There are some pretty neat potential military applications of this kind of technology, and they are not necessarily kinetic. Imagine that you could lean out Cisco’s OSPF network layer protocol – or adopt some existing lean layer 3 protocol – in such a [...]]]> Check out this quad rotor video from UPenn’s GRASP lab:

There are some pretty neat potential military applications of this kind of technology, and they are not necessarily kinetic. Imagine that you could lean out Cisco’s OSPF network layer protocol – or adopt some existing lean layer 3 protocol – in such a way that it could run on a circuit card. Network traffic could flow between the UAS nodes in such a way that not all possible routes would have to be advertised, thereby reducing the overhead burden and increasing “goodput.” Potentially some larger, “master” UAS or other battlefield system would be aware of all potential routes so that the network could self-form and self-heal as nano-UASs joined or left the network.

Now picture that you have a dispersed number of troops in some place where the cellular network is either compromised or unavailable. A soldier in one building could launch his nano-bot, establish a network link, and over line-of-sight connections to the other network nodes and master, establish connectivity to the Global Information Grid. Now on his iPhone or iPad – or whatever secure, handheld network device you might think of – he could tap into virtually all web-enabled services; imagery, voice/video, ftp, email and text. Assuming of course that the master system has wide-band SATCOM, which why wouldn’t it?

Taking fire from a site beyond yonder hill? Employ a cross-domain solution at the master system which enables you to go to Google Earth and see what collateral damage implications would be involved in counter-fires. If the nano-bots themselves had sensors, they could create a common operational picture that is viewable both by troops in the field and from higher headquarters for combined fires.

What’s your idea?

Pentagon-supported physicists on Wednesday said they had devised a “time cloak” that briefly makes an event undetectable.

The laboratory device manipulates the flow of light in such a way that for the merest fraction of a second an event cannot be seen, according to a [...]]]> DARPA gets that teensiest bit closer to making one:

Pentagon-supported physicists on Wednesday said they had devised a “time cloak” that briefly makes an event undetectable.

The laboratory device manipulates the flow of light in such a way that for the merest fraction of a second an event cannot be seen, according to a paper published in the science journal Nature.

It adds to experimental work in creating next-generation camouflage — a so-called invisibility cloak in which specific colours cannot be perceived by the human eye.

“Our results represent a significant step towards obtaining a complete spatio-temporal cloaking device,” says the study, headed by Moti Fridman of Cornell University in New York…

After proving that the “cloak” is possible, the next step for the researchers is to expand the time gap by orders of magnitude, firstly to microseconds and then to milliseconds, said Boyd and Shi.

The time cloak has a potential use in boosting security in fibre-optic communications because it breaks up optical signals, lets them travel at different speeds and then reassembles them, which makes data hard to intercept.

Last year, scientists reported a step forward in so-called metamaterials which act as a cloaking of space, as opposed to time.

Metamaterials are novel compounds whose surface that interacts with light at specific frequencies thanks to a tiny, nano-level structure. As a result, light flows around the object — rather like water that bends around a rock in a stream — as opposed to being absorbed by it.

Tinkering with time and space.

Geez.

Pretty nifty, but I’m not sure how they’re going to hide the engine exhaust plume when the tank is on the move…

And soon it will launch off electromagnetic catapults.