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DanDrollette writes:
The secret history of the world’s largest nuclear detonation is coming to light after 60 years. The United States dismissed the gigantic Tsar Bomba as a stunt, but behind the scenes was working to build a “superbomb” of its own.
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DanDrollette writes:
A comprehensive look at the US' new (and expensive, unnecessary, and highly vulnerable) land-based nuclear missile. Many of the missile’s critics are former military leaders, and their criticism has to do with its immovable silos. Relative to nuclear missiles on submarines, which can slink around undetected, or nuclear bombs on airplanes—the two other legs of the nuclear "triad"—America’s land-based nuclear missiles are easy marks.
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DanDrollette writes:
The anniversay of the bombing of Nagasaki just occured, so this is is a good time to revisit events of the lesser-known of the two atomic bombings.
In a nutshell: A typhoon was coming, the fuel pump failed, they had to switch planes, things were wired incorrectly, they missed their rendezvous, they couldn't see the primary target, they ran out of gas on the way home, and they had to crash-land. But the worst part was when the Fat Man atomic bomb started to arm itself and begin the countdown to detonation mid-flight, before they were even half-way to Nagasaki.
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Lasrick writes:
12 years (and billions of rubles) after skirmishes between pro-Russian separatists and government forces in Georgia and the subsequent invasion of the former Soviet republic by Russian forces, Russia has heeded the lessons learned from that conflict: The Russian military had gone to war in using World War II-era compasses for navigation and outmoded equipment for weapons targeting, a far cry from the capabilities of the US military. But Russia is now challenging the United States’ long-standing supremacy in space, working to exploit the US military’s dependence on space systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, and targeting.
Aaron Bateman of Johns Hopkins, a former US Air Force intelligence officer who has published on technology and military strategy, Cold War history, and European security affairs, writes about a coming space arms race, with Moscow’s aggressive behavior in space potentially inducing the United States to pursue more assertive policies, like the reinvigoration of Cold War-era anti-satellite weapons programs.
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sciencehabit writes:
Most days, Willy van Wingerden spends a few free hours walking by the sea not far from the Dutch town of Monster. Here, the cheerful nurse has plucked more than 500 ancient artifacts from the broad, windswept beach known as the Zandmotor, or “sand engine.” She has found Neanderthal tools made of river cobbles, bone fishhooks, and human remains thousands of years old. Her favorite beach—made of material dredged from the sea bottom offshore—preserves traces of a lost world, when sea levels were lower, and what is now the North Sea was a rich lowland, home to modern humans and Neanderthals. While she and other dedicated amateurs amass artifacts, scientists are applying new methods to date the finds and sequence any genetic traces, as well as to map the sea floor and analyze sediment cores. Together, researchers and collectors are bringing to light a vanished homeland of ancient Europeans.
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Lasrick writes:
On the surface, who could disagree with quashing the idea of supposed killer robots? Dr. Larry Lewis, who spearheaded the first data-based approach to protecting civilians in conflict, wants us to look a bit closer.
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Lasrick writes:
You may remember the explosion at VECTOR, once a center of Soviet biological warfare research. Filippa Lentzos, senior research fellow jointly appointed in the Departments of War Studies and of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, just posted an update on what happened after the explosion. Her research focuses on biological threats and on the security and governance of emerging technologies in the life sciences, and she's been covering the accident since it first happened in September.
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Dan Drollette writes:
The incident should serve as yet another wake-up call that the nuclear power industry needs to take cybersecurity more seriously.
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Dan Drollette writes:
Opponents of wind power claim that it's too unreliable, intermittent, unpredictable, and expensive to ever be a major energy source. But on Block Island, Rhode Island — site of North America's first commercial, offshore wind farm — residents found the exact opposite to be true. The Bulletin goes to the smallest town in the smallest state to find out why, in this multimedia package.
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Dan Drollette writes:
A specialist in nuclear security analyzes Game of Thones. One immediate similarity to the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction: The inherent difficulties of managing fictional dragons and real-life nuclear weapons. (Which George R.R. Martin was well-aware of.)
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Lasrick writes:
A court ruling on whether bots have First Amendment free speech rights remains in the realm of conjecture, but as a new law in California will soon force bots that engage in electioneering or marketing to declare their non-human identity, it may be coming soon. Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas, thinks the people programming bots may want US courts to answer the question on free speech rights for bots in the affirmative. Take a hypothetical bot that engages a voter around a shared concern like motherhood, for instance. "If it has to say, ‘Well look, I’m not really a mother, I’m a chatbot mother, a mother of other chatbots. And when I say I feel your pain, I don’t actually have feelings.’ That’s just not going to be very effective,” Sacharoff says.
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Dan Drollette writes:
Dire as it is, the latest IPCC report is actually too optimistic — it ignores the risk of self-reinforcing climate feedbacks pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control. So says a team of climate experts, including the winner of the 1995 Nobel for his work on depletion of the ozone layer.
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meckdevil writes:
Joanne Chory, director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and a Breakthrough Prize recipient, has created an initiative called “Harnessing Plants for the Future” to develop a super plant that will both provide food and store carbon dioxide in its roots. A “super chickpea plant” now in development could remove huge amounts of excess atmospheric carbon dioxide and fix it in the soil, greatly diminishing the impacts of climate change (not to mention producing large amounts of tasty hummus). But fear of anti-GMO activists has so far deterred her from using the Crispr gene-editing tool to speed work on the plant.
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Dog of the South writes:
When the Pentagon--famous for its painful procurement process and its penchant for producing tech systems that are obsolete before they're fielded--decided to develop and deploy artificial intelligence to a combat zone within just six months, the idea sounded like a failure waiting to happen. Remarkably, Project Maven has met its goals and won rave reviews--and may have changed the Pentagon's whole approach to tech innovation. But is the Defense Department ready for the enormous challenges that lie at the intersection of military power and artificial intelligence?
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slash.jit writes:
China Has Launched the World’s First All-Electric Cargo Ship. It can travel 80 kilometers (approximately 50 miles) after being charged for 2 hours. As noted by Clean Technica, 2 hours is roughly the amount of time it would take to unload the ship’s cargo while docked.
Oh.. and Ironically, the world’s first all-electric cargo ship is being used to move coal.
