Tag: complex

U.S. Navy Wants Killer Robot Ships

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❝ Defense News reports that the U.S. navy is planning to unleash unmanned surface combatants — military robot warships, basically — to accompany other boats that are controlled by a human crew.

Last year’s naval National Defense Strategy — when it was announced at the beginning of 2018 — was focused on backing up existing aircraft carriers and bolstering peacekeeping efforts. The new focus differs: smaller surface combatants, many of which will be unmanned, and equipped with state-of-the-art sensors.

The idea is to overwhelm the enemy and make it difficult for them to track a large number of smaller ships. Having a larger number of autonomous ships will also make sensor data collection more reliable and accurate.

❝ One such autonomous warship has already made headlines in the past: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Sea Hunter is a submarine-hunting warship that can operate without humans on board for 60 to 90 days straight. Details are becoming more sparse about the Sea Hunter since the Navy recently classified any information about its future.

Might be nice if the Feds and our military didn’t just pour taxpayers dollar$ into the ocean like so much laundry detergent. Proof of concept, prototyping, pilot projects are accepted as useful in any industrial project that doesn’t involve someone in a uniform with lots of stars on his hat.

Someday, an American government will grow cojones big enough to tell the military industrial complex to go raise their own money. Have a bake sale or something. Leave taxpayer dollar$ for healthcare, education, the legitimate needs of the whole populace.

Syria and Iraq are clubhouses for DIY remote-controlled guns

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Click on the photos for an alternative American TV version

The Syrian civil war is producing a multitude of remotely-operated, custom-made killing machines — sniper rifles and machine guns which a shooter can trigger remotely with the push of a button.

Remotely-operated guns are common in militaries around the world. The United States has thousands of them mounted on tanks and other armored vehicles. The U.S. Marine Corps is testing a smaller machine-gun robot called MAARS, and other gun-bots have appeared in South Korea, Israel and Russia.

But their adoption by rebel groups is an innovation arising from an intermingling of war, cheap personal computers and cameras. The devices typically use cables to hook up the guns to control stations. Aside from the gun, a complete setup only costs a few hundred bucks worth of off-the-shelf components and some technical skills.

After that, it’s just a matter of swiveling the now-teleoperated gun with a joystick, gamepad or a keyboard and triggering the firing mechanism…

While the weapons are hardly new to the Syrian battlefield, an August report published by the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office listed 20 distinct teleoperated weapons spotted in Iraq and Syria which can be traced to specific armed factions.

The consequences extend beyond the battlefield, as it’s usually only a matter of time before weapons of war filter back to the civilian world.

…It’s hard to see insurgents matching the scale by which states can deploy teleoperated guns. The weapons in Syria and Iraq are custom made, not mass produced. And armies have a lot more money to spend on research and development.

Still, that insurgents are nonetheless crafting their own versions is something the U.S. military should worry about as an emerging matter of fact in modern warfare.

I imagine there are stores retailing drones which can be adapted for geek death squads in just about every country in the world. Add that to the mix.

A 120-year-old device that perfectly mimics the song of a bird

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Get out the headphones or turn up your speakers and prepare to be impressed by archaic 19th century engineering.

Relying on dozens of moving parts including gears, springs, and a bellows, this small contraption built in 1890 was designed to do one thing: perfectly mimic the random chatter of a song bird. At first I expected to hear a simple repeating pattern of tweets, but the sounds produced by the mechanism are actually quite complex and vary in pitch, tone, and even volume to create a completely realistic song. I think if you closed your eyes you might not be able to tell the difference between this and actual birdsong.

It’s believed the machine was built 120 years ago in Paris by Blaise Bontems, a well-known maker of bird automata and was recently refurbished by Michael Start over at The House of Automata. Can any of you ornithologists identify the bird?

Thanks, Ursarodinia

Wau al Namus

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Wau al Namus
Click to enlarge

Volcanic crater of Wau al Namus, (Wau means hole, so Wau al Namus is “hole of mosquitoes”).This massive (and apparently dormant) volcano can be easily be seen in satellite views of Southern Libya, as a large black smear in the wind-scoured sands of the Sahara. The inner crater is bordered by a chain of small salt lakes. Outside the outer rim of the crater are small black dunes of windblown volcanic residue.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

Early results from LHC put supersymmetry theory in the past

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Results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have all but killed the simplest version of an enticing theory of sub-atomic physics.

Researchers failed to find evidence of so-called “supersymmetric” particles, which many physicists had hoped would plug holes in the current theory. Theorists working in the field have told BBC News that they may have to come up with a completely new idea.

Data were presented at the Lepton Photon science meeting in Mumbai. They come from the LHC Beauty (LHCb) experiment, one of the four main detectors situated around the collider ring at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) on the Swiss-French border.

According to Dr Tara Shears of Liverpool University, a spokesman for the LHCb experiment: “It does rather put supersymmetry on the spot”…

The experiment looked at the decay of particles called “B-mesons” in hitherto unprecedented detail. If supersymmetric particles exist, B-mesons ought to decay far more often than if they do not exist. There also ought to be a greater difference in the way matter and antimatter versions of these particles decay.

The results had been eagerly awaited following hints from earlier results, most notably from the Tevatron particle accelerator in the US, that the decay of B-mesons was influenced by supersymmetric particles.

LHCb’s more detailed analysis however has failed to find this effect.

This failure to find indirect evidence of supersymmetry, coupled with the fact that two of the collider’s other main experiments have not yet detected supersymmetic particles, means that the simplest version of the theory has in effect bitten the dust…

The worry is that the basic idea of supersymmetry might be wrong. “It’s a beautiful idea. It explains dark matter, it explains the Higgs boson, it explains some aspects of cosmology; but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

“It could be that this whole framework has some fundamental flaws and we have to start over again and figure out a new direction,” he said.

There can be more varied, implicitly more complex variations on the supersymmetry theory; but, for many young physicists – or old physicists with youngish brains 🙂 – it’s time to start all over again.

Complex, multicellular life almost a billion years older than imagined

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The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago. This finding represents a major breakthrough: until now, the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) dated from around 600 million years ago. These new fossils, of various shapes and sizes, imply that the origin of organized life is a lot older than is generally admitted, thus challenging current knowledge on the beginning of life.

These specimens were discovered and studied by an international multidisciplinary team of researchers coordinated by Abderrazak El Albani of the Laboratoire “Hydrogéologie, Argiles, Sols et Altérations”. Their work, due to be published in Nature on 1st July, will feature on the cover of the journal.

The first traces of life appeared in the form of prokaryotic organisms, in other words organisms without a nucleus, around three and a half billion years ago. Another major event in the history of life, the “Cambrian explosion” some 600 million years ago, marked a proliferation in the number of living species. It was accompanied by a sudden rise in oxygen concentration in the atmosphere. What happened between 3.5 billion and 600 million years ago though?

Scientists have very little information about this era, known as the Proterozoic. Yet, it is during this crucial period that life diversified: to the prokaryotes were added the eukaryotes, single or multicelled organisms endowed with a more complex organization and metabolism. These large-sized living beings differ from prokaryotes by the presence of cells possessing a nucleus containing DNA.

While studying the paleo-environment of a fossil-bearing site situated near Franceville in Gabon in 2008, El Albani and his team unexpectedly discovered perfectly preserved fossil remains in the 2.1 billion-year-old sediments. They have collected more than 250 fossils to date, of which one hundred or so have been studied in detail. Their morphology cannot be explained by purely chemical or physical mechanisms.

These specimens, which have various shapes and can reach 10 to 12 centimeters, are too big and too complex to be single-celled prokaryotes or eukaryotes. This establishes that different life forms co-existed at the start of the Proterozoic, as the specimens are well and truly fossilized living material..!

Several research avenues now need to be explored: understanding the history of the Gabonese basin and why the necessary conditions were gathered to enable this organized and complex life to exist; further exploring the site to enhance the collection of fossils; but also comparing the history of the Earth’s oxygenation with the mineralization of clays. The most urgent task, however, remains the protection of this exceptional site.

Bravo!

Dynamic, rapid evolution alters experiment! WTF?

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When the forces of evolution took over an experimental strain of bacteria, it derailed an experiment Duke and NC State researchers thought they were conducting, but led to something much more profound instead.

The researchers used a colony of mice raised in a large plastic bubble, called an isolator, that was completely sterile, lacking even a single bacterium. They introduced a single type of bacteria into the mouse colony, but it mutated quickly into different types, making new bacteria that were hardier inside of the mice than the original bacterium was.

In some regards, “this is one of the best demonstrations of evolution ever carried out in a laboratory,” said William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Duke Department of Surgery. “This is the first time the evolution of bacteria has been monitored for a period of years in an incredibly complex environment.”

Parker said the work illustrates the power of evolution in creating diversity and in filling ecological niches. “This study also strengthens the idea that we could harness evolution in the laboratory to develop microbes for use in biotechnology and in medicine,” Parker said.

The results…indicate that “experimental evolution,” or evolution controlled in a laboratory setting, could be used to develop new strains of bacteria for use as probiotic substances, which are living organisms used for intestinal and digestive therapies…

Over the three-year study period, the bacterial population remained diverse and appeared to adapt significantly well to the environment in the digestive tracts of the mice. “The bacteria colonized better in the mice by the end of the experiment than at the beginning,” Parker said, with more than a three-fold increase in the density of bacteria within the gut by the end of the experiment.

Wow. Most researchers are flexible enough to perceive unexpected results for what they are, where they may lead.

Still – it’s rewarding to see how this group let their experiment carry through on its own – adding to evolutionary knowledge at the same time.

US Fortress to be built in Pakistan

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Holbrooke and Gilani
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

This Op-Ed piece is typical of Ghori’s rants. Nationalist before democrat, though both interdependent. A retired career diplomat.

‘The Americans are coming, and coming big,’ according to media pundits in Pakistan. And none should blame them for going over the top because the figures being bandied about are, to say the very least, flabbergasting.

What’s on the drawing boards in Washington and Islamabad are the blue prints for vastly increasing the number of American personnel manning one of the most important diplomatic presence in the 21st century for the Americans in Pakistan. Apparently, Washington feels that its battery of 750 men and women stocking the American Embassy in Islamabad is far too inadequate to cope with the job on their hands. They need to be given a big injection to inflate their muscles. The magic potion said to be brewing would add at least another thousand people on what’s being described as a ‘war footing’…

Though he wanders off into hallucinations suitable to a delusional Right – or Left, a useful question is raised about the purpose and goal of the new Pakistan diplomatic fortress.

Continue reading →

Biden says stimulus program on schedule

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Nearly three months after President Obama approved a $787 billion economic stimulus package, intended to create or save jobs, the federal government has paid out less than 6 percent of the money, largely in the form of social service payments to states…

That’s not a contradiction, you know.

The stimulus bill has directly injected around $45.6 billion into the economy, mostly to help states cover the costs of Medicaid and unemployment benefits, one-time $250 checks that were mailed to Social Security recipients last week, and income tax cuts that began to take effect this spring.

Although states around the country are beginning roadwork projects, the Department of Transportation had spent only about $11 million on highway projects through the first week of May.

I guess we were near the head of the pack here in New Mexico. One outfit is already paving roads being repaired just north of me.

Obama administration officials, however, say the pace of the stimulus program is on schedule, and even if the federal checks are not yet in the mail the effects of the stimulus are beginning to reverberate: the promise of the federal money has been enough to get states to start construction work and to retain some jobs that were in jeopardy.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who writes in a report on the stimulus bill to be released this week that it remains “ahead of schedule in most programs,” said in a telephone interview Tuesday that the bill was helping people grapple with the recession, getting money to the states and into the economy, and laying a foundation for long-term aspirations like high-speed rail.

“We’re 85 days into a two-year program here — we’re trying to get the money out as quickly as we can, but not too quickly, so we don’t end up really screwing up here,” Mr. Biden said. “Because we’re talking about big dollars here, these are big numbers, this is unprecedented. And in 85 days we’ve gotten tens of billions of dollars out the door, and so far — knock on wood — no real big problems, no real big glitches.”

The biggest problem I’ve seen is one that would take Obama about five terms in office to overturn. That is – the absurd agglomeration of programs into little bureaucratic fiefdoms. No rhyme or reason. Just follow the paperwork in the appropriate department according to their own misbegotten standards.

One local tried to submit a project for expanding broadband access. He finally learned he has to go through the department of agriculture. WTF?