Lifeboat Foundation

Consumer drones have over the years struggled with an image of being no more than expensive and delicate toys. But applications in industrial, military and enterprise scenarios have shown that there is indeed a market for unmanned aerial vehicles, and today, a startup that makes drones for some of those latter purposes is announcing a large round of funding and a partnership that provides a picture of how the drone industry will look in years to come.

Percepto, which makes drones — both the hardware and software — to monitor and analyze industrial sites and other physical work areas largely unattended by people, has raised $45 million in a Series B round of funding.

Alongside this, it is now working with Boston Dynamics and has integrated its Spot robots with Percepto’s Sparrow drones, with the aim being better infrastructure assessments, and potentially more as Spot’s agility improves.

Apparently, military electronics can give away their location.

Look at the US Airforce’s new flying car! 😃

The U.S. Air Force has shared images of its newest addition, a flying car, and it doesn’t quite fit the image that’s expected to scare off enemy lines. See for yourself.

China and Russia will feel that America has just undermined their nuclear deterrents.

CPEC: Internal Pressure, External Threat – Why China’s $60 Billion Investment In Pakistan Is At Risk?

Its taking a bit more time for soldiers to adjust to their new drones.

• Land Warfare, Networks / Cyber

Let Your Robots Off The Leash – Or Lose: AI Experts.

In DARPA-Army experiments, soldiers tried to micromanage their drones and ground robots, slowing their reaction times and restricting their tactics. Can AIs earn troops’ trust?

Some of the greatest medical discoveries of the 20th century came from physicists who switched careers and became biologists. Francis Crick, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology and helped identify the structure of DNA, started his career as a physicist, as did Leo Szilard who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, writing the letter for Albert Einstein’s signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, but spent the last decades of his life doing pioneering work in biology, including the first cloning of a human cell.

Today, a group of world-renowned researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics with expertise from cosmology to quantum gravity are using physics to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

This simple laser demonstration is actually a great crash course on how these anti-drone weapons work.

At first glance, this video is just a simple promotional video for Rafael’s Drone Dome, an anti-drone laser weapon. But at just two minutes long, it does a really excellent job at explaining what how a laser weapon actually takes down a drone.

It’s a bit like a Bond villain lair, only much more dangerous.

An underground missile base lurking somewhere beneath Iran looks an awful lot like a James Bond villain lair, complete with walls carved out of rock, spotlights, and a promise of “severe revenge.”

Continue reading “Iran’s New Underground Missile Base Looks Mildly Terrifying. See for Yourself” »