Giant armored vehicles are hard to hide. When rolling forward, they're loud, lumbering hunks of metal, but with the dark of night and the engine turned off, they can gain some semblance of discretion, their listening metal hulls hiding from all but those either very alert or immediately nearby. This state, called “silent watch,” means the tank (or infantry fighting vehicle, or troop carrier) becomes a waiting body--its sensors run on low battery and scan the world around it, waiting until it's needed to power back on and drive forth.
A boat pulls up to the dock. It's a long-liner, meaning the owner, an Icelander by the name of Jani, uses long lines and hooks to bring fish up from the seafloor, between 100 and 1,000 feet down. Jani's boat has 16,000 such hooks, which take two and a half hours to put out and another 8 hours to pull in. All said, he can haul in about 11,000 pounds of fish a night.
On January 12, 2020, the PLA's "916" Tianmushan, a 5,000 ton Type 072A LST (Landing Ship Tanks), was commissioned into the PLAN. The news is notable in two ways: the first is that it joins the East Sea Fleet, which has responsibility for operations around Taiwan. The second is that it adds further to what was already the world's largest fleet of tank landing ships.
The temperature hovered around freezing in New York City on Tuesday evening and my exposed hands were started to go numb, turning clumsy and slow in the cold. My phone's battery was sluggish in the frigid air, and the screen was lagging. My internet connection, however, was flying.
While other autonomous vehicle tests are being carried out on closed campuses and simulated streets, Audi has decided to test at the track. Audi engineers will be working with their counterparts at the Volkswagen Group Electronics Research Lab in Silicon Valley to test highly automated vehicles - or piloted driving, in Audi's terms - at speed using Thunderhill Raceway in California.
On face value, Dave Levin and Loay Malameh are creating a makerspace and innovation center for refugees, but their real goal is much more ambitious. “Much of what we're doing is trying to disrupt the whole nature of humanitarian relief, of civil defense, perhaps of warfare itself,” said Levin.
Previous
