NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Satellite Pics Reveal Heavy Guns in Syria

Satellite imagery, GPS, and Google Maps are all high-tech ways to find your way around, and now they are revealing military moves by the Syrian government.

Satellite images of Aleppo, Syria, show that the Assad regime has deployed its heavy artillery in civilian neighborhoods. The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Geospatial and Human Rights Project has been monitoring the situation over the past several months.Their full report is here.

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The pictures underscore the hardening of positions in Syria's most populous city. As it is, the war has resulted in suicide bombings and a war of snipers.

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The AAAS analysis covered 182 square kilometers of Aleppo and surrounding areas. It was based on satellite images captured on Aug. 9 by DigitalGlobe’s Quickbird-2 satellite and on Aug. 23 by GeoEye’s IKONOS, as well as information provided by AIUSA and media reports. A Google Earth image taken on Oct. 5 of last year was also used to investigate changes in the features of a military base.

The QuickBird satellite, launched in 2001, can see objects down to 24 inches across, from an orbit 279 miles up. IKONOS orbits higher, at about 430 miles and can see objects as small as three feet.

It's part of a longstanding AAAS project to use image analysis and satellite data such as GPS to monitor humanitarian crises in troubled regions such as Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Ossetia, Afghanistan and Myanmar.

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The AAAS said its image analysis wasn't perfect -– the high population density in Aleppo means that tall buildings can cast shadows.  But a lot of detail can still be picked up. In a neighborhood called Salaheddine, for example, smoke is visible above an urban area too tightly packed to reveal street-level changes.

Getting information about Syrian troop movements has been difficult at best; few news organizations operate inside the country and those that do have to navigate between areas controlled by the opposition.

Top photo: Recently-constructed "revetments" -- barriers to protect from artillery and probably mortar positions -- are visible near Aleppo airport on Aug. 9. 

Image: AAAS / DigitalGlobe

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James Bond Tech Still Beyond Our Reach

Fifty years ago this month, Dr. No premiered in theaters, the first installment of the James Bond series that would stretch 22 films to date with another installment, Skyfall, due to premiere this year.

The James Bond movies gave sixties audiences not only the vicarious thrill of following 007 through dangerous missions in exotic locales, but also a glimpse of the future through some of the technology used by Bond and the villains he pursued.

Despite the decades between the imagined Bond universe and the real world today, Bond and the supervillains he confronted still have the edge in terms of technology now available today.

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Homing Devices

In order for MI6 headquarters to keep tabs on 007's location, he has on several occasions had to carry some kind of homing device with tracking capability on his person.

In Thunderball, Bond brought with him a homing pill that activated when it was swallowed and emitted a frequency that could only be tracked with specialized equipment. Most recently in Casino Royale, Bond was implanted with a homing chip that not only tracked his whereabouts but also monitored his vitals.

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Although GPS tracking is virtually ubiquitous in cell phones today, a device the size of a small chip or a pill with GPS-tracking capabilities just doesn't exist yet. There is existing technology for implantable radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, like the microchips implemented in animals. Those, however, are only passive RFID and require a specialized scanner in close proximity.

Space Base

The climatic scenes in Moonraker take place on the space station of supervillian industrialist Hugo Drax. The space station is large enough for Bond, Drax, Bond's squeeze Dr. Holly Goodhead, Jaws and an untold number of henchman, all floating in simulated gravity in suborbital spaceflight. It has to be big, after all, given Drax's play to essentially use the station as an arc while he poisons all of humanity. Despite its size, Drax even has a radar jammer capable of hiding his massive suborbital hideout.

Although the International Space Station might be the closest comparison to the space base from Moonraker, the 21st-century station is nowhere near Drax's base in terms of scale or capability.

If you're going to take on a villain in space, conventional weapons just won't do. That's why in Moonraker, Bond was armed with a handheld laser gun.

Laser weapons already exist in various forms. As Craig Freudenrich writing for HowStuffWorks.com explains, high-energy lasers and other weapons, such as the Airborne Laser and the PHaSR, have been tested for possible military applications. However, a handheld, laser-burst gun isn't yet available today.

Cigarette-sized rocket

Given how often Bond can get himself into a jam, he often needs a lot of firepower in a small package when he's backed into a corner.

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Laser handguns

In You Only Live Twice, Bond wielded a rocket concealed into a tiny cigarette. Despite its size, the rocket was accurate within 30 yards and proved to be a lethal projectile.

In reality, no rocket has yet been developed that has that much firepower in such a small package. Even in a more conventional design like the shape of a gun, as demonstrated here by what might be the world's smallest gun, a firing mechanism that size can't really generate the force necessary to create the kind of stopping power wielded by 007.

Satellite-based weaponry

As difficult as a small-scale weapon might be to duplicate, no one has come close to the space weaponry developed by Bond villians.

Diamonds Are Forever marked the first time such a device was employed in which the laser used diamonds to concentrate light into an accurate and widely destructive weapon. In Goldeneye, an orbital satellite produced shock waves that created an electromagnetic pulse in a target area to destroy any electronic devices on the ground.

Count this as one Bond device we're happy to see on screen, but not in real life.

Photo credit: Corbis Images

Predator Drones Tracked by Insurgents

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are reporting that Iraqi insurgents have hacked into military spy drone video using an inexpensive, off-the-shelf computer program called Skygrabber, which was developed by the Russian company SkySoftware to intercept music, photos, video, programs and other content that can be downloaded from the Internet.

The name is pretty ironic, then.

Apparently, the snafu was discovered in July 2009, when the U.S. military captured militant who had a laptop with the video feeds on it.

The communication link between the drone and the ground station is not encrypted, and by using the software, just about anyone can monitor the unmanned autonomous aircraft and track it. John Bigs at CrunchGear called it packet sniffing. Technically not a "hack," since the movements of the plane are not being altered. But the fact that one can spy on the spy drone, well that's enough.

Perhaps this will prompt Obama to appoint a cybersecurity coordinator, a position that he promised to fill back in May, but remains open.

Any candidates?

AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin