U.S. military drones that are so small they even look like insects

They look like children’s toys that are left discarded in wardrobes around the world.

But these innocent-looking devices are actually some of the most sophisticated drones on the planet.

The U.S. Air Force is developing the miniature spy craft with the goal of making them so small that they resemble birds and even insects.

Causing quite a buzz: Lead researcher Dr Gregory Parker holds a small, winged drone that resembles an insect. The U.S. military’s goal is to make the devices so small that they resemble birds and even insects.

Some even have moving wings that military chiefs hope will look so convincing that people won’t pay them any attention.

The Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are being developed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

The base’s Air Force Research Laboratory mission is to develop MAVs that can find, track and target adversaries while operating in complex urban environments.

The engineers, led by Dr Gregory Parker, are using a variety of small helicopters and drones in the lab to develop the programs and software.

Testing takes place in a controlled indoor environment, during which data is gathered to analyse for further development.

An insect-sized drone. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s mission is to develop MAVs that can find, track and target adversaries while operating in complex urban environments.

You’ll believe a toy can spy: First Lieutenant Greg Sundbeck (left) and Dr Parker watch a test flight of a drone.

The trials are the latest research into tiny drones funded by the U.S. military.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has spent years developing a whole host of cyborg critters, in the hopes of creating the ultimate ‘fly on the wall’.

Two years ago, researchers revealed that they had created cyborg beetles that can be guided wirelessly via a laptop.

Using implants, they worked out how to control a beetle’s take-off, flight and landing by stimulating the brain to work the wings.

First Lieutenant Sundbeck prepares a computer controlled drone for a test flight in the microaviary lab at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

What on the outside appears cheap is actually camouflaged and sophisticated military equipment.

They controlled turns through stimulating the basilar muscles on one side or the other to make the wings on that side flap harder.

The embedded system uses nerve and muscle stimulators, a microbattery and a microcontroller with transceiver.

They were implanted in the beetles when they were at the pupal stage.

Three types of large beetles from Cameroon were used in the experiments at the University of California in Berkeley. The smallest was 2cm long, while the largest was 20cm.

First Lieutenant Zachary Goff operates the control console during a test flight at the Micro Air Vehicles lab.

Via DailyMail

Inside NASA’s ‘Skunk Works’ lab

With the space shuttle program ending, what does NASA have to look forward to? The future of deep-space exploration is already taking shape, inside the walls of Johnson Space Center’s Building 220, the space agency’s “Skunk Works” lab for human spaceflight.

This is where NASA once worked on the X-38, a snub-nosed space plane that might have carried astronauts down to Earth from the International Space Station. The project was canceled in 2002, and today the 12,000-square-foot building houses hardware for a succession of projects that are not quite ready for prime time. But some of them may be ready sooner than you think.

Take Robonaut 2, for example. The humanoid upper-body robot was shipped up to the space station in February, and taken out of its box at President Barack Obama’s urging. (“Unpack the guy,” he told Discovery’s astronauts jokingly, but NASA took the request seriously.)

A Robonaut twin is set up in Building 220, and the team behind the project is putting the guy through its paces in preparation for the start of tests in orbit later this month. One of the first tasks is to figure out how the Robonaut and flesh-and-blood astronauts can work safely together in microgravity.

Nicolaus Radford, deputy project manager for the Robonaut team, demonstrated how the earthly Robonaut was programmed to ease up if a human got in the way. When one of the android’s arms knocks into you during a maneuver, it will push against you gently — as if it were a brother trying to elbow his way past you quietly. If you continue to block the arm movement, the robot will go passive in place.

Having robots programmed not to harm humans is important, not only because it will head off the robot apocalypse but also because it will lead to safer industrial robots. That’s one of the reasons why GM executives are partnering with NASA on Robonaut 2. “They spend more money on the safety for robots than they spend on the robots themselves,” Radford said.

However, the physics of hazard avoidance is different on the space station, where even a little bit of force could send an astronaut floating away. So Radford said Robonaut 2’s software will be fine-tuned to reflect that physics. “That’s specifically what we’re going to be looking at,” he said.

Looking further ahead, the team is already hard at work developing a pair of legs for Robonaut, so that it can carry objects from one space station location to another. “In the next 18 months or so, you’re going to see legs on a robot walking around the space station,” Radford said.

Project Morpheus
That will come as music to the ears of engineers working on another “Skunk Works” project on display in Building 220. Project Morpheus started out as “Project M,” a concept that called for landing a humanoid robot on the moon in 1,000 days. Then reality set in, and the project was redefined. “We narrowed it down to focus on lander technology,” said Jenny Mitchell, Project Morpheus’ systems engineering and integration lead.

The Morpheus team turned to Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace for help in getting a prototype lunar lander off the ground — in fact, a scaled-up version of the rocket-propelled craft that won some of NASA’s money in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. The methane-fueled Morpheus lander is designed to bring a 1,100-pound payload, such as a humanoid robot or a small rover, down to the surface of the moon from lunar orbit. What’s more, the lander would fly autonomously, without the need for human intervention.

Morpheus project manager Jon Olansen said the team is well into the testing stage after spending just $5 million. He said the lander should be ready to demonstrate autonomous flights on high-energy trajectories in the next year.

The project made headlines last month when a tethered flight test went slightly off, sparking a grass fire at Johnson Space Center. Now the team is setting up additional safeguards to reduce the fire risk. YouTube videos provide multiple perspectives on the Morpheus tests.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

Building 220 houses a series of Morpheus-related test items. In the far background is Armadillo Aerospace’s rocket-powered Pixel lander prototype. The larger Morpheus lander sits nearby. In the foreground is a small model lander that was built from hardware-store lighting globes to study how propellant sloshes around the lander’s four tanks. And a clear plastic tank at right shows how buffers were built into the full-size Morpheus tanks to minimize the slosh.

Morpheus’ team members are also widening their perspective on the eventual application of their technology. It isn’t just for the moon anymore. “At this point in time, we don’t need a specific destination to do this kind of work,” Olansen said, “because this work will be needed for any destination.”

Desert RATS
That philosophy carries over to next month’s Desert RATS exercise, which is due to be conducted in Arizona after months of preparation in Building 220. “RATS” stands for Research and Technology Studies, and past studies have focused on simulating surface operations on the moon or Mars using next-generation space exploration technologies. But now NASA’s vision for space exploration is focusing on sending humans to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025. That means the Desert RATS’ Habitat Demonstration Unit is being remodeled for a new role.

“This year we’re reconfiguring it for the deep-space habitat for an asteroid mission,” said Terry Tri, demonstration unit integration manager for Desert RATS.

The wheeled vehicle that was being tested as the prototype for an electric-powered lunar rover is now being looked upon as a make-believe “multimission space exploration vehicle,” or MMSEV. In an actual mission, the MMSEVs would not be rovers wheeling around the lunar or Martian surface, but would instead be thruster-powered pods designed to travel through space to make contact with an asteroid under low-gravity conditions.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

A rover driver gets ready to climb down from a wheeled vehicle that has been used as the prototype for a lunar rover in past Desert RATS simulation. During this year’s simulation, the vehicle will play the role of a “multimission space exploration vehicle,” or MMSEV. An actual MMSEV would be propelled by thrusters rather than wheels.

During this year’s exercise, the rover drivers will be “pretending they don’t have wheels,” Tri said.

He said the 19-foot-wide habitat would serve as “the ‘mothership,’ if you will, that [astronauts] would return to.” The habitat’s lower floor has a glovebox for handling space samples, a mini-medical station, a telerobotics work station and a repair bench. The inflatable upper floor would provide living space for four astronauts.

This year, NASA held a college-level competition for the design of the inflatable part of the habitat, and the winning entry was submitted by students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The Badger X-Loft can be expanded from a 30-inch-high base into a 13-foot-high dome in about 15 to 20 minutes. Each astronaut gets a desk and a chair as well as private sleeping quarters.

Nicole Roth / UW-Madison

The fully inflated Badger X-Loft is perched atop the Habitat Demonstration Unit inside Building 220 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

“Basically, everything’s modular,” team member Jordan Wachs, an engineering mechanics and astronautics and physics major, said in a university news release. “The whole design was intended that any eighth can be swapped entirely with any other eighth.”

As a reward for their efforts, the students will share an $10,000 prize and travel to Arizona to see their Badger X-Loft tested during the Desert RATS exercise. Who knows? In a few years, maybe they’ll be plotting NASA’s next giant leap, right here at Building 220.

 

Via MSNBC/Alan Boyle

UFOs Filmed Over London — Or Not

For extraterrestrials notoriously shy about making their presence known to Earthlings, they have been making more and more appearances in home videos over the past six months.

One of the most famous was the UFO that appeared over the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine in Jerusalem, on January 28. Discovery News writer Ian O’Neill published one of the first analyses of the video (based in part on my own investigation), demonstrating that it was “almost certainly a hoax.”

A more comprehensive analysis by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), one of the oldest, largest, and most respected UFO investigation organizations in the world, also later concluded that it was faked.

A few months later, on April 21, another ‘alien’ home video surfaced. This one, allegedly taken in Russia, showed two young men finding an alien body on a rural, snowy farm. It, too, was soon revealed to be a hoax.

Now, right on schedule, comes yet another UFO home video, this one taken in London, England. According to a report in the Daily Mail:

“In the video, the cameraman runs towards the corner of Bolsover Street and Clipstone Street where two other men are already standing, gazing skywards, one of whom is using a mobile phone camera. As the camera is pointed upwards, over the BBC’s Yalding House, three white dots flash across the sky at great speed in a triangle formation, they are very quickly followed by two similar sized white dots. As the camera pans down again, two people on the opposite side of the road can also been seen watching events unfold above them. Then one larger, bright and more slow moving disc-shaped white object appears, circles around briefly and zips off.”

The video, one of at least two similar videos, was posted to YouTube last week and soon went viral over the Web, stirring interest and controversy among believers and skeptics alike.

Though evidence may eventually validate the video, a preliminary analysis strongly suggests that this video, like the others, is a hoax. For one thing, it’s not clear who shot the video, or even when; anonymous eyewitnesses are a red flag.

Furthermore, the UFOs (like the one that appeared in the hoaxed Jerusalem video) are very easy to fake with video-editing software, mere spots of light without structure or detail.

Adding fuel for the skeptical grist, it seems that no one else on the busy London street near the British Broadcasting Building saw the many bright glowing objects in the sky. Logic suggests that there would have been thousands of eyewitnesses, yet the cameraman captured an event that apparently no one else saw.

It’s also suspicious that though the video shows others recording the amazing event, no other photos or videos from the same angle have surfaced. Surely one of the other UFO eyewitnesses present (and seen in the video) would have come forward in the past weeks to sell their own photographs or videos to a newspaper or television station — perhaps the BBC would be interested, since it occurred above their building.

Faked UFO videos may be fun for hoaxers (or as viral marketing), but even many people firmly convinced that UFOs are real are getting tired of the hoaxes. After all, how will we know when the real UFO videos surface? No one likes to be fooled, and the best preventative is to examine all the evidence with a sense of history and a skeptical eye.

 

Via Discovery

IBM thinks about the next 100 years

 

A hundred years from now, will we be assimilated by the machines? Or will we assimilate them? These are the kinds of issues facing International Business Machines as the company begins its second 100 years.

Right now, most folks are thinking about the past 100 years at IBM, which is celebrating the centennial of its founding on Thursday. But for Bernard Meyerson, the company’s vice president of innovation, it’s all about the next century.

“That’s pretty much what we think about,” Meyerson told me today.

Meyerson has plenty to look back on, including his own not-so-small part in IBM’s past innovations. When his cell phone dropped the connection during our telephone conversation, he called back and casually mentioned that he had a hand in creating the transistors built into that cell phone. And when I asked him to explain, he said, “I actually invented the technology known as silicon-germanium.”

It turns out that IBM has played a behind-the-scenes role in all sorts of technologies, ranging from semiconductor development to barcodes to Wi-Fi. “IBM is a funny company,” Meyerson said. “We don’t force you to put a little sticker on anything that says, ‘We’re the smart guys.'”

But enough about the past: What about the future? “Going forward, you have tremendous opportunities,” particularly when it comes to making sense of the huge databases that are being built up in all sorts of fields, Meyerson said. For example, imagine a system that can take medical records from the 285 million people around the world with diabetes, anonymize those records and analyze them, looking for potential new treatments or preventive measures.

“The fact is, there is no mechanism today that could do that, and the reason is that medical data is unstructured,” he said. There’s little consistency in how the records are kept, and medical conditions might be described in different ways by different doctors.

When you put together the volumes of data and the numbers of people that have to be covered in these massive, unstructured data sets, the figures mount up to quintillions of bytes. That’s the challenge facing new types of computing tools — for example, the Watson supercomputer, which won a highly publicized “Jeopardy” quiz-show match earlier this year. Now Watson is being put to work on a tougher task: making sense of medical records, which is just the kind of job Meyerson has in mind.

Still other challenges await. Watson-style computers could digest the millions of data points involved in tracking the flow of highway traffic, then develop models to predict where the tie-ups could arise before they actually happen. The computers of the next century will have to handle a wide range of “big data” challenges, ranging from climate modeling to natural-language search engines for multimedia.

Meyerson doesn’t expect Watson to answer that challenge completely. A hundred years from now, Watson will almost certainly be considered a quaint antique, much like the tabulating machines that were made back in 1911.

“Watson specifically is not the issue, as much as the combination of Watson’s ability to interpret natural language, the capacity to store ‘big data’ and apply data analytics to come up with solutions for society,” he said. “In the absence of natural language, you’re going to have a short, unhappy life attempting this work. Without that key ingredient, how are you going to take the interaction of humans and machines to the next level and make it easy?”

What will the next level be in the year 2111? “Honestly, at 100 years I’m genuinely unsure,” Meyerson said. The past century has shown that the pace of technological advancement can be highly variable, depending on what kinds of breakthroughs come to the fore. But if Meyerson had to bet on one particular game-changing technology, it would be coming up with a direct interface between computing circuits and the human brain.

“If it turns out that there is a very natural way to communicate data back and forth without being obtrusive, then the whole world changes,” he told me. This wouldn’t be a Borg-like assimilation, in which humans look increasingly like machines. Rather, the machines would blend into the human body.

Does that sound like a grand dream for the next century? Or a nightmare? Feel free to chime in with your comments below.

 

 

Via MSNBC

Mini-weapons sought by Pentagon for new era of warfare

A sleek, delta-winged robotic jet took to the skies for the first time above the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base.

Boeing Co.’s experimental drone, dubbed Phantom Ray, flew to 7,500 feet and reached speeds of 205 mph in its first flight. The 17-minute flight took place April 27, but Boeing officials did not confirm details until Tuesday.

 

The Phantom Ray, which resembles a giant boomerang, is being developed by the Chicago company for a variety of missions. Its stealthy design could enable it to slip behind enemy lines to knock out radar installations, clearing the way for fighters and bombers.

Under mounting pressure to keep its massive budget in check, the Pentagon is looking to cheaper, smaller weapons to wage war in the 21st century.

A new generation of weaponry is being readied in clandestine laboratories across the nation that puts a priority on pintsized technology that would be more precise in warfare and less likely to cause civilian casualties. Increasingly, the Pentagon is being forced to discard expensive, hulking, Cold War-era armaments that exact a heavy toll on property and human lives.

At L-3 Interstate Electronics Corp. in Anaheim, technicians work in secure rooms developing a GPS guidance system for a 13-pound “smart bomb” that would be attached to small, low-flying drone.

Engineers in Simi Valley at AeroVironment Inc. are developing a mini-cruise missile designed to fit into a soldier’s rucksack, be fired from a mortar and scour the battlefield for enemy targets.

And in suburban Portland, Ore. Voxtel Inc. is concocting an invisible mist to be sprayed on enemy fighters and make them shine brightly in night-vision goggles.

These miniature weapons have one thing in common: They will be delivered with the help of small robotic planes. Drones have grown in importance as the Pentagon has seen them play a vital role in Iraq, Afghanistan and reportedly in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Now, engineers in Southern California and elsewhere are refining drone technology to deliver a powerful wallop with increasingly smaller robotic planes — many of which resemble model aircraft buzzing around local parks.

This work is aimed primarily at one buyer —the Pentagon, which is seeking a total of $671 billion for fiscal 2012. Of that, drones represent $4.8 billion, a small but growing segment of the defense budget — and that doesn’t include spending on robotic weapons technology in the classified portion of the budget.

This comes at a time when expensive weapons programs, like Marine Corps amphibious assault vehicles and Navy cruisers, are being eyed for trims.

Although some mini-weapons may resemble toys, they represent a new wave of sophisticated technology in modern warfare, which has forced the military and weapons-makers to think small. And they are just a few under development that have been disclosed.

“There are a lot of weapons in the military’s arsenal,” said Lt. Col. Brad Beach, an official who coordinates the Marines’ drone technology. “But what we don’t have is something small.”

The military is flush with multi-ton bunker-busting bombs designed to reduce fortified buildings into smoldering rubble.

But Marines on the front lines in Afghanistan say there is an urgent need for a weapon that is small and powerful enough to protect them from insurgents planting roadside bombs.

Marines already have small spy drones with high-powered cameras, but what they need is a way to destroy the enemies that their drones discover.

Looking to fill the need, the 13-pound “smart bomb” has been under development for three years. The 2-foot-long bomb is steered by a GPS-guided system made in Anaheim. The bomb is called Small Tactical Munition, or STM, and is under development by Raytheon Co.

“Soldiers are watching bad guys plant” roadside bombs and “can’t do anything about it,” said Cody Tretschok, who leads work on the program at Raytheon. “They have to call in an air strike, which can take 30 to 60 minutes. The time lapse is too great.”

The idea is that the small bomb could be slung under the spy plane’s wing, dropped to a specific point using GPS coordinates or a laser-guidance system, and blast apart “soft” targets, such as pickup trucks and individuals, located 15,000 feet below.

Raytheon does not yet have a contract for the bomb and is building it entirely with its own money.

“We’re proactively anticipating the military’s need,” said Tretschok, who is testing the technology at the Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.

In a similar fashion, drone-maker AeroVironment in Simi Valley didn’t wait for the government when it started to build its Switchblade mini-cruise missile to seek and destroy nearby targets.

The little missile, which looks less harmless than many Fourth of July fireworks, is fired from a mortar, unfolds its wings as it goes, and begins sending live video and GPS coordinates to the soldier who launched it.

The 2-foot-long battery-powered drone would be tipped with a tiny warhead and remotely operated from a handheld controller. It is being designed to fly above a warzone for at least five minutes for more than a mile at a time.

“This technology gives the war fighter the ability to pinpoint where and when he strikes,” said Steven Gitlin, an AeroVironment spokesman. “It’s all about precision.”

Critics say the technology may be too imprecise and hard to track, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution.

But the weapons have sophisticated internal guidance systems, which is key because much of today’s fighting takes place in crowded urban environments, such as targets located in or near population centers, he said.

“Weapons are sometimes only usable today if they’re small. The bottom line is: You’re not going to go around dropping 500-pound bombs everywhere,” O’Hanlon added. “Collateral damage is unacceptable in modern warfare.”

Knowing this, the military has embarked on using mini-drones for a “tagging, tracking and locating” initiative, which centers on secretly marking a target with invisible sprays and other identifiers so they don’t get lost in crowds.

Companies like Beaverton, Ore.-based Voxtel have benefited from the millions of dollars that the government is handing to contractors for research. The small 30-person company, which makes tagging products to prevent the counterfeiting of bank notes, lottery tickets and other items, now believes its microscopic nanocrystals — which become part of an invisible spray — may be are exactly what the military needs.

Tagging, tracking and locating “is a hot topic in government work,” said George Williams, company president. “It isn’t easy tracking somebody in a crowded urban environment like what is seen in today’s wars.”

Indeed. Earlier this year, the Air Force asked for proposals on developing a way to “tag” targets with “clouds” of unseen materials sprayed from quiet, low-flying drones.

In its request, the Air Force said “one method of distribution would be ‘crop-dusting’ from a sufficiently high altitude (to avoid detection) and letting the dust-cloud fall on a target or in front of it if it is moving.”

Other methods suggested to covertly mark the targets were to “pneumatically blow a cloud” or “burst above” them.

As the military moves into miniaturizing its weapon stockpile, contractors believe applications such as these may be crucial to the overall effort. “What we do is just one part of a complex system,” Voxtel President Williams said. “We play a small role.”

– William.Hennigan

Via L.A. Times

Supercomputer diagnoses & treats diseases

IBM’s Watson computer system, best known for defeating the world’s best Jeopardy! players, is now delivering rapid-fire answers to questions about diseases and medicines.

The company says it could be suggesting diagnoses and treatments to doctors right at a patient’s bedside in the next couple of years.

A recent demonstration showed how Watson’s diagnoses evolved as the computer was given more information about a patient, including where the patient lived.

A career in medicine: ‘Watson’, IBM’s supercomputer, is not devouring information from medical history and text books in a bid to know everything

Beaten: Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek with contestants Ken Jennings, Watson’s ‘avatar’ and Brad Rutter – before Watson went on to wipe the floor with them

When told a patient was pregnant, for example, it altered its treatment suggestion.

Watson is being fed a diet of medical textbooks and journals and taking training questions in plain language from medical students.

A doctor who is helping IBM says its database might soon include entries from blogs.

The imposing Watson first made headlines when it comprehensively beat Jeopardy! champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.

Medical diagnoses: IBM says Watson will soon be able to help doctors diagnose and treat individual patients, by swiftly analysing personal data

Named after IBM’s former president Thomas Watson, the computer’s secret to succes is its ability to understand language and solve problems through complex algorithms.

It makes it even more evolved than Deep Blue, an IBM chess-playing supercomputer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

The mastermind is actually housed in two units. Each unit contains five racks and each rack has 10 IBM Power 750 servers.

Namesake: Pioneering IBM founder Tom Watson pictured in 1966 with an early computing machine. The supercomputer is named after him.

When all are linked up they are the equivalent to 2,800 powerful computers with a memory of 15trillion bytes.

Watson is a pretty noisy contraption, but most of the noise comes from two large refrigerated units used to cool the machine down.

IBM researchers have been developing Watson for almost four years.

The company spends around $6billion a year on research and development. An unspecified part of that goes to what it calls ‘grand challenges’, or big, multi-year science projects such as Watson and Deep Blue.

IBM is attempting to create computers that can mimic the human ability to comprehend and answer natural language questions.

Via DailyMail

Flying robot intelligence system set to replace the CCTV camera

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No – it’s the terrifying new flying robot that it set to replace the CCTV camera.

The Aeryon Scout is equipped with the world’s most sophisticated intelligence systems to track down criminals and spy on the public.

Users simply point to a place on Google Maps on its touch-screen controller and the robot flies there at 30mph to record high quality video that can be beamed to an iPhone in real-time.

Airborne hunter: The Aeryon Scout is equipped with the world’s most sophisticated intelligence systems to track down criminals and spy on the public.

Easy-to-use: Point to a place on Google Maps on the Aeryon Scout’s touch-screen controller and the robot flies there at 30mph to record high quality video that can be beamed to an iPhone in real-time

The Scout can go up to 500ft above the ground and can zoom in to a close-up from a 300metres away, meaning it may not even be seen while on a mission.

The four rotor blades also ensure it is practically silent when hovering.

According to Aeryon, the Scout has the ‘most sophisticated and highest quality aerial intelligence available today’.

It beams its pictures to any electronic device, be it a remote computer or even an iPhone.

The Scout and its laptop-style control panel fits into a suitcase so it can be deployed easily over any crowd and carried away covertly.

One of the most ingenious features is that the camera is self-correcting, so even if you are flying along at speed it will stay locked on the target.

In a video posted on the Aeryon website, the £30,000 ($50,000) robot hovers at a great distance from a car thief who is being caught in the act.

When the camera zooms in, the suspect’s face can be clearly seen, enabling police to get a better idea of his identity.

Handheld: The robot doesn’t come cheap, costing £30,000

Portable: The Scout and its laptop-style control panel fits into a suitcase so it can be deployed easily over any crowd and carried away covertly

The Scout also has potential uses for the military and general surveillance missions.

In today’s world, instant access to high-quality aerial intelligence is a requirement in the field, not a luxury,’ write Aeryon on their website.

‘It can be the difference between mission success or mission failure, or in some cases, lives saved versus lives lost.

‘The Aeryon Scout instantly provides aerial intelligence to where it’s needed – to the people in the field.

‘With a touch screen interface and a system that snaps together in seconds, any soldier, officer or civilian is capable of gathering professional quality aerial intelligence within minutes.’

Canada-based Aeryon is currently seeking permits to fly the Scout in the U.S. and has already spoken to a number of law enforcement and security agencies.

Via DailyMail

Transformers: The Dark of the Moon (2011)

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Julie White, Kevin Dunn, Josh Duhamel
Directed by: Michael Bay

U.S. Opening Date: July 1st, 2011

The Autobots Bumblebee, Ratchet, Ironhide and Sideswipe led by Optimus Prime, are back in action, taking on the evil Decepticons, who are determined to avenge their defeat in 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. In this new movie, the Autobots and Decepticons become involved in a perilous space race between the U.S. and Russia, and once again human Sam Witwicky has to come to the aid of his robot friends. There’s new characters too, including a new villain in the form of Shockwave, a longtime Transformers character who rules Cybertron while the Autobots and Decepticons battle it out on Earth.

Completely Automatic Robot Jet Fighter Passes Further Tests

The X-47B looks exactly the same as the B-2 stealth bomber but there is one major difference, it is totally automated. The X-47B is the US Navy’s newest UAV and it’s the very first robotic fighter to exist.

Robotic predator and Reaper drones that are currently in Iraq and Afghanistan are controlled by pilots on the ground but this aircraft is fully automated and actually flies itself from A to B dith no intervention.

It first flew on February 4, 2011. The tests that have recently been carried out on the robustness of the jet make the aircraft one step closer to it actually landing on an aircraft carrier which is scheduled for 2013.

It is difficult to detect by radar because it has no tail fin. With a ceiling of 40,000 feet and a 4500 lb weapon load capacity with supersonic speeds and 2100 nautical mile range it will be THE future weapon.

The X-47B will be joining 7000 UAVs and 2000 ground robots that are already on battlefields around the world. This is one step closer to a fully automated battlefield. In the future this could include all elements of a nation’s military force including soldiers that don’t get tired and can continually fight. This may mean that war is pursued continuously but let’s just hope that the hackers of the world aren’t quite up to the task of hacking automated weapons.

Via Completely Automatic Robot Jet Fighter Passes Further Tests

‘Skyline 2′ Is Already In Development

When Greg and Colin Strause rolled into Hall H at Comic-Con this year with a movie no one had heard of, they knew if they didn’t have the goods, their movie could suffer insurmountable backlash. Thankfully, the footage they showed from Skyline was not only impressive, but the story the Strause’s told – about making the film on their own, on a relative shoe string budget, much like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project – was incredible. That these brothers, who also happen to own their own visual effects house, Hydraulx, made a movie that looks like it costs $200 million for a tiny fraction of that was jaw-dropping.

So it’s no surprise to report that, with the film just weeks away from its November 12 release date, the confident Strause Brothers are already working on the sequel. Details after the jump.

Film School Rejects did an interview with Colin and Greg Strause who said they have a 45 page treatment ready to go on a sequel to Skyline and that, if the film makes a “tenth” of what a normal event movie does, it’ll be deemed profitable enough to move ahead with. That’s not to say that there’s a guarantee Skyline 2 will happen, but, it’s in the works.

So let’s say a normal event film ends up making $300 million, which is roughly whatIron Man 2 made this year. A tenth of that is $30 million. With the amount of marketing Universal is putting into Skyline -I can’t walk around the block without seeing a billboard or flip a channel without seeing the commercial – it’s almost certain to make that, if not in the first weekend. Is roughly $30 million what the film cost, though? No one has gone on record with a budget.

What has been put on record is the fact that Sony, who used Hydraulx to do effects forBattle: Los Angeles – scheduled for March 2011 release – accused the company of stealing effects and using them in Skyline. After all, both films are about the alien destruction of the City of Angels. Depending on what happens with that, maybe some of the Skyline profits will end up going to legal fees before the sequel gets the green light. That’s speculative though and more information will certainly become available once Skyline opens on November 12.

For me, the best thing that could happen with Skyline is that it be a huge hit, 20th Century Fox looks on their shelves and goes, “Oh yeah, we have a movie like this,Independence Day 2!” and that gets made. With Roland Emmerich directing, it’s not going to cost $20 or $30 million dollars though – more like ten times that – but I still can’t wait to see it.

Are you guys excited for Skyline? Do you think the marketing is working? And does the story of the Strause brothers making this movie inspire you as a filmmaker?

Via ‘Skyline 2′ Is Already In Development