Super Cool "Inviso Helmet"

The new JSF x-35 helmet is being developed to where the entire plane is invisible, no longer limiting the pilot to a mere cockpit display. The first plane without a Heads Up Display (HUD) in 50 years.

via nu

Rocket Propelled Swarming Micro Camera's

From Mike
Elgan at The Raw Feed:

"The single-winged device would pack a tiny two-stage rocket thruster along with telemetry, communications, navigation, imaging sensors and a power source." The tiny rocket could be blasted in clusters over war zones." full story at Sci Am

Gee wiz' I just put down Crichton's "Prey" about bio-engineered swarming micro camera's gone amuck. The article says the Lockheed Martin Corp (Or should I say Xymos) project nano air vehicle, or NAV could be used to sense bio hazzrds as well as "organized swarms to fly low over a disaster area, the NAV sensors could detect human body heat and signs of breathing" Can you say Red Dawn?

Danger In The New Space Frontier: China?

It appears that China shot down one of it's own satellites, in an unprecedented display of power. Read the choice quotes below from the full story from Defense Tech.

"...Wynne said the shoot-down of a 1990's-era Chinese weather satellite in polar orbit has forced astronauts aboard the international space station to avoid the debris field scattered in the intercept, and he concluded that China now claims space as a legitimate battlefield...

..The test put at risk the assets of all space faring nations and posed dangers to human space flight due to the creation of an unprecedented amount of debris," the report stated. "The direct ascent ASAT system is one component of a multi-dimensional program to generate the capability to deny others access to outer space."

Drone Control

The issue of control of drones is being hotly debated by the Army and the Airforce. This seems to be part of a bigger on going quest for power and move to a centralized military. While duplication of resources is obviously costly, innovation is clearly fueled by competion.

“If you think it is a young technology, that the Orville and Wilbur Wrights of the 21st century are running around in the UAV marketplace, then as messy as it makes the environment, it is far more strategically important to have lots of players, different patrons behind those players, and to keep stimulating the useful competition of ideas that a useful inter-service rivalry brings.”

— Pierre Chao : Center for Strategic and International Studies on the issue of the Airforce becoming the “executive agent” for drones – unmanned aircraft.

Drones of Iraq will soon be here in the states. Those drones will become AI powered. Air drones will eventually become networked with robots on the ground. Who will control them.

Hasn't anyone watched the Terminator? Once Skynet get's a hold of the contract, it's all over, the rise of the machines will come to pass.

Hacking Your Nervous System

“...Sensory consequence of electromagnetic pulsed emitted by laser induced plasmas,” it described research on activating the nerve cells responsible for sensing unpleasant stimuli: heat, damage, pressure, cold. By selectively stimulating a particular nociceptor, a finely tuned PEP might sensations of say, being burned, frozen or dipped in acid — all without doing the slightest actual harm" from Defensetech

Pain inducing beams of energy. Reminds me of the gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert's "Dune".

via docinthemachine