These 20 Advanced Military Projects Will Change Your Life

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via businessinsider.com

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gets a ton of funding to develop the science and technological future of the military.

This is the agency responsible for GPS, the internet and stealth planes. They’re the real deal.

We looked at their active projects to find the ones that might have massive civilian implications if they eventually produce real-world tech.

Last round, we focused on the Defense Science Office and their Information Innovation Office. This time, we’re looking at DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, which is researching the next age of computing technology.

15 Advanced Military Research Projects That Will Change Your Life

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via businessinsider.com

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gets a ton of funding to develop the science and techological future of the military.

This is the agency responsible for GPS, the internet and stealth planes. They’re the real deal.

We looked at their active projects to find the ones that might have massive civilian implications if they eventually produce real-world tech.

For this round, we focused on only their Defense Science Office and their Information Innovation Office, two of six DARPA branches.

Video from Space Shows Army Creating an Island Off the Coast of the US

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via gizmodo.com

The Army has been creating an island since 1998 on the Northeast coast of the United States. Slowly, the US Army Corps of Engineers built concrete dikes to establish its perimeter and then have spent more than decade filling them with mud.

Its name: Poplar island.

Fortunately, no weird stuff is going on there (that we know of, anyway). Poplar Island, which is being rebuilt in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, is 30 miles south of Baltimore Harbor, where all the mud is coming from.

Future Drones Will Autonomously Navigate the Skies Without GPS

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via gizmodo.com

Military drones rely heavily on GPS for navigation guidance while in the air. But in areas where a signal can’t be found, or where someone is using a GPS jammer, a drone will find itself in a troublesome predicament. Military sub-contractor BAE Systems has come up with a solution to that problem: A positioning system called NAVSOP that uses any wireless signal to find its location.

The Future of Drone Surveillance: Swarms of Cyborg Insect Drones

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via networkworld.com

Forget the roachbots and the swarm of MIT humanoid robots dancing in sync, as well as “disposable” quarter-sized kilobots which are “cheap enough to swarm in the thousands,” and think instead of DARPA-like tiny insect cyborg drones that are “designed to go places that soldiers cannot” to work as spies or as swarm weapons. Is this a mosquito micro air vehicle (MAV)?

Army Scientists Build a Better Battery

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via gizmodo.com

Single-cell batteries have an inherent design limitation that prevents them from producing more than 4 volts—they simply can’t do it, there isn’t enough energy density to produce that extra bit of output. That is, until now.

“This is what you would call a quantum leap,” Army researcher Arthur Cresce said in a press release. “We’ve gone from circling around a certain type of four volt energy for quite a while. All of a sudden a whole new class of batteries and voltages are open to us. The door is open that was closed before.” This breakthrough comes after years of research by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory into how the various battery components interact with one another.

The research team found that the inclusion of a specific, proprietary (and now patented) additive bumps the battery output from four volts to five—that’s a 30-percent increase and a huge deal. As Cynthia Lundgren, chief of the electrochemical branch at the USARL explained:

These Are The World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Armies

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With huge cutbacks slated for the U.S. military, the Marines and Army in particular, private security firms are sure to be getting a boost.

The Army is cutting 50,000 soldiers over the next few years and the Marines are looking to shave about 20,000 servicemembers over the same period of time.

So while business was booming for this group private military contractors, who take their military training and offer it to the highest bidder, it’s likely to grow even more.

Modern-day mercenaries are stationed throughout the world fighting conflicts for governments that are reluctant to use their own troops or where foreign troops are unable or unwilling to go.

Secret side of military spending [infographic]

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via holykaw.alltop.com

The United States military budget rose for 11 consecutive years, going from $354 billion in 2001 to $721 billion in 2011. That’s an increase of 104%. While 2012’s proposed budget signals the first decline in military spending in over a decade, it is a drop in the bucket and if the past is any indication, actual spending will surpass the budget and once again take us into record territory.

13 Old War Photographs You Won’t Believe Aren’t Photoshopped

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via cracked.com

World War II was a hell of a time. Ask your grandpa: He’ll tell you all about the solemn, grim-faced, gritty reality of the whole thing until you become grizzled by proxy. Now, we’re not going to sit here and say your grandpa is full of crap (the guy could probably still gut us with a can opener). We’re just saying that maybe some of the ways we picture WWII looking — all razor-jawed men charging through the mud in black and white — isn’t entirely accurate. Because we know for a fact that at least some of the soldiers were carrying floppy dong-shaped rifles into battle, and those air aces had the most fabulous planes …

Israeli Air Force May Use Nano Drones, Missile Launching Algorithm In Future - Military Tech

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via devicemag.com

A serious brain storming session that was on since mid-2009 has recently concluded at the headquarters of the Israeli Air Force in Tel Aviv. During the effort, named IAF 2030, some 300 Israeli Air Force officers were asked to deliberate on different aspects of the development of the air force.

What came out from the session, though highly classified, is very interesting. Officers were divided into eight groups to look into different aspects like Advanced Information Technology, Vast Data, Space, Cyber, Environment, Intelligence, Human Factor and Organizational Behavior. Then to keep the brain storming sessions intensive, a ninth ‘Red Team’ was formed to challenge the assumptions formulated by the other groups.