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Laser Folds Tiny Origami for US Army

A team of researchers figured out how to get 3 mm microstructures to fold in response to low-intensity laser light, but now their focus is even smaller. CREDIT: U.S. Army Research Laboratory

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Lasers could help fire weapons or set off explosive warheads for the U.S. Army in the near future. That possibility comes from a lab demonstration of how a simple, handheld laser can fold tiny metallic structures in a style that mimics Japanese origami.

The demonstration suggests that similar systems could produce tiny grippers and switches that would act as mechanical components in small devices. The components could be used to detonate explosive or propellant material, attach identification transponder tags to clothing, or even enable a new generation of extremely tiny robots or electronic devices.

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"We are enabling true microsystems, where all of the energy and functions are self-contained in a millimeter- or smaller-sized package," said Christopher Morris, a researcher focused on micro-materials and devices at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

Army researchers became interested in the concept after seeing work that Johns Hopkins University had done in making micro devices for performing surgery. But the Army took the method a step farther by creating millimeter-sized structures that could be triggered by low-power lasers or even LED lighting.

The tiny structures act as mechanical hinges capable of folding along certain "stress" lines built into the layered metal. When a laser shines onto the structure, its energy softens a polymer "trigger" that normally prevents the hinges from folding.

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A handheld laser operating on "eye-safe" levels could trigger the folding action from up to 3 feet away during testing detailed in the journal Applied Physics Letters and highlighted in the journal Nature Photonics.

Folding time ranged from 67 milliseconds to 21 seconds, depending on the wavelength and intensity of laser light, but larger structures required several minutes. The Army Research Laboratory takes about 20 hours to make a sheet of the millimeter-sized folding structures.

"Our hope is that new uses will spur from this basic scientific exploration of novel fabrication and self- assembly of materials, and will help future soldiers in ways they may not even see," Morris said.

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Military's Robot Mule Carries on Despite Fall

By Jeremy Hsu, TechNewsDaily

The four-legged LS3 robot follows soliders around, and can carry 400 pounds of equipment. Credit: Boston Dynamics

A four-legged U.S. military robot carrying 400 pounds of equipment has shown how it can play "follow the leader" in a manner similar to a trained mule or horse. Like an animal, it can also regain its feet after an accidental tumble in the woods.

The Legged Squad Support System (LS3) robot has evolved into a quieter beast compared to earlier four-legged "BigDog" or "AlphaDog" robots that sounded like runaway lawnmowers or chainsaw-armed Terminators. The latest LS3 version represents the U.S. military's best hope for a robotic helper that can carry combat loads across rough terrain for soldiers or Marines.

A new video by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency demonstrates how the robot obeys a verbal command by a human researcher: "LS3 follow tight."

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Several camera shots show the LS3 robot ambling after its human leader like an overlarge, clumsy puppy trying to keep up with an owner. At one point the robot takes a tumble and rolls almost comically down a slope before regaining its feet.

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The video also shows the robot, made by Boston Dynamics, trotting along more briskly in a manner vaguely reminiscent of high-stepping horse. The robot succeeded in navigating ditches, streams, wooded slopes and mock-urban environments during the field testing by DARPA and the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory.

U.S. Marines have already spent months working with robotic helicopters capable of delivering supplies to outposts or frontline troops. A robotic mule could serve different, if equally useful, purposes for squads on patrol.

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DARPA envisions the robot acting like a mobile recharging station for U.S. troops to recharge pounds of batteries used in radios and handheld mobile devices. The Marines have already experimented with  using renewable energy sources such as portable solar panels to replace some of the batteries they carry.

But the LS3 robot's greatest potential use comes from carrying some of the combat equipment that soldiers might normally have to carry themselves. The heavy burden of combat loads averaging close to 100 pounds per soldier has already taken a serious health toll on both active troops and returning veterans.

You can follow TechNewsDaily Senior Writer Jeremy Hsu on Twitter @jeremyhsu. Follow TechNewsDaily on Twitter @TechNewsDaily, or on Facebook.

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Foam Stops Internal Bleeding

If you've ever used a can of Great Stuff, you know what an amazing job the foam insulation does sealing up gaps and cracks around the house.

In similar fashion, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has developed their own spray foam; only their version can be injected into a wounded soldier's abdominal cavity to help stop internal bleeding.

When soldiers are wounded on the battlefield, getting them to advanced-level treatment facilities within the first 60 minutes of injury often makes the difference between life and death.

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During this "Golden Hour," internal bleeding -- particularly in the abdominal cavity -- is life-threatening because there is little that can be done to stop the bleeding. Internal wounds can't be compressed like external wounds, nor can they be treated with tourniquets and hemostatic dressings, which require a medic to access to the injury in order to dress it.

DARPA hopes their new foam can help the wounded survive until they get to treatment facilities. Designed by Arsenal Medical as part of DARPA's Wounded Stasis Program, the polyurethane polymer foam can be injected by a field medic in two liquid phases, a polyol phase and an isocyanate phase. When the liquids mix, they expand to 30 times their original volume.

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As it expands, the foam fills the abdominal cavity and conforms to the surface of the injured tissue and organs. The foam then hardens, providing resistance to intra-abdominal blood loss. DARPA says the foam can even expand through pooled and clotted blood.

During tests, removal of the foam took less than one minute after an incision by a surgeon. Only minimal amounts of the foam remained in the abdominal cavity and no significant amount of tissue stuck to the foam.

No human tests have been conducted yet. However, tests on swine did show that the foam raised survival rates for liver injuries after three hours from eight to 72 percent and reduced blood loss by six fold. DARPA recently awarded Arsenal Medical a $15.5 million contract for Phase II of the project to continue development in hope of future FDA approval of a prototype device.

via Gizmag

Credit: DARPA

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Military Drones Prowl US Skies

By TechNewsDaily Staff

FAA documents don't show any oversight of how drone flights could affect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans. Credit: David Howells/Corbis

Military drones used to track terrorists or insurgents in Afghanistan have also been flying across the U.S. homeland. Newly released documents show U.S. drone flights by the Air Force, Marine Corps and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the first time.

The Air Force has tested drones in U.S. skies ranging from hand-launched Ravens to the larger Reaper drones responsible for targeting and killing people overseas — all recorded through the Federal Aviation Administration licenses required to fly in national airspace. That information became public through a Freedom of Information Act request from the nonprofit digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

"The FAA recently announced it wants to slow down drone integration into U.S. skies due to privacy concerns," the EFF said. "We are hopeful this indicates the agency is finally changing its views."

But the advocacy organization noted that the FAA documents don't show any oversight of how drone flights could affect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.

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The advocates run a U.S. drone census that aims to track drone flights made in the homeland by the U.S. military, law enforcement agencies, local police departments and universities. Part of that effort has involved requesting the FAA to release documents showing what agencies and organizations applied for licenses to fly drones in U.S. national airspace.

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Drones flown by the Air Force near places such as Virginia Beach, Va., have the cameras and sensors to track moving ground targets for hours at a time. The Reaper drone capable of both spying on people and firing missiles at them has spent much of its time prowling the skies above Nevada, California and Utah.

Some Air Force operators have even practiced surveillance missions they might carry out in Afghanistan by tracking civilian cars on the highways, according to a New York Times report.

The Air Force proved the most accommodating by allowing the related FAA records to go public. The Marine Corps chose to redact so much material from the records that the EFF had a difficult time figuring out the Marines' drone programs.

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On the civilian side, the drone records show how many U.S. law enforcement agencies want to use drones for spying on drug activities in the war on drugs.  But some police departments -- specifically the Orange County, Fla., sheriff's department and Mesa County, Colo., sheriff -- chose to withhold some or most of the information about drone flights by claiming that public information could threaten their police work.

The FAA released the new batch of documents more than a year and a half after the EFF filed its Freedom of Information Act request, but has yet to release more than half of the available drone records. The EFF called that "unacceptable."

"Before the public can properly assess privacy issues raised by drone flights, it must have access to the FAA's records as a whole," the EFF said.

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Squirrels, Birds Teach Robots To Deceive

Deception is something that people do all the time -- and it plays an important role in military strategy. Now some researchers are trying to figure out how to get robots to do it, by looking at the behavior of squirrels and birds.

At Georgia Tech, a team led by Ronald Arkin, a professor at the School of Interactive Computing, studied the literature on squirrels hiding their caches of acorns. Squirrels will hide their food in a certain place, but when they see other squirrels trying to steal from them, they attempt to fool the thieves by running to a false location.

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Ronald Arkin, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, and his Ph.D. student Jaeeun Shim, used that as a model for robot behavior. They programmed the robot into tricking a "predator" machine by doing what a squirrel does: showing the adversary a false location for an important resource.

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The team also looked at how other animals -– in this case, a species of bird called an Arabian babbler –- drive off predators. Babblers will make an alarm call when they see a predator and other babblers will join the bird and make more calls. They then mob the predator, all the while flapping wings and making noise. The babblers don't ever actually fight the animal they want to drive off; they just make enough noise and flap around enough that attacking a babbler seems like it isn't worth it.

Arkin and and Ph.D. student Justin Davis found that the deception works when the group reaches a certain size -- essentially, when enough backup arrives to convince the adversary that it's best to back off. Davis modeled that behavior in software using a military scenario and found that it worked even if the group didn't have the firepower to confront the enemy directly.

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The military is interested in this because a robot that can fool an opponent is a valuable tool. It could lead an enemy down a false trail or make itself look more dangerous than it actually is.

The work is an extension of similar research Arkin started in 2009, developing a kind of 'ethical governor' for robots. In 2010 he worked with Alan Wagner to develop deception algorithms using a kind of hide-and-seek game.

If robots can fool other robots – or people – that does raise interesting ethical problems. When does fooling people become dangerous? How do you tell the robot when the right time to do that is? We won't be seeing anything like the Terminator anytime soon, but we already have drones, and the military has explored the use of autonomous supply vehicles. Human Rights Watch has expressed concern over robots that can make targeting decisions -- the ability to deceive would complicate that.

via Georgia Tech

Credit: Tetra Images/Corbis

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How Syria Shut Down the Internet

By Ben Weitzenkorn, TechNewsDaily

The Syrian goverment has cut off the Internet in a novel way.

On Thursday, all Internet traffic in and out of Syria suddenly stopped.

Syria isn't the first country to have suddenly cut its population off from the Internet, but the manner in which it did so may be unprecedented.

"Since the beginning of today's outage, we have received no requests from Syrian IP space," network-reliability provider CloudFlare wrote on its blog last night. "That is a more complete blackout than we've seen when other countries have been cut from the Internet."

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The Syrian Minister of Information blamed the outage on terrorists, the Jerusalem Post reported.

"It is not true that the state cut the Internet. The terrorists targeted the Internet lines, resulting in some regions being cut off," he reportedly said, citing a cut cable.

As far as CloudFlare could tell, that was not the case. Instead, evidence suggests it was a planned shutdown by the government.

CloudFlare said when the outage occurred, connections to Syrian IP space were all withdrawn at the same time, effectively blocking all Internet traffic to and from the country.

Internet access in Syria is provided solely by the government-run Syrian Telecommunications Establishment.

There are four telecommunication cables that connect Syria to the Internet. Three are underwater and the fourth runs overland through Turkey.

However, CloudFlare doubts that the disconnect was performed physically.

"The systematic way in which routes were withdrawn suggests that this was done through updates in router configurations, not through a physical failure or cable cut," the CloudFlare blog said.

CloudFlare provided a video of the shutoff occurring in real time, letting viewers watch an entire country lose Internet access.

Nationwide Internet cutoffs were among the last-ditch efforts by Libya's and Egypt's former dictators to save their regimes before both fell during the Arab Spring uprisings last year.

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How Israel's Iron Dome Works

The conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza has meant a test of Israel's missile defenses, a system called the "Iron Dome," which was built to protect Israel from short-range, unguided rockets on ballistic trajectories. Unlike it's name implies, the Iron Dome is not an actual dome, but a small, mobile arsenal that consists of a radar unit and typically three launchers capable of deploying missile interceptors and missiles. It was up in running for the first time on March 27, 2011.

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It works when radar picks up the signal of an incoming rocket -- most of which are unguided -- within an approximately 40-mile radius. The information is sent to a control center on a truck and operators check the trajectory of the rocket. If it's headed to a populated area or a military target, an Iron Dome missile, called a Tamir, is fired. This missile is guided and therefore more accurate than the attacking missile. A solider programs the Tamir with the incoming rocket's trajectory and then guides it with the help of radar. When the Tamir reaches the rocket, it detonates, destroying it.

There are currently five batteries of Iron Dome missiles deployed. As of this past weekend, the Israeli military reported that they had taken out hundreds of incoming rockets. Those that were headed to unpopulated areas were allowed to strike.

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Iron Dome was developed by three Israeli companies: Rafael Advanced Defense Systems built the Tamir missile. Here's a promotional video that shows how the system works. Elta, an Israel Aerospace Industries subsidiary, designed the radar. Impress developed the command and control systems.

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Building Iron Dome was financed largely with aid from the United States, amounting to $310 million so far and another $610 million over the next three years, according to The New York Times.

One issue with the system is the high price tag. Each Tamir cost up to $50,000, while the typical Qassam rocket launched form Gaza is less than $1,000. That means that Palestinians can launch a lot more rockets at much less expense. Even if Israel were to deploy many more batteries, it's possible the Palestinians could fire enough rockets to simply overwhelm the interceptors.

via: Business Insider, NBC

The video below shows the system in action during a recent attack.

Photo: The Israeli army deployed a fifth Iron Dome anti-missile battery near Tel Aviv on Saturday after rocket barrages were launched at the city amid Operation Pillar of Defense. The IDF said the battery is estimated to have higher interception abilities than the previous four systems already in use, and includes an improved radar and upgraded interception software, enabling the protection of a larger radius. Credit: Xinhua/Jini

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Hackers Cyberattacking Israeli Government Sites

As violence between Israel and Palestinian militants continues to escalate, new fronts of digital warfare are being declared in cyberspace.

Reuters' Steven Scheer reports that Israeli government websites have been bombarded by more than 44 million hacking attempts since Israel began its air strikes last week. Defense-related websites have been the biggest targets, while 10 million attempts have been made on Israeli President Shimon Peres's website, 7 million on the Foreign Ministry and 3 million on the prime minister's website.

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"The war is taking place on three fronts. The first is physical, the second is on the world of social networks and the third is cyber," said Carmela Avner, Israel's chief information officer, according to Reuters.

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Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said that one hacking attempt succeeded in taking down one site, which he declined to name, but it was back online within 10 minutes.

According to a ministry spokesman, most cyberattacks have come from within Israeli and Palestinian territories, but some have come from around the world.

On Friday, international hacking collective Anonymous published a list of Israeli websites it had taken down or defaced. Though all sites have returned to normal, many had their homepages temporarily replaced with pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas messages.

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Anonymous started their #OpIsrael campaign in solidarity with Palestine after Israel "crossed a line in the sand" by threatening to sever all Internet and telecommunications in and out of Gaza.

However, both sides in the conflict have embraced social media as a means to spread their message and document the turmoil. The Israeli Defense Force is quite active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram while Palestinian militants are primarily active on Twitter.

via Reuters

Credit: Kobi Gideon/Xinhua Press/Corbis

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Clear Super Material Stops Microbullets

Bulletproofing for soldiers and law enforcement officers has lightened up considerably in recent years, but it promises get insanely thin with new nanotechnology coming out of MIT and Rice University.

A team of mechanical engineering and materials scientists created special materials that were able to stop bullets in the lab. The group, which included Rice research scientist Jae-Hwang Lee and School of Engineering dean Ned Thomas, recently published their findings in Nature Communications (abstract).

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The type of material, called a structured polymer composite, can actually self-assemble into alternating glassy and rubbery layers. When performing ballistic tests on the material at MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, those 20-nanometer-thick layers were able to stop a 9-millimeter bullet and seal the entryway behind it, according to a Rice University article.

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However, one of the challenges to making thinner and lighter protective gear is being able to test new, promising materials effectively in the lab. Researchers need to know precisely why those nanolayers are so good at dissipating energy, but analyzing the polymer can take days.

So the MIT-Rice team also came up with an innovative testing method, where they shot tiny glass beads at the material. Although the beads were only a millionth of a meter in size, they simulated bullet impacts, according to MIT News. Under a scanning electron microscope the material's layers look like corduroy so the projectile impact can be seen clearly.

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The nanomaterial, along with improved impact testing, could translate into safety beyond vests. According to the researchers, these advancements could accelerate progress on protective coatings for satellites and even jet engine turbine blades.

Meanwhile the team has a disk of the bullets trapped in the clear material to show any skeptics. Ned Thomas told Rice University, "This would be a great ballistic windshield material."

Photo: Rice University scientists Ned Thomas (left) and Jae-Hwang Lee with the material that stopped three bullets. Credit: Tommy LaVergne, Rice University

Correction: An earlier version of this post had a headline that misstated the thickness and nature of the material tested.

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Follow The Bouncing Camera

It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie: a spherical camera that can be thrown into tight spaces to see what is happening. The founders of a Boston, Ma.-based company called Bounce Imaging, Francisco Aguilar and Dave Young, want to make it a reality. The camera could be used by first responders, law enforcement officers or soldiers to scope out a room before entering it.

The technology itself isn't all that complex: the ball has six cameras, each facing in a different direction and is equipped with accelerometers, gyroscopes and sensors for temperature, as well as infrared LEDs. The spherical casing is tough enough and bouncy enough that the device can be thrown.

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The images it sees, along with any other data, are transmitted to a mobile device, such as a smart phone or tablet.

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Spherical cameras have been built before; there is even a military model called the Eyeball R1, built by Israeli company ODF Optronics. But it costs $5,000. Bounce Imaging hopes to sell their device for a fraction of that.

Cost is an important consideration because there might be some situations where the camera has to be left behind or is thrown somewhere that it gets damaged. Currently there isn't any way for the ball to roll back to the thrower.

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While it might sound like a useful technology, this kind of sensor has encountered skepticism before. The Eyeball, for example, might roll behind a couch or other object and not be able to "see." And if a soldier or police officer is going to throw something into a room then it might be a better idea to use a flash-bang grenade. It's likely first responders would be using it before the police or military.

Meanwhile the device isn't in production yet. The founders, former students at MIT's Sloan School of Management, won $50,000 in seed money from MassChallenge, a local startup incubator, as well as $10,000 from VenCorp's NYC Impact Challenge.

Credit: Bounce Imaging

 

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