected while hiking far from cell towers. This 4-ounce  personal safety device lets you text anyone from anywhere over satellite, through pairing it to your phone and with the Garmin Messenger app, by using its virtual keyboard, or utilizing preset messages on the device itself. In case of emergency, the inReach Messenger connects the user to the Garmin Response Center. And should your phone die, the inReach Messenger’s Safety Charging gives your phone a partial charge for continued use.

Essential Ski by Rossignol: Reducing waste, one set of skis at a time

Rossignol

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The Essential Ski is a first—and a feat—for Rossignol: It’s made from 62 percent recycled, certified natural, and bio-sourced materials, including aluminum, steel, and wood. The design process uses no solvents or water. Plus, the ski can be recycled through a partnership with MTB Recycling that will repurpose the ski’s materials to the automotive, garden, or construction industries. And it’s produced using renewable energy. But don’t let its Earth-friendliness fool you: It’s a real-deal ski that lives up to Rossignol’s performance and durability standards. Plus, they’re not even guarding the secret of how they made it, so that others can make greener skis, too.

Home

Renters, homeowners, and DIY-ers don’t always have the time, money, or skills to accomplish the home improvement tasks on their lists. We get it. Fortunately, one of the benefits of living in a time of rapid innovation is that technology can easily step in where our brains, brawn, and bank accounts fall short. This year, you can upgrade your living space with an easy-install smart showerhead, use spray paint that doesn’t drip, or even consider the most compact in-home water recycling system we’ve ever seen—and that’s just the tip of the screw.

Grand Award Winner

Smart water recycling by Hydraloop: A compact, easy-to-use gray water recycling system

Hydraloop

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Gray water is the stuff that spirals down your shower and sink drains, and it’s mostly clean, usable H2O that goes to immediate waste. Recycling this wastewater is doable, but the required systems are frequently large, maintenance-intensive, and involve a complicated jumble of pipes and valves. Hydraloop founder Arthur Valkieser changed that by redesigning existing water treatment technology to eliminate filters, and shrinking his device into something that looks a lot more like a modern household appliance. As water fills the Hydraloop’s tank, sediment sinks to the bottom and lighter grime like soap and hair floats to the top, where it foams up and over as waste. Then, a torrent of air bubbles grabs any free-floating solids and removes them, too. The gray water then enters an aerobic bioreactor where live bacteria feast on any remaining organic material and soap. Every four hours after that, UV-C light disinfects the stored water to kill any remaining bacteria, and the non-potable (but sanitized) water is ready to go back into your washing machine, toilet tank, or garden.

Timberline Solar shingles by GAF Energy: Roofing and renewable energy in one

GAF Energy

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Installing traditional rack-mounted solar panels requires drilling through your existing roof, creating holes that can lead to leaks and water damage if they’re improperly sealed. GAF Energy’s Timberline Solar shingles, however, nail down just like regular asphalt roofing, thanks to a flexible thermoplastic polymer backing. With that supporting a durable photovoltaic surface, they’ll hang tight in the rain, hail, and winds up to 130 mph. Even brighter: These shingles have serious curb appeal and you won’t have to choose between spending on a roof replacement or investing in solar—you can do both at the same time.

3-in-1 Digital Laser Measurer by Dremel: Precise measurements of uneven surfaces

Dremel

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Anyone who’s tried to measure an odd-shaped object knows the struggle of fumbling with a flexible tape, laboring through numerous calculations, or painstakingly determining the length of a string that once followed the contours of the piece in question. Dremel’s 3-in-1 digital laser measurer makes this job easier with a snap-on wheel you can roll for up to 65 feet along any surface. On top of that, it’s got a laser measurer that’s accurate within an eighth of an inch, and a 5-foot tape for all your in-home measuring needs.

757 PowerHouse by Anker: A longer-lasting portable power station

Anker

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Whether you need portable outdoor power or are trying to sustain your home through a blackout, the lithium iron phosphate cells inside the Anker 757 PowerHouse will keep your devices juiced for more than 3,000 cycles. That means if you dispense and refill its full 1,500-watt output once a day, this picnic-cooler-sized hub will last for more than eight years. It’s got one car outlet, two USB-C ports, four USB-A connections, and six standard household AC plugs. Bonus: Its flat top allows it to double as a sturdy off-grid table.

Glidden Max-Flex Spray Paint by PPG: Drip-proof spray paint

PPG

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Few things are more disheartening to a DIY-er than completing a project, shaking up a can of spray paint, and then seeing your first coat start dripping all over your masterpiece. Applying a smooth sheen of color takes practice, and PPG seems to understand that not everyone has the time to learn the fine points of pigment application. The company’s Glidden Max-Flex all-surface paint eschews the traditional conical spray for a unique wide-fan pattern that not only refuses to drip, but dries in minutes. The lacquer-based formulation works on wood, glass, and metal and is available in 16 matte shades ranging from “In the Buff” to “Black Elegance.”

M18 18V Cordless Tire Inflator by Milwaukee: Faster, cooler roadside assistance

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It goes without saying that cordless inflators produce lots of air, but they also generate a bunch of heat. That’s a problem when your pump conks out after 5 minutes and you have to wait for it to cool down before you can keep filling your tires. Not only will Milwaukee’s M18 cordless tire inflator push out 1.41 standard cubic feet of air per minute—making it the fastest 18-volt cordless tire inflator around—but its internal fan will keep it chugging along for up to 20 minutes. You might not even need to use it that long, either: It’ll top off a 33-inch light duty truck tire in less than a minute.

Smart Showerhead by hai: No plumber necessary

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Smart showerheads frequently require skilled experts to install, and some even feature components that are built into the wall of your bathroom. That’s not accessible for the everyday homeowner. You don’t need tools or special skills to hook up hai’s smart Bluetooth showerhead, though. Just unscrew the old head, twist on the new one, connect the app, and you’ve got immediate control over both temperature and flow. Use the adjustable spray slider on the head to go from a high-pressure stream to a light mist, and choose your preferred heat level from the app. Plus, customizable LED lights will let you know when you’ve reached your self-imposed limit, saving water.

Credits:

Package Editor: Rob Verger

Judging Panel: Corinne Iozzio, Stan Horaczek, Rob Verger

Category Editors: Rachel Feltman, Stan Horaczek, Charlotte Hu, Corinne Iozzio, John Kennedy, Jen McCaffery, Amanda Reed, Purbita Saha, Rob Verger

Researchers: Kelsey Atherton, Clifford Atiyeh, Kate Baggaley, Berne Broudy, Rahul Rao, Andrew Rosenblum, Celia Shatzman, Terri Williams

Design Director: Russ Smith

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An army may march on its stomach, but it can’t march at all if the soldiers don’t have water. To ensure that its forces are always able to hydrate wherever they operate, this year, the Marine Corps has been testing a machine that can pull drinkable water out of the air. Called the Atmospheric Portable-water Sustainment Unit, when paired with a water purification system it can generate over 15 gallons in a day, or enough water for a squad of marines.

Capt. Sean Conderman, of the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment’s combat logistics battalion at MCBH, told The Honolulu Star-Advertiser that it’s in essence a small dehumidifier paired with a purifier. “We can mount it basically on any vehicle, and what it does is it pulls water out of the air to give us potable water without having to connect to an actual water source.” He further elaborated to The Star Advertiser that this device would be ideal in humid environments like the ones across the United States Indo-Pacific Command. 

The Atmospheric Portable-water Sustainment Unit, or APSU, is paired with the Corps’ Lightweight Water Purification System, to ensure that the water it pulls from the atmosphere is drinkable. This system generates 15 to 20 gallons of drinkable water every 24 hours. Since the Corps recommends “three to four and a half quarts (96–144 fl oz) of fluid per day for men and two to three quarts (64–96 fl oz) for women,” using the high end of the recommendations, the system can sustain 13 men, or 20 women. With variable water consumption rates across people, and production of up to 20 gallons, a single unit could sustain at least one squad, possibly a squad and a half.

Drinking water is a necessity anywhere the military operates. In the Pacific or other humid environments, it can turn the oppressively moist air into an asset, freeing forces up from a reliance on known streams, instead letting them drink from the sky. 

Snowbird Water Technologies built the APSU for the military, which it describes as an “Air Water Generator.” The air water generator “produces water from air, using an extremely efficient process by which condensation is collected and treated with an ozonator and UV light, ensuring safe and potable drinking water is produced at the tactical edge of the battlefield.

Snowbird first announced their contract with the military in April 2021, highlighting that the system can fit on the back of trailers or vehicles. Being able to bring a water generator into the field means that the water supply is constrained only by the availability of power and storage.

One possibility this opens up is that soldiers or marines could set up temporary camps in austere places where shipping in drinking water would be more trouble than it’s worth.

As the marine corps revisits its pacific past and considers island campaigns, one challenge is resupply. Logistics, or the process of getting forces in the field everything they need, is a hard problem, and it is harder over sea and in war zones. A marine regiment that can supply its own water will still need some aid: everything from food to bullets to medical supplies are depreciating quantities in war. But the ability to free itself from dependence on local water supplies, which this Atmospheric Portable-water Sustainment Unit promises, could let the marines go longer between supply drops, or move through otherwise impassible routes without sacrificing health.

For centuries, the most meaningful constraint on a military was how much food it could carry on the march (or forage in the field), and that was along routes premised on water being available. 

The ability to bring water resupply into the field expands where an army can go, and how long it can operate. Often, battles have been forced by soldiers desperate for supply seeking what they can before rations run out. With at least water resupply on hand (for as long as there’s power to run the water generator), a unit can wait, choosing instead to raid when it is most advantageous to do so.

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Stopping a missile is a complicated operation that takes a team of machines. The Army, charged with protecting soldiers in the field from enemy attacks, is testing a system that can coordinate sensors and interceptors to better accomplish this task. On November 17, the Army successfully used this new system to shoot down a cruise-missile stand-in at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

To do this, soldiers from the Army’s 43rd Air Defense Artillery Regiment used two Patriot and Sentinel radars, Patriot missile launchers, and Patriot interceptors, all coordinated through a new command system. This connective tissue between sensors and interceptors is the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, or IBCS. It’s a way for the Army to coordinate radars and missile interceptors across a broad area, comprehensively detecting incoming threats and then making sure those missiles are stopped, without overcommitting interceptors and depleting vital stockpiles.

This endeavor “had a test objective of demonstrating Army Integrated Air & Missile Defense capability to execute [a] kill chain against a ground launched cruise missile surrogate,” the Army said in a release.

In other words, the soldiers used the sensors and interceptors to track and destroy a target drone that was imitating a cruise missile in flight. While the test specifically used Patriot and Sentinel radars, and Patriot interceptors, the premise is that the IBCS can incorporate a host of useful existing and future sensors, as well as any kinds of interceptors the Army might field.

“Preliminary indications are that the planned flight test objectives against the cruise missile threat were achieved, and the target was successfully intercepted,” said the release.

Cruise missiles are a durable threat on modern battlefields, in part because their low trajectory and high degree of maneuverability mean they can be hard to detect at a distance. Patriot missiles, which are deployed in batteries with fire command stations and radars to track targets, have been used to defend against cruise missiles for decades, though the missiles drastically underperformed at intercepting targets during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

One way to improve targeting is to incorporate and coordinate more sensors across a wider field, so that missiles can be detected earlier and the most relevant ways to stop them can be brought to bear against the target. Sometimes, these tools for stopping weapons will be missiles, like the Patriot interceptors, or the older HAWK missiles the US is preparing to send to Ukraine. 

Other ways of stopping an attack may be rockets, like the Vampire anti-air and anti-drone system. Laser weapons, like one tested by PopSci, are another component of modern anti-missile tech, and could be incorporated into a command system.

There are many ways to stop a missile, or a drone, in flight. Grouped together, jammers, guns, missiles, lasers, and other answers to aerial threats are called “effectors,” in military and industry parlance. The effect can be everything from explosion by missile, puncture by bullet, melting by laser, electronic disruption by jammer, but what is essential to the IBCS is that a commander has the sensors that can say where the attack is and the tools to stop it. 

“Once fielded, IBCS will extend the battlespace beyond what a single sensor tied to a single effector can provide, allowing the use of a sensor or effector’s full range and enabling the warfighter to quickly see and act on data across the entire battlefield,” said Northrop Grumman, maker of IBCS, in a release.

Many legacy weapon systems are designed to work with a specific sensor, making a self-contained and compact kit that matched the capabilities and limits of the technology at the time of introduction. It also meant that commanders in the field were limited to working within that system’s information and weapons, even if another system could see the same target. By designing IBCS to incorporate information across sensors, it can match the Army’s desired plug-and-play information environment of the future, where the tools on hand are used to share information, and then the coordinating node matches signal to weapon.

The testing of IBCS at White Sands started in January, and over 10 months soldiers learned how to use the system in a range of scenarios designed to resemble what might be seen in combat. This included two flight tests prior to November 17 where “IBCS detected, tracked, and intercept threats that included: a high speed, high performance tactical ballistic missile and two cruise missile surrogates during a stressing electronic attack,” according to Northop Grumman. 

Provided the system can withstand electronic attack in the field as well as it did in testing, the coordinated system should let the Army better protect soldiers from a range of incoming assaults, using whatever tools are on hand to build a defense that’s stronger together.

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The wars of the future may be decided by boots off the ground. DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, is prepared to award funding for new kinds of personal mobility systems, PopSci sibling publication Task & Purpose has learned. The form may vary, but the net effect of new mobility is the same: DARPA is funding the development of jetpacks for soldiers.

The jetpacks, and other such mobility devices, are being pursued under the Portable Personal Air Mobility System (PPAMS). A DARPA spokesperson told Task & Purpose that DARPA has selected several companies for phase II funding, noting that “DARPA is currently working with the small companies to finalize contracting details and award contracts, so at this time we can’t discuss the specifics.”

This news follows previous developments. In March 2021, DARPA posted a notice stating its intent to develop and demonstrate “novel or unique approaches to personal battlefield mobility for operators in a man portable low-cost package.” While there are already many types of transport already available to soldiers, from Humvees on the ground to parachutes or V-22 Ospreys for arriving from the sky, what this sought was a unique way to move an individual person.

Going beyond existing mobility means finding a new way soldiers can move and fight beyond that. Extra mobility on a personal level is useful for everything from light resupply, fighting in cities, search and rescue, boarding ships at sea, and letting special operations forces sneak in and out of hostile territory. 

“When deployed, the systems allow mobility for a range of at least 5 km [3.1 miles] for a single operator, likely at low to medium altitudes. Systems should be designed such that assembly and deployment can occur in less than 10 minutes using only simple tools or no tools at all,” reads the 2021 notice.

One other standout feature is that DARPA is exploring both reusable and disposable systems. These jetpacks are designed to carry a person over rough terrain, up a building, or somewhere else they could not normally get. Plus, they can be expendable if the situation demands it.

“Some examples of technologies of interest include jetpacks, powered gliders, powered wingsuits, and powered parafoils which could leverage emerging electric propulsion technologies, hydrogen fuel cells or conventional heavy fuel propulsion systems,” continued the notice.

Because these are tools designed in part for covert missions, DARPA wants to make sure that they are both quiet and cool, in a literal sense: If a jetpack is hot enough to show up on infrared sensors, it likely means the person wearing it can be caught and shot. In addition, the kit needs to be simple to operate and quick to learn, with both design and computer-assistance allowing an average grunt to become a jump-jet enabled mobile infantry unit of one in no time.

Phase II of the program is about developing the technology enough to show that it is viable in ground or flight tests, with Phase III aimed at creating a demonstrator. Phase I, which already awarded contracts, asked companies to describe the system, anticipate how it will perform, outline a path for tech to go from concept to demonstrator, and showcase its use.

Triton Systems, a defense contractor, was one of the companies awarded a Phase I contract. In its contract award from 2021, Triton did not describe the type of portable mobility system pursued. Instead, the company noted that its system “will be quiet, highly reliable, capable of carrying a wide pilot and payload weight range, compact and light enough to easily be transported by a single soldier, require relatively little operator training, and can be made to autonomously self-deliver to stranded operators in remote areas.”

Autonomous delivery of a jetpack to people in the field is a major promise, as it turns a jetpack into not just a way in but a tool that could be delivered from some distance away, allowing stranded soldiers the means to escape safely. It is a promising offer, though there are inherent hurdles in the design. A trip to deliver itself to someone will drain fuel or electrical power, limiting travel time and distance, even more so when carrying a human.

There is a long history of the US military pursuing novel flying machines, with an eye towards more mobility and better scouting for individual soldiers. But the hard limits of turning an individual human into an efficient flying machine, at speeds and sizes useful enough for sneaking into key areas, have so far meant these concepts remain novelties and prototypes, instead of a regular feature of war.

In general, modern jetpacks have moved to at least the demonstration stage. Whether or not they can be useful in actual military missions remains to be seen.

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In the desert south of Death Valley, mock patients waited for drones to deliver simulated blood. California’s Fort Irwin is an Army base that hosted an event called Project Convergence 2022 from late September into November, an annual exercise led by the United States where militaries of multiple nations work together to explore new technologies in service of war. By testing drone delivery of medical supplies, in conjunction with other tech, the military is looking at ways to ensure the survival of soldiers after battle injuries, even in circumstances where it’s unsafe to send people on foot for help.

Part of Project Convergence was Project Crimson, which involved drones dropping medical relief to field medics in a simulated mass casualty scenario. 

“Project Crimson is a project to take a common unmanned air system and adapt it to support a medical mission,” said Nathan Fisher, medical robotics and autonomous systems division chief at the US Army’s Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center, in a release. “This drone supports medical field care when casualty evacuation isn’t an option. It can keep whole blood and other crucial items refrigerated in the autonomous portable refrigeration unit and take it to medics in the field with wounded warriors.”

Researchers first proved that drones could successfully deliver blood in 2015. As cargo, blood makes a lot of sense, since a small amount can be life saving, and drones can rapidly transport small cargoes as needed. In the summer of 2021, British marines tested blood delivery by drone swarm, with the dedicated resupply drones carrying everything from ammunition to blood to troops in the field. 

For Project Crimson, the army used a FVR-90 drone, a vertical takeoff and landing UAV. Two outriggers attached to the drone’s wings each feature two rotors, allowing the FVR-90 to launch and land like a quadcopter. In flight, the FVR-90 flies like a fixed-wing plane, with a front-facing propeller and its over 15-feet wide wingspan allowing for long-lasting efficient flight of up to 16 hours. The FVR-90 tops out at 74 mph, but it can carry up to 10 pounds of payload under its wings, ready to drop and deliver.

The drone “doesn’t need a catapult launch or runway to perform a lifesaving mission. This allows military personnel to preserve life in the critical phase of injury and facilitate rapid transport to an Army hospital for further treatment,” said the release.

Beyond medical delivery drones, the army tested distant communication and diagnostic tools, designed to improve the ability of field medics to observe and manage the health of injuries in the field.

One of these is the Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit, or BATDOK. It’s a smartphone app that can work with sensors placed on the patients, scanning information and then storing it for up to 25 patients per device. This information can be shared over a mesh network with other devices, or transferred via protocols like Bluetooth and WiFi, letting a field medic pass along records seamlessly for a patient at the point of transfer to better care. 

“The facility can see the patient’s status real-time using BATDOK, while the medics on ground can update treatments and medications for the patients as well. This allows the facility to be alerted, rally and prepare to treat the patient once they are transported,” explained Michael Sedillo, an integrated cockpit sensing program airman systems director with the Air Force Research Laboratory, in a press release.

As part of Project Convergence, troops carried litters of mock casualties to medical transports, with medics applying care in transit. At the field hospital, field medics and hospital staff traded records using local communications infrastructure, ensuring smooth flow of care. 

Project Convergence included participants from the British and Australian Armies, with allied nations like Canada and New Zealand observing.

Ultimately, exercises like this will improve the ability of the military to not just fight wars, but to ensure that injury on the battlefield is dealt with as best as possible. Drone resupply of medical necessities like blood can keep people in the field alive longer until reinforcements or evacuation arrives. Better data management can make sure that as little information as possible is lost when transferring care, letting medical teams move forward in treatment as conditions allow.

As robots and new data tools move into greater use on the battlefield, training on these labor-saving devices should open up the possibility for human soldiers to focus directly on the tasks of saving lives, while machines provide the tools needed to do that.

Watch a video about Project Convergence below:

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Boston Dynamics and Ghost Robotics have both offered similarly unsettling four-legged automatons to consumers for a few years now—although only one of those companies recently strapped a sniper rifle to their product. As it seems, however, turning your quadrupedal robot into a weapon apparently isn’t enough of a differentiation to prevent a legal battle, as Tech Crunch and elsewhere report that Boston Dynamics has filed a lawsuit against Ghost Robotics alleging multiple patent infringements.

According to legal paperwork submitted on November 11, Boston Dynamics is accusing their competitor of blatantly copying seven patents for “core technology” related to Spot, the plaintiff company’s four-legged, dog-like robot. “Boston Dynamics’ early success with the Spot robot did not go unnoticed by competitors in the robotics industry, including Ghost Robotics,” argues a portion of the filing, specifically calling out Ghost Robotics’ Vision 60 and Spirit 40 quadruped products. Boston Dynamics also recounts that it sent Ghost a request to review its patents over the summer, followed by multiple cease and desist letters that went unanswered.

[Related: Boston Dynamics gave its dog-like robot a charging dock and an arm on its head.]

As Tech Crunch also notes, although Boston Dynamics has previously sold products to law enforcement groups such as the New York Police Department (although that partnership ended last year), it still opposes weaponizing robots. Last month, the company even added its name to an open letter speaking out against the practice, alongside companies including Clearpath Robotics and ANYbotics. “We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues,” reads a portion of the letter. “Weaponized applications of these newly-capable robots will also harm public trust in the technology in ways that damage the tremendous benefits they will bring to society.”

Compare this to Ghost Robotics, whose CEO once vowed, “We’re not going to dictate to our government customers how they use the robots” shortly after debuting one of its aforementioned four-legged robots with SWORD Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR) mounted to it at a trade show.

Ghost Robotics had not yet responded to the allegations at the time of writing.

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At a range in southern England, researchers tested a new laser, making it one step closer to military use. Developed for the Ministry of Defence, DragonFire is intended to be a long-range answer to incoming threats, a way to defeat projectiles in mid-air through the concentrated power of intense light. On November 8, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) announced it had conducted long-range laser trials at the Porton Down site. During the live fire test, the laser hit and neutralized a small drone at a range of 2 miles.

The laser was developed for the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). Like most laser weapons, it is a composite technology, a sum of multiple systems put together into one more functional package. This included controls and image processing from defense contractor MBDA, a beam directory to track and point at targets made by defense contractor Leonardo, and a 50-kilowatt laser built by QinetiQ. In the future, the plan is for this laser to be able to “scale fire-power levels,” likely letting the user increase or decrease power to match the target. That saves energy otherwise wasted on overkill, while ensuring the laser can defeat tougher targets when they exist. 

“The trials involve firing the UK DragonFire demonstrator at a number of targets over a number of ranges, demanding pinpoint accuracy from the beam director,” DSTL said in a release. “These tests improve the UK’s understanding of how high-energy lasers and their associated technologies can operate over distance and defeat representative targets.” 

To develop the laser, the Ministry of Defence and industry have spent “around £100 million,” or roughly $118 million dollars. Laser weapons are heavily front-loaded on cost, with the research and development expense in the name of creating a weapon that can destroy targets cheaply, relative to using high-caliber bullets, rockets, or missiles instead.

“Laser directed energy weapons have the potential to provide lower cost lethality, reduced logistical burden and increased effectiveness when compared to other weapon systems – the technology could have a huge effect on the future of defence operations,” said DSTL in the release.

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

Laser weapons work by combining and focusing powerful light, and then holding that light steady on a target until the heat of the laser can damage it. The effectiveness of the laser depends on a host of factors, from the amount of power going in, to how well the tracking system can keep the laser focused on the same part of an object. Even the location of where a laser is focused on a drone can change the speed at which it is disabled: a laser aimed at plastic casing and circuits will disable a drone much faster than a laser aimed at igniting a battery.

That means simply developing a powerful laser is not enough to ensure a quick takedown of a drone, or a missile, or other threats like mortar rounds and rocket fire. The sensors and automated tracking systems that go into laser weapons are important for reducing the amount of time a laser needs to fire per target. On the range, a laser can focus on one object without distraction, but in a realistic combat scenario, a laser may have a few seconds to disable a projectile before moving onto another. 

The Ministry of Defence has been looking to develop a laser weapon since at least 2015. One of the durable challenges of making a laser weapon is that the beam’s effectiveness can be diminished by particulates in the air, from smoke or dust or even moisture like fog and rain. The 2015 request stated that the goal was for a laser which can “detect, acquire and track targets at range and in varying weather conditions, with sufficient precision.”

Some of those conditions, like billowing dust or thick fog, are also obstacles to drone flight and sensors. But with laser weapons also taking an anti-projectile role, an inability to stop attacks in bad weather could turn a gloomy day into a grim one in combat.

[Related: The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers.]

DragonFire has been in the works since at least 2017, as a way to defeat and disable aerial targets, like drones. Drones are an ideal target, in part because they fly slow enough for lasers to track, and because there is no onboard pilot that a laser can blind. Laser weapon use against people is governed by the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, part of the Geneva Conventions on Certain Conventional Weapons, which entered into force in 1998. Both the United States and the United Kingdom are among the treaty’s 109 signatories, agreeing to not use lasers specifically to blind people in war. 

That makes DragonFire, like other laser weapons, a modern solution to a modern threat. It’s a way to stop flying robots and uncrewed enemies, protecting humans from inanimate attackers.

Watch a video about it below:

The post The UK’s DragonFire laser is designed to burn drones out of the sky appeared first on Popular Science.

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On November 4, the Department of Defense announced a $400 million package of aid and weapons for Ukraine. This latest installment joins a long list of previous aid to the country as it continues its fight against Russian forces, which invaded Ukraine in February. The shape of the war is reflected in the aid sent, which in this package includes funding for anti-air missiles, river boats, and armored vehicles. But what is most striking about this latest aid package is the juxtaposition of both vintage and modern weapons: among them are refurbished T-72B tanks, a design that is decades old, and 1,100 new Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems. 

The package, the announcement states, is designed to support Ukraine “by meeting their most urgent needs, while also building the capacity of Ukraine’s Armed Forces to defend its sovereignty over the long term.”

Some of the $400 million is going to funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment, ways that the Ukrainian forces can keep fighting at a professional level. It’s also important for incorporating a range of modern and older equipment into one effective military force.

Here’s what to know about both the old and new tech that’s going to Ukraine.

Old equipment

Two of the systems included in the package are, at least in origin, decades old. Included is funding to refurbish old HAWK missiles so the US can deliver them to Ukraine in the future. HAWK missiles were first developed by the US in the 1950s, and deployed in the 1960s, with upgraded versions introduced in the 1970s and 1990s. The missile was named after the bird first, before retroactively getting the acronym “Homing All the Way Killer”

While their role in the US military has been supplanted by Patriot surface-to-air missiles, HAWK missiles can reach altitudes twice that of human-portable anti-air missiles like the Stinger or Strela, and fly nearly ten times as far, hitting planes as far away as 25 miles. Spain has already sent HAWK missiles and launchers to Ukraine, so the US announcement will expand the inventory of missiles.

Also included in the package are T-72B tanks, a Soviet design whose base T-72 model was first prototyped in 1968. T-72s entered production in 1972, with the B model first produced in 1986. This is a main battle tank, one of three lines maintained and produced by the USSR, with a 125mm gun designed to destroy the armored vehicles of NATO in any war in Europe. What sets the T-72B apart from other variants is especially thick turret armor, as well as a better engine. In addition, the tanks have a laser designator and can fire laser-guided rounds from the main gun, though this was designed as an option rather than the default. 

Because the T-72B is a Soviet design, the vehicles designated for Ukraine will come from a former Soviet stockpile, in this case the Czech Republic. The announcement notes that these tanks will be refurbished with “advanced optics, communications, and armor packages.” A separate announcement of the deal says that the United States and the Netherlands are partnering with the Czech Republic for the refurbishment. The first of these tanks are expected for delivery to Ukraine in December 2022, with more to come in 2023.

New weapons

The war in Ukraine is being fought with legacy systems from decades of Cold War buildup, and it is also being fought with new and modern tools, some of which specifically debuted in this war. The Phoenix Ghost, announced in April, is a self-detonating drone. These kinds of weapons have seen prolific use on Ukrainian battlefields, along with US-made Switchblade systems already in use.

When Phoenix Ghost was first announced, it was as a delivery of 121 of the systems. This latest announcement is an order of magnitude larger, at 1,100. These weapons fit in the increasingly crowded low skies above Ukraine, where quadcopter scouts and small remotely piloted missiles give soldiers on foot better information and greater reach.

A toolbox of tech 

The package is best seen as not a hodgepodge of old and new tech, but a coherent picture of what a modern military, at war for months against a similarly equipped foe, needs to win battles and fronts. The tanks in the announcement are listed alongside M117 armored wheeled vehicles, which allow soldiers to fight and move on routes with unexploded bombs or hidden landmines. The Armored Riverine Boats will help forces move and fight on the waterways of the country, of which none is likely more important than the Dnipro that runs through both Kyiv and Kherson.

This will all be coordinated with new communications, soon to be under the watchful protection of anti-air missiles, and with new drone-based weapons hitting gaps in defensive lines. War is a combined arms affair, and all of the items in the November 4 package offer tools for Ukraine to break out from the static artillery duels that can hold fronts in place.

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This article was originally featured on Task & Purpose.

The U.S. military’s uncrewed space plane has set a record for its longest flight in orbit. The X-37B craft has now been circling the earth for 902 days, greatly exceeding its previous record of 780 days. And it doesn’t appear to be coming back to Earth any time in the immediate future. 

The X-37B current mission started more than two years ago, with the craft launching from Cape Canaveral on May 17, 2020. With this milestone, the space plane’s total record has been more than 3,700 days in orbit.

The mission is secretive, with only two pieces of its payload announced. It’s the sixth Orbital Test Vehicle mission with the space plane, and the military has been keeping its operation and what it is doing on this and past missions relatively secret. Speculation has ranged from testing surveillance systems to experiments on putting satellites in lower orbits. 

What is clear is that this is the first mission launched under Space Force command. The X-37 project started life under the Air Force. After the Space Force formed in December 2019, it took over authority on the program. 

“This important mission will host more experiments than any prior X-37B flight, including two NASA experiments,” then-Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said in May 2020. “One is a sample plate evaluating the reaction of select significant materials to the conditions in space. The second studies the effect of ambient space radiation on seeds. A third experiment, designed by the Naval Research Laboratory, transforms solar power into radio frequency microwave energy, then studies transmitting that energy to earth.”

This flight is the first time the space plane has been equipped with a service module to carry additional pieces for experiments. During this mission, the X-37B launched a FalconSat-8, a satellite developed by the U.S. Air Force Academy that hosts five different experiments the academy will conduct. The space plane is also testing the effects of radiation and space on seeds, according to Space Force.

The X-37 project is also important because the space plane is reusable. Each launch uses a booster rocket, but the craft can safely land on its own The first flight, in 2010, lasted 224 days, and subsequent missions have pushed the longevity of its orbital capabilities. The space plane is powered by solar cells and lithium-ion batteries.

The United States is not alone in developing winged space planes. China has its own, smaller craft, which is also currently in orbit.

The military as a whole has been testing uncrewed vehicles or crafts, and some have set records for their time in operation. The X-37B however keeps beating its own results by significant margins each mission. It’s unclear when this current mission is set to end.

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A typical hobbyist drone is made by assembling electronic parts on frames made of carbon fiber or plastic. But as these flying machines continue to proliferate, it’s worth remembering that drones can come in many forms.

As an extreme case, consider a drone recently shared on Twitter. The quadcopter looks like it was assembled on a dare. With a body made of six sticks, the drone is little more than rotors, wires, and a control unit wrapped around an ultra minimalist frame. A caption on it reads, in Arabic, “Yemeni makes aircraft from stalks of qat.” For at least a few seconds, the drone flies, soaring overhead.

Here it is, in action: 

The drone is a reminder that such devices can actually be pretty simple. “I think the biggest benefit of this design is that once key materials are available – a battery, a receiver, several small motors, propellers and wiring – such a drone can be essentially assembled ‘on the fly,’ pun intended,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security.

What’s striking is how this drone distills the aircraft down to minimum parts. The wee flying machine is motors, writes, controls, and something it can all stick to. In this case, literal sticks, or stems from the qat plant.

“Obviously, some experience building and flying such quadcopters is helpful in making sure the drone can be properly stabilized, but a lot of those requirements and knowledge is freely available online as well,” says Bendett. “The main point of this video is that the quadcopter frame can be assembled from any products freely available. And the rest of the components can be relatively easily procured or even built/3D printed if necessary.”

Spare parts

The modern drone market is built on complete, packageable products. These are made by a variety of companies, though China’s DJI has long been the industry leader in low cost and mass production of capable drones. DJI drones have such a durable presence that, when Popular Science took part in a laser weapon demonstration in October, their drones were the targets.

As such a large player in the commercial space, DJI’s products end up in military use, which led the company to ban sales in both Ukraine and Russia after the latter invaded the former in February. The ready-made drones are the easiest and fastest way to get scouts into the sky. But as the Yemen-made stick-drone illustrates, the whole can be made from a handful of parts.

ISIS, the theocratic insurgency that for a few years controlled territory in Syria and Iraq, was able to build its own drones. These aircraft, largely fixed-wing (or miniature plane-like), employed plywood and styrofoam for their bodies. Guidance systems came from electronics supply shops, designed to go into DIY drone kits. By tapping into the same market, and getting parts from markets out of territory they controlled, ISIS was able to outfit its own drones from the same broader supply chain that makes mass-produced drones possible.

Food that flies

What stands out about the stick drone is the minimalism of its design, replacing bulky plastic with sticks destined for disposal. Another alternative, as presented in a recent robotics conference, is to make a drone where the wings themselves are cargo, consumable on delivery.

In this case, the drone’s wings are made of rice cakes.

“The researchers designed the wing of this partially edible drone out of compressed puffed rice (rice cakes or rice cookies, depending on whom you ask) because of the foodstuff’s similarity to expanded polypropylene (EPP) foam. EPP foam is something that’s commonly used as wing material in drones because it’s strong and lightweight; puffed rice shares those qualities,” writes Evan Ackerman of IEEE Spectrum.

By cutting rice cakes into hexagons, and then binding them together with edible gelatin, the researchers were able to make a foam-like wing. The electronics of this drone included a rotor, engine, control surfaces on the tail, and a battery. With the rice cakes packed in plastic and attached to the electronics as the wing, the drone is an airborne breakfast for one, designed as air-deliverable rescue rations.

Sticks and drones

While militaries will stick with equipment built for the purpose, the ability to turn a small amount of electronics into a flying machine kit with only a few found materials opens up possibilities for drone operation. In the field, it’s easy to imagine soldiers with a spare parts kit adapting those parts to make a new drone if their built unit is too broken to work. Even if all the spare drone does is make a noise and a distraction, the option for a little unexpected movement directed remotely could be useful, distracting hostile forces while seeking cover or escape. 

With field-assembly of drones as an objective, kits could be designed to work for forces that have to travel light, with an understanding that the drone will be assembled from foraged materials as needed. If a stick-kit drone is designed to be expendable, then the careful considerations of balancing an airframe for hundreds of hours of flight become secondary. Instead, a minimalist drone, built on trash, just needs to fly for a moment, useful until it crashes down and returns to rubbish.

The post A drone made out of sticks? In the UAV space, anything flies. appeared first on Popular Science.

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A scout drone is a system for collecting information—an uncrewed flying machine with freedom of movement and the ability to get lost or even shot down. As the United States Navy plans for greater integration of drones in its operations, the way drones capture, store, and transfer data are all new avenues for risk. At two October 26 events, the Navy and the defense industry addressed the unique problems of drone data management in the fleet. In brief, the issue at hand is how much data drones can collect, and how to convert that collected data into useful information, all while transfering that info to human commanders in a timely manner.

“What [are] the most important 1s and 0s it needs to travel on very resource-constrained devices that move things from satellite, from ship to ship and all of the above? The Navy is really struggling with this, but there are organizations that have [been] stood up to look at all these problems,” said Chris Cleary, principal cyber advisor to the Navy, according to reporting by Inside Defense. Cleary’s remarks came at an event held by the Federal News Network

While the specifics vary from vehicle to vehicle, a typical flying drone with cameras can, at a minimum, collect video, video in infrared, location data of the drone’s position, other flight information for the drone, as well as possibly the distance to an object filmed. With onboard data processing, the drone could do object analysis, and send back the raw data, the analyzed data, or both.

For nearly two decades, when the US’s primary use case for long-endurance drones was aerial surveillance and attack above Iraq and Afghanistan, collecting and analyzing the data from Predator, Reaper, and other drones became a labor-intensive task. This sometimes meant dozens of analysts watching either in-country or on video recorded and transferred to secure facilities stateside.

The Navy, which operates in fleets and squadrons at sea, can be more removed from terrestrial internet links. Satellite data links are one possibility, though they are vulnerable to loss if a shooting war spills into orbital destruction. For sailors at sea, direct connection between drones and ships is likely the way to go, though there are other hurdles for maritime drone use.

Data mines

On-board processing, part of what is in the commercial world known as edge commuting, is one way to minimize the data load that needs to be transferred out. That can come with its own risks, as people receiving and acting on the data for, say, target identification, would need to trust that the onboard computer processed it correctly. 

Another risk for drone use at sea is that if the drone stores data in its onboard computers, there’s a risk the data could be found when the drone is shot down and then extracted by a hostile enemy. The battlefield capture of intact sensitive Russian military equipment by Ukraine wasn’t just a battlefield victory, it also likely makes the use of that equipment by Russia against US-supplied foes less effective, as the equipment can be reverse-engineered and countermeasures can be designed with explicitly known.

Even without the risk of enemy capture, a downed drone still represents lost data. While drones will sometimes be in communication with human operators on ships, the vast expanse of ocean around the fleets that ships want to surveil could have the uncrewed vehicles flying beyond distances amenable to easy data transfer.

“When I lose the attritable thing if I don’t have links, how do I get that information off that little buddy? Otherwise, the mission was for naught and I have to go back and do it again,” Steven Fino said October 27 at the Association of Old Crows symposium in Washington, according to Inside Defense. (The Association of Old Crows is a group of former electronic warfare professionals.)

Foggy futures

In the past, commanders have been constrained by a lack of information in the field. This “fog of war,” which once applied to the clouds of gunpowder smoke over battlefields, metaphorically accounts for the uncertainty of knowing what is happening in war at any given moment. Drones, as data-gathering tools that expand the amount of information commanders collect, offer instead a different challenge. Instead of a lack of information, commanders can be inundated with too much information, or information that is, through processing, different from the reality on the ground (or sea, as it may be).

No technology can remove uncertainty from war. What new tools can offer, in the best cases, is a way for additional information to be added into the decision process. Converting data to information to action is difficult work. When it comes to designing, building, and employing flying machines, how that data is ultimately used can inform the process, and ensure drones are enhancing understanding of the world, rather than overwhelming it.

The post The Navy doesn’t know what to do with all its drone data appeared first on Popular Science.

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