by ra41. CC: Flickr

Recently the Navy issued a proposal that DangerRoom summarized perfectly, they want to create ”the Easy-Bake Oven of the robot apocalypse.”

The proposal can be broken into three “phases”:

1. “ Develop proof-of-concept for manufacturing with distributed micro-robot swarm.” As well as “Develop the architecture for a networked real-time embedded system, i.e., cyber-enabled manufacturing, to design, plan and operate this micro-factory for desktop manufacturing.”

2. “Build a micro-robot swarm system that is capable parallel processing in the production the selected complex material system”

3. “Transition the micro-robot swarm desktop manufacturing technology to critical military use and the civilian sector. Build marketable manufacturing units and demonstrate the fabrication of test-beds.”

The proposal also notes that “A successful swarm micro-robot desktop manufacturing system would be useful for a variety of commercial applications. Such a manufacturing platform can be used to create super-strong components, ultra-lightweight materials, composite and hierarchical structures, complex part geometries, and/or multi-functional components.”

One possible reading of this proposal goes like this:

1. Prove we can make a micro-robot army, as well as bigger robots to make the smaller robots for us

2.Build them

3. Let the military have ‘em.

Oh and lets try to flip ‘em to make a profit too.

So it’s finally going to happen, robots building other robots–micro-other-robots! … better call Bridget Moynahan, Will’s gunna need a hand… that’s not robotic.

CC: Senior Airman Brian Ybarbo/U.S. Air Force (Homepage image: AP)

Recent talk of the alleged use of psy-ops on many politically influential figures, such as John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin, comes at an already charged time for the military, specifically with it’s enormous budget.

We’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq for too long, everyone in the world wants us out, but for some reason we just don’t seem able to leave. Maybe we just like the view from the top of the Pamir Mountains, maybe we need to be patient with our government, or maybe the wigs in office have been brainwashed to stay there.

Rolling Stone magazine covered the meltdown between the opposing views of Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell on the application of psy-ops on the previously mentioned visiting guests in Afghanistan.  The dramatic battle between lieutenants concluded with Holmes having to resign.  Holmes defended his actions by saying:

“My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave. I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.”

With the score 1-0 in favor of the psy-ops division of the U.S. military, one must acknowledge their ability to fight off these accusations. And not only to defend themselves but manage to get  $553 billion for the Defense Department’s baseline budget.

So who knows? Maybe the military has an EC-130J flying around the capital, “brain-washing” politicians to support spending millions on obsolete aircraft parts when the majority of the human race wishes the U.S. could leave the middle east peacefully.

Hoping for the best. Photo: CC/Jordan

One percent of Air Force/Army/Navy/Marine brats have autism. That’s double the rate for the general population.

So I’m not surprised to read the US Defense Department’s announcement of a $2.2 grant to help the military better treat its personnel, and their families, who’ve been affected by the disease.

It may be that military moms and dads are exposed to more heavy metals in their jobs, as well as chemical and biological weapons. That, and experimental vaccines.

As a military spouse who has been contributing to Age of Autism since it was Rescue Post, I am especially thrilled. We’ve seen growth here at Age of Autism, but we’ve also seen growth of the autism epidemic both in the military and civilian community. We’ve also seen a rise in the challenges, or problems, that come along with this heartbreaking rise. In the military community the most recent FOIA shows that as of 2007, one in every eighty-eight military dependent child of an active duty member has autism. This figure most likely doesn’t include my own boys because of how and when the stats for the FOIA were tracked. Currently we’re waiting on new statistics.

via AGE OF AUTISM: Age of Autism Adds Military Category.

Photo: CC/David Lisbona

Military brass and scholars this May will meet to discuss a frightening near-future scenario, filled with loose nukes, bioweapons and untraceable terrorists.

This year’s symposium will examine the nation’s preparedness to prevent or manage four WMD crises that could transform U.S. security:

* Collapse of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime, in which a number of current, unresolved nuclear proliferation challenges threaten to unleash a sudden and destabilizing wave of proliferation;

* Failure of a WMD-Armed State, creating unprecedented risks that radical actors will obtain WMD and unprecedented challenges for prevention;

* A Biological Terror Campaign, in which terrorists employ deadly biological pathogens to strike at multiple cities; and

* A Nuclear Detonation in a U.S. City, delivered covertly and leaving great uncertainty about who did it, will it happen again, and how we should respond.

via Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction – National Defense University.

Smarter than your average carbon-based life form. Photo: Stanford U.

The Sci-Fi Channel blog says that autonomous choppers developed at Standford University are teaching each other to fly better than a human pilot.

The announcement embraces two common subtexts in media coverage of robotic technologies: that robots will soon be our betters, and that they can be trustworthy as they carry out their benign missions overhead.

Stanford says “there is interest in using autonomous helicopters to search for land mines in war-torn areas or to map out the hot spots of California wildfires in real time.”

That kind of language is the military’s way of easing robot killing machines into our consciences. The choppers will follow the Predator into the killing business soon enough.

DVICE: Stanfords robotic helicopters teach each other tricks, fly better than a human
Crazily enough, the helicopters used aren’t fancy at all. They’re just store-bought RC helicopters, with the complex innards added by the Stanford students. The team includes Professor Andrew Ng, graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter, Morgan Quigley, and expert remote controller Garett Oku.

(SS scientists studied Tibetans' facial characteristics on an early expedition.)

University of Missouri computer scientists are sure to anger “neuro-diversity” advocates with this one: Hypothesizing that autistic kids have unique physical features, they will create a roadmap with head size and facial feature measurements for diagnosticians.

The research is being funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

“Instead of looking at brain structures slice-by-slice in an MRI (magnetic resonance image), we developed tools to create 3-D representations of the structures in order to visualize and make comparisons,” said Kevin Karsch, a research assistant in Ye Duan’s computer graphics lab, in a recent announcement. “Using the 3-D representations, we are comparing the brain structures of autistic children to those of non-autistic children; no one has ever done that.”

Note: FXSmom last year blogged about using facial characteristics to diagnose genetic disorders.

MU Researchers Study Facial Structures, Brain Abnormalities to Reveal Formula for Earlier Detection of Autism | MU News Bureau
The U.S. Department of Defense awarded Duan, in collaboration with researchers at the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, a $110,000 grant to create a facial imaging system that will make identical measurements of the faces of children with ASD. Additionally, the NARSAD Foundation, the world’s leading charity dedicated to mental health research, awarded Duan the prestigious Young Investigator Award and $60,000 to fund 3-D imaging of various segments of the brain in children with ASD. The projects also are supported by a $100,000 contribution from other MU sources and $30,000 in Research Scholar Funds.

We are developing a quantitative method that will accurately measure these differences and allow for earlier, more precise detection of specific types of the disorder,” said Ye Duan, assistant computer science professor in the MU College of Engineering. “Once we have created a formula, we can pre-screen children by performing a quick, non-invasive scan of each child’s face and brain to check for abnormalities. Early detection is crucial in treating children and preparing families.”

(First, it was smallpox. Photo: Steven Stehling)

from Mark:

Plague is a terrorist threat, the University of Central Florida says.

According to the university: In 2005, plague killed 56 people in the Congo, “and another 124 were infected before the epidemic was stopped.”

The disease is more likely to kill you, than if you were infected with smallpox. Mortality rates for untreated plague are well over 50 percent. For smallpox, the mortality rate is about 30 percent.

UCF has new vaccine for plague, however, which can be taken orally: making it more useful in the case of a terrorist plague attack, something scientists, writing for the Lancet last year, is something for which we should be prepared.

UCF professor develops vaccine to protect against black plague bioterror attack
A University of Central Florida researcher may have found a defense against the Black Plague, a disease that wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages and which government agencies perceive as a terrorist threat today.

UCF Professor Henry Daniell and his team have developed a vaccine that early research shows is highly effective against the plague. Findings of his National Institutes of Health and USDA funded research appear in the August edition of Infection and Immunity. The vaccine, which is taken orally or by injection, was given to rats at UCF and the efficacy was evaluated by measuring immunity (antibody) developed in their blood.

All untreated rats died within three days while all orally immunized animals survived this challenge with no traces of the plague in their bodies. The rats were exposed to a heavy dose of Yersinia Pestis bacteria, which causes the plague, at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland. It is one of a few labs in the world authorized to store and work with the highly dangerous agent.

The U.S. Joint Forces Command ends its massive domestic wargames exercise with international forces today. JFCOM’s people have been blogging updates to their website (excerpt, below). Nongovernmental organizations, such as World Cares — which, in an emergency, will mobilize millions of “volunteers” — are also participating. — mb

News From USJFCOM: Liveblogging: Noble Resolve 08
Situated in the middle of all of the action (and over 100 computer screens), today I should be able to provide an insider’s look at what’s going on here, especially when it comes to who’s communicating with who, how they’re communicating and ultimately, what information is shared during a crisis.

To date, the campaign has examined issues involving the handling mass population movements during a crisis, improving maritime domain awareness, and several other critical issues that may occur during a domestic crisis.

PS. Noble Resolve, according to the DoD, “includes representatives from Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Morocco, Portugal, South Korea, Romania, Spain and Sweden, as well as NATO Allied Command Transformation.”

Predator combat air patrols double in 1 year
The Air Force plans to expand Predator training by standing up a second Predator training squadron and establish a Predator Weapons Instructor Course in early 2009. This action is necessary to lay the foundation to further increase and enhance joint warfighting capability.

(Dummy bomb: The US Air Force has a habit of accidentally dropping these babies on civilian sites near its bases. And practice bombs ain’t always for practice, history shows. Photo: GlobalSecurity.org)

“God must love the people at Canyon Creek.”

That’s what a manager of an Oklahoma apartment complex told the Associated Press after the U.S. Air Force bombed the complex last week.

But God must also love the factory workers in Choong-chung, Korea, whose workplace the US bombed in 2006:

1/12/2007 – OSAN AIR BASE, Republic of Korea — The 51st Fighter Wing and the Republic of Korea Air Force have completed an exhaustive and Air Force wide investigation of an inadvertent release of a small non-explosive practice munition on Nov. 29, 2006 by an aircraft stationed at Osan Air Base.

An A/OA-10 aircraft assigned to the 25th Fighter Squadron was returning to Osan from a routine training mission at approximately 12:30 p.m. when an apparent systems problem caused the inadvertent release of a 25 pounds practice munition — a BDU-33. The small, non-explosive training munition then struck a civilian factory in northern Choong-chung province damaging the building but causing no injuries.

… And let’s not forget the farmers near East Yorkshire, England, who were bombed by the US in 2004:

US Air Force drops practice bomb
Alan Marsland, who farms land near to the site the bomb landed, said: “It went through the asphalt on this old airfield which is now owned by Allied Grain. Luckily no-one was around.”

Or the West Texas family whose home was hit by the Air Force in 2002.

In fact, all of these incidents involved the BDU-33, which can carry incendiary materials that produce a flash on impact.

The red phosphorous in one BDU-33 also blew off half of Petty Officer John Love’s face a few years ago.

The list goes on.

On the same day in November 2007, the Air Force dropped a dummy bomb along a busy road in North Carolina, and a Navy jet accidentally dropped one on one of its bases.

Dummy bombs not just for practice

Dummy bombs have played a number of roles over the years. Military leaders have used the practice ordnance to frighten and intimidate populations since World War II.

Even as far back October 1920, the Navy dropped dummy bombs on an old battleship, the Indiana, to trick the American public into believing its battleships could not be sunk.

Note: The secret societies historian Alan Watt says Canadian forces once dropped ordnance down his chimney.

MARK BAARD