Barco, a maker of large-format projector technologies, has just unveiled what it is calling a breakthrough in flight simulator technology, and for all the hardware involved we're inclined to agree that his must be something big. The new flight simulator dome - it's really more like a sphere - offers state of the art high-res visuals and full 360-degree views, allowing fighter pilot trainees to spot other aircraft from 20 kilometres away.
Apple's iPhone 4S announcement yesterday was somewhat anticlimactic save the incorporation of Siri, a voice-command application that is now integrated deeply into Apple's new iOS 5 and allows users to ask their phones questions and give them commands in natural language. And if that kind of voice recognition and command sounds somewhat familiar to you technophiles, it should. Siri is the indirect spawn of DARPA, Danger Room reports, envisioned to help military commanders organise their data and otherwise make sense of fast-moving situations.
It's not enough for the US military to be able to monitor you from afar. The US Army wants its drones to know you through and through, reports Danger Room, and it is imbuing them with the ability to recognise you in a crowd and even to know what you are thinking and feeling. Like a best friend that at any moment might vaporise you with a hellfire missile.
It's an innovation fit for a Cold War spy novel: a means to transmit secret messages via microbe. Dubbed steganography by printed arrays of microbes (yup: SPAM), the technique involves encoding messages in the colours of glowing bacteria, which can be later unlocked with antibiotics.
We hear so many negative things about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program these days: cost overruns, missed deadlines, technology failures, etc. So it's nice to see a video of a small piece of the larger JSF initiative moving forward--and moving quickly. It's not part of the plane itself, but a stealthy cruise missile developed by Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, and it's looking for a ship to sink.
Improvised explosive devices are far and away the single biggest killer of coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the ability to identify hidden explosive threats is key to keeping soldiers safe. A team of researchers at Michigan State University has developed a tool that could detect roadside bombs from afar, using nothing more than a laser with an energy output of a presentation pointer.
Over at Danger Room, Noah Shachtman got a look at the US military's current and next-gen night-vision goggles (or, more accurately, "goggle," or "monogoggle," since they only cover one eye). Hardly anyone ever gets to look at these, so to actually be able to try them out is pretty amazing. The goggles live up to the hype: they pack incredibly sensitive thermal sensors (enough so that reflections and handprints both glow) as well as embedded LCDs that transmit all kinds of data.
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