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Now Darpa, usually the agency behind the Pentagon’s most out-there ideas, is putting their money into an old standby: solar power. They’re investing $3.8 million into the creation of high-powered, lightweight solar cells that can “stand up to battle conditions and environmental extremes.”

The program, called Low-Cost Lightweight Portable Photovoltaics (PoP), is being spearheaded by Dr. Robert Birkmire, director of the University of Delaware’s Institute of Energy Conversion (IEC). The Institution has a long history of working on Darpa-funded projects, including a 7-year consortium, launched in 1995, that successfully created much of the tech now going into PoP.

“Obviously, this is an agency that sets out some incredibly ambitious goals,” Birkmire told Danger Room. “But if you’d asked me in 1995, if we’d be able to complete that project? I’d have had no idea.”

And, Birkmire is quick to point out, the cells Darpa’s after will require some lofty innovation. Thin-film, flexible solar cells are a major priority for the military, because they can be applied onto almost everything — from tents to uniforms — and would minimize the number of generators and portable battery packs needed by troops in battle. In 2005, the Army tested tents lined with silicon-based solar cells that were able to generate adequate power for fans, lap tops and lights.

Five years later, Birkmire and co. have taken that technology up a notch. They’re testing cutting edge, copper-indium-deselinide-based cells, made on a lightweight plastic substrate. And Darpa wants the PoP program to yield solar cells that are more than just light and flexible — they should also be able to withstand dirt, rough handling and punctures, and be manufactured inexpensively.

Right now, Birkmire said, the cells are in their infancy, and operate at 7-11 percent efficiency. Darpa wants to see that doubled — at least.

“They want to take performance to another level, and I’m not sure that we’ll get there,” he said of the program, which will also include four industry partners. “Add to that the challenge of encapsulating these models to make them resilient for battle, and keeping them lightweight in spite of that, and it’s a big challenge.”

But because the cells are so inexpensive (less than $1/watt), and so versatile, Birkmire anticipates widespread civilian application.

The developer of the salmon has been trying to get approval for a decade. But the company now seems to have submitted most or all of the data the F.D.A. needs to analyze whether the salmon are safe to eat, nutritionally equivalent to other salmon and safe for the environment, according to government and biotechnology industry officials. A public meeting to discuss the salmon may be held as early as this fall.

Some consumer and environmental groups are likely to raise objections to approval. Even within the F.D.A., there has been a debate about whether the salmon should be labeled as genetically engineered (genetically engineered crops are not labeled).

The salmon’s approval would help open a path for companies and academic scientists developing other genetically engineered animals, like cattle resistant to mad cow disease or pigs that could supply healthier bacon. Next in line behind the salmon for possible approval would probably be the “enviropig,” developed at a Canadian university, which has less phosphorus pollution in its manure.

The salmon was developed by a company called AquaBounty Technologies and would be raised in fish farms. It is an Atlantic salmon that contains a growth hormone gene from a Chinook salmon as well as a genetic on-switch from the ocean pout, a distant relative of the salmon.

Normally, salmon do not make growth hormone in cold weather. But the pout’s on-switch keeps production of the hormone going year round. The result is salmon that can grow to market size in 16 to 18 months instead of three years, though the company says the modified salmon will not end up any bigger than a conventional fish.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.

An average baby — sort of — since Yotaro is a robot. His inventors hope he will help Japan’s sagging birth rate, among the lowest in the world.

“A robot can’t be human but it’s great if this robot triggers human emotions, so humans want to have their own baby,” said Hiroki Kunimura, the project leader for the Yotaro robot.

Kunimura and his University of Tsukuba team originally built Yotaro because they wanted to create a robot that would appeal across national and cultural lines. Since a baby doesn’t have any language skills yet, they chose to build a robotic infant.

The University of Tsukuba students then started showing off Yotaro at robot competitions, and were surprised by the reactions from the public and the media.

“People asked us if this baby robot was created to tackle the low birth rate in Japan,” said Kunimura, who describes himself as Yotaro’s “daddy.”

On Thursday morning, 30 police officers swooped on the palace of the archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, sealing off buildings and removing documents.

The latest blow to the scandal-hit Roman Catholic Church disrupted a meeting of bishops taking place in the presence of the Vatican’s ambassador to Belgium, in Mechelen, just north of Brussels.

A second raid took place at the nearby home of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, 77, where police officers seized a personal computer belonging to the former head of Belgium’s Catholic Church.

A third raid took place in the city of Leuven, where police officers searched the office of the Adriaenssens committee, an independent body set up by the Church to collect and investigate abuse allegations. Over 450 files detailing abuse allegations were confiscated.

Jean-Marc Meilleur, a spokesman for the Brussels crown prosecutor’s office, said that the raids were “related to the sexual abuse of children within the Church”.

“In a recent dossier the prosecutor was informed of charges denouncing the abuse of minors by a certain number of Church people,” he said.

Hans Geybels, a spokesman for Cardinal Danneels, said that police did not interrogate him during the raid.

“They did take away his computer,” he said. “The cardinal believes justice must run its normal course. He has nothing against that.”

The investigation is thought to centre on April’s resignation of Roger Vangheluwe, Bishop of Bruges. Bishop Vangheluwe stood down after admitting to having sexually abused a young boy during the time when Cardinal Danneels was the head of the Belgian Church.

Police are now able to jail anyone who refuses to furnish identification and submit to a search while within five metres of a designated security zone in downtown Toronto.

Critics reacted furiously to the new rules, which remained unpublicized until Thursday when a 32 year-old man was arrested in Toronto for refusing to show ID to police.

New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos said Friday the provincial Liberals created a “Kafka-esque” situation where people could be arrested for violating rules they didn’t know existed.

“This is very very repugnant stuff and should be troubling to everybody,” he said.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) said it was “extremely concerned” that the new measures violate constitutional safeguards.

Nathalie Des Rosiers, general counsel for the CCLA said the changes are contrary to Canadian law.

“You don’t have any obligation to speak to Canadian police, to give your name or the reasons for your existence unless you’ve done something wrong — unless you’re being detained or arrested,” she said. “So on its face, it’s a dramatic change from what our constitution guarantees.”

On the walls were television screens, known by the special forces boys as “Kill TV”, where footage from image-intensifier cameras of the enemy being blown up by air strikes, or being gunned down by undercover hit teams was shown.

This place was “the Machine”, a state-of-the-art military command centre hidden away in an airbase in Balad, a desolate stretch of land north of Baghdad.

It was created by Major General Stanley McChrystal, the chief of United States Special Forces, the most secretive force in the American military.

Here, in the permanently darkened communications cockpit, dozens of US and British (SAS) personnel would gather around as nightly raids took place against al Qaeda and their insurgent allies.

Sometimes McChrystal would lead the raids himself, his squad of elite undercover combat troops, known as Delta Force, being told at the last minute that the commander was coming along for the ride.

No one was quite sure what the Pentagon policy was on two star generals going on such dangerous missions, but then very few people in the US Department of Defence, and even fewer outside it in Washington, were even aware of these shadowy operations going on in Iraq.

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Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a “bleeding ulcer.” In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want.

Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it’s going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,” says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. “This is going to end in an argument.”

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After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn’t read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman’s death. “If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman’s death become public,” he wrote, it could cause “public embarrassment” for the president.

“The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat’s true actions,” wrote Tillman’s mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the “golden boy” of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman’s death, McChrystal
was promoted to major general.

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“They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable,” says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. “That’s the game we’re in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn’t get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future.”

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