Speaking at the Pentagon earlier today, Vice President Mike Pence outlined the official plan to create the U.S. Space Force, the first new branch of the military in more than 70 years.

China claims to have successfully tested a hypersonic aircraft capable of reaching speeds in excess of Mach 6, or 4,563 miles per hour. The cutting-edge vehicle has the potential to penetrate U.S. missile defense systems and be refitted to include a nuclear warhead.

The common conception of a technologically enabled apocalypse foresees a powerful artificial intelligence that, either deliberately or by accident, destroys human civilization. But as a new report from the RAND Corporation points out, the reality may be far subtler: As AI slowly erodes the foundations that made the…

School districts in New Mexico have begun installing advanced gunshot-detection devices in the wake of February’s Parkland school shooting.

For years, we’ve been sharing videos and images showing the destructive power of the United State Navy’s electromagnetic railgun. But we might soon be seeing the last of those horrifying GIFs.

In preparation for this week’s UN Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva, Switzerland, the Future of Life Institute has released a disturbing sci-fi short that shows what might happen if we fail to place an international moratorium on autonomous killing machines.

The US Air Force’s scientific research wing is giving Lockheed Martin $26.3 million “for the design, development, and production of a high power fiber laser,” which it expects to start testing on a tactical fighter jet in four years. Sounds cool and certainly futuristic, but the jury’s still out on whether these…

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey’s new tech startup isn’t just trying to ramp up border security—it seems the company also wants to gamify war and modernize battlefields with virtual and augmented reality.

As we head deeper into the 21st century, the prospect of getting robots to do the dirty business of killing gets closer with each passing day. In Max Tegmark’s new book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, the MIT physicist and founder of the Future of Life Institute contemplates this…

Data visualization artist Neil Halloran has a knack for turning incomprehensibly large and complex data sets into content that’s both coherent and engrossing. In his latest project, the filmmaker uses his skills to convey the unthinkable: the total number of deaths caused by an all-out nuclear war.

Just in time for the Fourth of July, North Korea says it has successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The country voted most likely to start WWIII says it can now strike targets anywhere in the world, but military experts believe the missile, which flew for 40 minutes, is a medium range…

At an airshow held earlier today in southern China, a pair of J-20 stealth fighters streaked across the sky as Beijing proudly debuted the latest edition to its military arsenal.

Archaeologists working at an ancient Roman battlefield in Scotland have discovered a type of pierced sling-bullet that made a whistling sound when hurled at the enemy.

Earlier this summer, more than a thousand prominent thinkers and specialists signed an open letter calling for a ban on autonomous killing machines. Since then, a number of critics have condemned the motion, citing it as both dangerous and useless. Optimization researcher Toby Walsh explains why we shouldn’t be so…

More than a thousand prominent thinkers and leading AI and robotics researchers have signed an open letter calling for a ban on “offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.”

Set in the near future, Ghost Fleet dares to imagine what the next global war might actually look like. We talked to P.W. Singer to learn how he and his co-author August Cole managed to produce a futuristic techno-thriller that’s as plausible as it is entertaining. We were also given an exclusive excerpt from the…