Holy crap! It's The White House! Never mind that the "dragon fire" is a spell from Everquest. Mount the griffins and arm the bunker busters! And somebody ask Mommy for $14 because my WoW subscription just ran out!! [Danger Room]

The technology is described as an example of “neuromorphic engineering”—hardware and software that tries to emulate human intelligence. Basically, the binoculars point out objects that our brains might have noticed, but not fully processed. The subconscious can detect multiple things at once, but the conscious mind can only focus on one thing at a time. By collecting data using human eyes and then passing the data back to the brain, the binoculars more or less add a second processing loop.

One possible problem: How to fine-tune it so that the binoculars don't just pick up on useless, distracting noise. Brains look for patterns in everything, and will sometimes find them even where they don't exist (i.e. Astrology). What if for every rocket launcher it did notice before us, it also pointed out how one specific mountain range in the distance looks like your mother-in-law's face? [Slashdot via Gizmag]

I've got pics from the DARPA cars at the Pentagon. The six finalist teams were there for the Urban challenge and they had a briefing at 1145 in the auditorium as well as showed off the vehicles from 0945-1300 in the center courtyard.

What are they doing there?

Besides launching a robotic coup against the U.S. military? They are really just showing off what they've done. Because the actual DARPA Urban Challenge comp has already happened, they are really here to just show off what DARPA has been up to to the military brass.

I don't know how familiar you are with this, but the DARPA challenge had two parts: the off-road, and the Urban. The Urban was obviously a much greater challenge and in talking with the guys there were something like 90 teams who had to have their vehicles navigate a military air base (think small suburb) with their vehicles and hit a series of GPS check points.

According to them they were allowed to drive around the area 24 hours before so they could get a feel of it, but then on the day of they were given a USB stick that had 10-15 gps check points the cars had to hit. So they loaded that into the computer, but were not allowed to load any sort of "route" in. Then they just had to it start on the autonomous vehicles and hope for the best. What's really cool—like all of this isn't already—is that they had something like 50 stunt drivers drive around the area while the robocars were moving to challenge the vehicles and make sure they didn't collide. As you can tell, 6 of 90 teams (it could have been a few more) were the only ones able to succeed, so it was quite the task.

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Bonus Option: none of the above, just this:

[Gizmodo]

On August 31, 2007 an Air Force crew accidentally loaded six live nuclear warheads into a B-52 Stratofortress—stationed in the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota—believing they were conventional cruise missiles. The weapons were missing, without anyone noticing it, for 36 hours until the B-52 landed in Louisiana.

According to the Pentagon, this happened because the nuclear weapons were stored right next to conventional ones, with just an "8.5 x 11-inch sheet of printed paper to differentiate between the two types." I guess the paper was ignored by the ground crew. I also guess that the paper said something like "Maybe this is bad. Really. No touchy! Noooo touchy!" instead of "NUCLEAR WARHEAD INSIDE. DON'T TOUCH UNLESS INSTRUCTED BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF, YOU MORON" because, otherwise, I just can't understand their mistake.

The report goes on saying that "part" of the problem is that nobody really has absolute control of the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal after the demise of Strategic Air Command. After the fall of the Soviet Union, SAC was split in 1992 into three different commands: the Air Force Space Command (which grabbed ICBM control,) the Air Combat Command (in charge of the bombers themselves) and the Air Mobility Command, which "provides airlift, special missions, aerial refueling, and aeromedical evacuation for U.S. troops." Furthermore, the Air Force nuclear capability is also under the control of the USSTRATCOM, along with the Navy's submarine nuclear ballistic missiles.

The report, however, then says that this "near disaster" was a "human error" because there are tight rules in place that weren't followed. Col. West Anderson, second in charge of the 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, added that they "handle weapons safely and ensure the highest possible standards of individual reliability and professional competence." I guess that means that the crew at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota are a bunch of incompetent monkeys, but his guys are A-OK. However, it all seems that they are just glad that nothing bad happened, so they can get away saving their asses.

Despite this "human error" excuse, their explanation leaves me with the impression that nobody has a real, definitive grasp of where every nuke is except probably Matthew Broderick and the WOPR. Their conclusion doesn't help either: the Air Force treats nukes the same as disarmed missiles when verifying armament, and there's "no written directive that specifically described the required identifying means" to make the distinction before loading the weapons into the bombers.

In other words: there are rules which are not followed, but they need more rules in writing. Perhaps they just need to stop playing Warhawk in their PlayStation 3 and start printing clearer warning signs. [Military.com, Wikipedia]

Sun Microsystems has just received a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to do just that. They're to work on a way of connecting silicon chips via lasers, which, if successful, will increase chips speeds by a factor of thousands.

Computer scientists have long sought a way to make faster and cheaper computers by making larger chips on a single wafer of silicon, a manufacturing process called "wafer scale integration." If the Sun researchers' idea can be proved technically feasible and manufactured commercially, it would be possible to create more-compact machines that are a thousand times faster than today's computers, the company said. Each chip would be able to communicate directly with every other chip in the array via a beam of laser light that could carry tens billions of bits of data a second.

The proposal is for the bat to be just six inches in length, weigh only four ounces and use just one watt of power, backed by a lithium-ion battery, which could be charged by not just solar energy, but wind energy and random vibrations as well. The bat's intended goal would be to run surveillance ops and relay data in realtime, including sights and sounds from minicams and mini-microphones, but also radiation and poison gas readings.

The UMich grant consists of $10 million over five years, creating the U-M Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology (dubbed "COM-BAT"—pun intended). The focus is to shrink down many electronics that while currently available would only be good if the US Army wanted, say, a 12-foot spy-bat. Not too stealthy.

For energy recovery, UMich will work to develop "quantum dot solar cells," making current solar cells twice as nice. The bat's autonomous navi system will be 1,000 times smaller than current systems, and that much more energy efficient too. The comms system will be shrunk to one-tenth the current size, too. You can see how all of this shrinkage will have positive impact outside the bionic-bat community as well. [UMich via Ubergizmo]

The mission was simple. At 10:26PM EST, a standard missile 3 carrying a kinetic warhead was launched northwest of Hawaii from the USS Lake Eire, a Ticonderoga Class missile defense cruiser. 24 minutes later, at 10:50, the Joint Space Operations Center at the Vandenberg Air Force base confirmed the breakup of the satellite at 153 nautical miles above the Earth from a direct hit.

While they can't confirm completely the destruction of the tank, which was needed to release the toxic fuel that may have posed a danger to us Earthlings, the Pentagon has declared the mission a complete success and with good reason. Some experts criticized the plan as probable failure during the past days, with the argument that the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, part of the Ballistic Missile Defense System being developed by the US Missile Defense Agency, wasn't designed to do this and, therefore, it wasn't going to be able to hit the target and destroy it effectively.

Their reasons were three: first, the kinetic warhead, launched in a long range standard missile 3, a isn't designed to destroy targets by explosion but by the sheer force of multiple impacts. While this is enough to destroy other incoming missiles, the critics said that this wasn't going to be enough to destroy the much larger satellite. Second was the speed of the target, which was traveling at double the speed of the missiles which are the usual target of the Aegis. And third, the tracking system, which wasn't originally designed to operate in high orbits.

The video, however, shows that the direct kinetic hit has completely obliterated its target. Now the world can rest at peace. Until A542B, that asteroid ten times bigger than Texas, finally arrives. [Wikipedia, Defense Tech Org and BBC]

The plan is to launch a missile from a Navy ship sometime in early March, smashing the thing to smithereens before it has a chance to enter the atmosphere. While you might think that they're just trying to make sure that the satellite doesn't land on an orphanage or something, in reality they're probably doing this so somebody like China doesn't get their hands on it. It is a spy satellite, after all, not just something beaming pay-per-view boxing down to you.

Hopefully the feds will be kind enough to shoot video or take pictures of the process so we can at least check out what shooting a satellite down with a missile would look like. Do it for the kids, Pentagon. [NY Times]

Hackers, in the past year, have managed to procure top-secret information directly from Pentagon computers, as well as from major military contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Growing concern for the safety of sensitive information has led to the introduction of the Mac computers as a way to thwart the efforts of hackers prematurely. At present, Apple provides some 20,000 of the Army's 700,000 servers and desktops. This may be a very small proportion, but the number is growing annually. This fact sits a little uneasy with us:

Although we would not trade our Macs for Aladdin's lamp, calling them in to the Army's systems to further its security is questionable. First thing, we are not great believers that Macs offer greater protection than Microsoft's offerings; secondly, even if they did; where there's a will, there's a way. That way may not be so difficult with Apple computers, making the route of attack potentially easier. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Apple's Mac OS X license state military use of its software is forbidden? [Forbes]

Believe it or not, the idea came from skin-administered drugs, such as nicotine patches. A first attempt using a felt pad soaked in "calmative" (their word not mine) fired from a rifle was ditched when it was discovered that thick clothing acted as a shield. Then some Pentagon clown (who'd probably just come back from a bachelor weekend) came up with the whole paintball idea.

The report doesn't just stop at drug administration via modified leisure activities—oh, no. Perhaps taking a leaf out of Saddam Hussein's book, one of the proposals involves a drone aircraft spraying clouds of non-lethal substances (laughing gas? itching powder? sexy laydee pheromones?) at crowds in order to disperse them. I've got a better idea. Legalize weed, guys, it'll be cheaper. [Wired via Sci-Fi Tech]

[YouTube via UberGizmo]

Of course, we couldn't get a picture of this uberplane, so just pretend that this Secret Service guard is in front of it and not Air Force One. – Nicholas Deleon

Inside Bob Gates's Flying Fortress [Time]