I love good World War II stories. They are always fascinating—although (too) often sad and dramatic. Sometimes, though, they are simply amazing. Like the tale of Ronald Brown, a soldier who stepped on a land mine in France and lived in silent pain with a shocking 6 ounces (170 grams) of shrapnel in his knee. He didn’t mention it once. More »
Drones that fly for days and kill people from miles away are the future of warfare. But before they can become the present of warfare, we have to be able to able to fly many simultaneously. We’re on our way! More »
We already know about the state-sponsored malware triplets Flame, Gauss, and Stuxnet, but now a new one is rearing its little head. Dubbed as “miniFlame” by Kapersky Labs, it’s a lot less cute and more dangerous than it sounds. More »
This is war in 2012—you can literally see a soldier under fire in Afghanistan. The soldier was shot but suffered no permanent injuries. It’s insane. More »
So, you want to buy an aircraft carrier. Stateside, there’s only one place you can go—Newport News Shipbuilding, the largest dry-dock in the western hemisphere. More »
DARPA aids our military in myriad ways, from designing one shot, one kill weapons to creating robotic pack mules to carry soldiers’ gear. It’s also been building tools for soldiers to better survey their environment and identify threats, and its latest such tool is called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS). CT2WS is comprised of a 120-megapixel electro-optical video camera with a 120-degree field of view feeding a laptop running cognitive visual processing algorithms. Those algorithms identify potential targets in the video feed, which are shown to a soldier wearing an EEG cap that monitors brain signals. You see, the human brain is particularly good at perceiving threats, and CT2WS looks for the particular brain wave that occurs when we see one. The human component drastically improves the accuracy with which the system can identify enemies from afar. How accurate? Testing in desert, tropical and open terrain showed that without a solider/EEG filter, the system had 810 false alarms out of 2,304 threat events in an hour. Incorporating the filter resulted in only five false alarms per hour, plus it was able to identify 91 percent of the potential targets successfully. Not good enough, you say? Add commercial radar into the mix and the army becomes omniscient — the system then identified 100 percent of the test targets.
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DARPA threat detection technology uses a camera to see targets, software and soldier brains to identify them originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Sep 2012 13:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Rebels in Syria are not satisfied with the munitions and technology readily available to them. So, increasingly, they’re building their own badass battle tools. New York Times’ At War blog is discovery these crazy awesome DIY weapons, like a machine gun, which instead of a traditional scope, has a digital camera installed: More »
In 1981, the White House released a secret memo regarding the stockpiling of a certain weapon. What kind of weapon? Now that it’s been declassified, we still have no idea: the title remains censored. More »
In the good ol’ days of spy vs. spy, the honeypot was a tried and true method espionage technique, laced with danger, intrigue, and sex. These days—as Australian soldiers have found out the hard way—all it takes to seduce your way to state secrets is a Facebook friend request and a Google image search for “hot chicks.” More »
This image sequence of a Syrian army tank firing against a group of rebels in a street of Aleppo is pure and horrible insanity. Taken by Tracey Shelton, it captures the exact moment of a tank shell hitting the rebel position. Miraculously, she survived. Sadly, some of the men weren’t so lucky. More »
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