Feds Eye Pilotless Helicopters to Battle Wildfires
October 17th, 2015Via: AP:
The future of wildland firefighting launched Wednesday morning in Idaho.
A Lockheed Martin helicopter capable of flying autonomously with no human control did so as it scooped up water, dropped it on targets and delivered supplies to a distant ridge in a demonstration in front of top federal decision makers 20 miles east of Boise.
“Wildland fires are a huge problem, particularly here in the West,” said Mark Bathrick, director of the Interior Department’s Office of Aviation Services. “I’m a believer in the technology that could be put on other helicopters, that eventually could be put on fixed-wing aircraft — scoopers and air tankers.”
The Lockheed Martin K-MAX put through its paces on Wednesday completed seven tasks in about an hour and a half. A safety pilot was aboard, often holding his hands aloft to indicate to about 200 observers that he wasn’t using the controls.
Federal officials, who are also considering other aeronautic companies for the choppers, say having an optionally manned aircraft has advantages in that a pilot can fly it from fire to fire. A pilot could also fly it on fires during the day when conditions are safe.
The problem is that firefighting from the air stops at night or when smoke reduces visibility to unsafe distances.
The unmanned helicopter, though, has high-tech sensors allowing it to fly at night and in smoky conditions too dangerous for manned flights. That means at least tripling the amount of time aircraft could be attacking blazes.
“I’m highly confident (the helicopter) has the technology to be able to do that,” said Dan Spoor, Lockheed Martin’s vice president and general manager for Aviation and Unmanned Systems. “If they bring in unmanned aircraft, they’ll be able to do 24-7 flights. So it could be impressive in terms of helping fight fires.”
The K-MAX demonstrated Wednesday has three communication methods, using line of sight and two different satellite links. The craft can be remotely controlled, but it also flies autonomously after being told what to do.
U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
October 17th, 2015Via: NBC:
The federal government will announce a new plan requiring anyone buying a drone to register the device with the U.S. Department of Transportation, NBC news has learned.
The government has been concerned about the rise in close calls between unmanned drones and aircraft flying into and out of some of the nation’s biggest airports. The plan is expected to be announced Monday.
More: Fortune: U.S. Government to Require That Hobbyists Register Their Drones
“Cured” Ebola Nurse in Critical Condition
October 16th, 2015Via: Independent:
The exact nature of Ms Cafferkey’s illness is not known, but experts have expressed shock at the severity of her condition.
Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the University of Nottingham, said the news was “frankly staggering.”
“I am not aware from the scientific literature of a case where Ebola has been associated with what we can only assume as life threatening complications after someone has initially recovered, and certainly not so many months after,” he said.
Health authorities have emphasised that the risk to the general public remains low. However 58 people who had been in close contact with Ms Cafferkey are being monitored by Health Protection Scotland. 25 have been vaccinated using the jab successfully trialed earlier this year in Guinea.
Battelle DroneDefender
October 15th, 2015Via: Battelle Institute:
The Drone Papers
October 15th, 2015Via: The Intercept:
The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.
Oakland: Outlaw Shipping Container Community, Containertopia
October 15th, 2015And in Texas, instant slums.
Via: sfist:
“It’s pretty much my dream post-apocalyptic cyberpunk setup,” says Luke Iseman near his 160-square-foot box home. With a camp stove and a fridge “that’s a really simple hack,” his miniature shipping container nightmare chamber sits alongside 11 others in a warehouse at an undisclosed location in Oakland. File under: Apartment Sadness?
Bloomberg reports that the 31-year-old cool guy Wharton graduate has been chased from two other locations by the authorities. But, like an idiot, Iseman has no plans to give up. “I’d rather ask forgiveness than ask permission,” the entrepreneur says in high Silicon Valley fashion.
Iseman rakes in $1,000 a month for each of the 11 structures docked in the 17,000-square-foot warehouse he rents for $9,100. His tenants include a Facebook engineer, a SolarCity programmer, and a bicycle messenger. This, as Iseman calls it, is “Containertopia.”
The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy
October 14th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
Japan: Robo-Bulldozers Guided by Drones
October 14th, 2015Via: The Verge:
Komatsu is the world’s second largest construction company, a venerable Japanese brand with 94 years of history that sells forklifts and bulldozers to customers around the globe. But in its home country, Komatsu has been struggling with an aging population, a trend that has left few young workers available to operate its machines.
As Japan ramps up new construction in preparation for hosting the 2020 Olympics, experts believe it will face a serious obstacle. “The labor shortage in the construction industry could reach a crisis level in the next few years,” Martin Schulz, an economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, told Bloomberg.
To get around this problem, Komatsu has begun creating a new service it calls Smart Construction. A team of robotic vehicles scoops rock and pushes dirt without a human behind the wheel. They are guided in their work by a fleet of drones, which map the area in three dimensions and update the data in real time to track how the massive volumes of soil and cement are moving around the site.
The drones are built by an American startup, Skycatch, and today it revealed that Komatsu is one of the principal investors in a new $25 million round of funding that the company plans on using for global expansion and R&D. The partnership will power an entirely new line of business for Komatsu: Instead of selling construction equipment to its customers, it can lease them out for a job, and use a staff of remote operators and autonomous vehicles to complete the work. One or two lightly trained humans are still required on site to take control if something goes wrong.
Naval Academy Reinstates Celestial Navigation: “After All, You Can’t Hack a Sextant”
October 14th, 2015Via: Capital Gazette:
Officials reinstated brief lessons in celestial navigation this year, nearly two decades after the full class was determined outdated and cut from the curriculum.
That decision, in the late 1990s, made national news and caused a stir among the old guard of navigators.
Maritime nostalgia, however, isn’t behind the return.
Rather, it’s the escalating threat of cyber attacks that has led the Navy to dust off its tools to measure the angles of stars.
After all, you can’t hack a sextant.
If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy
October 13th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
…we, the sensible majority, owe plenty of so-called crackpots a few apologies. We dismissed them, shrugging off as delusions or urban legends various warnings and anecdotes that now stand revealed, in all too many instances, as either solid inside tips or spooky marvels of intuition.
