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Russia's military plans 2019: Hypersonic Avangard to be in service, finish Arctic clean-up


RT
Tue, 18 Dec 2018 15:09 UTC
Russian base AlexandraLand
© Sputnik/Vadim SavitskyA Russian military base in the Alexandra Land.
The Russian defense ministry outlined its plans for next year in an annual report, which include deployment of hypersonic warheads and a new advanced Borei-class submarine as well as wrapping up its Arctic clean-up.

The annual report was made on Tuesday by Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu at a meeting chaired by President Vladimir Putin. The minister offered a lot of statistics on the armed forces life in 2018, from the percentage of weapons and equipment that need to be replaced with modern hardware to amount of money saved with introduction new electronic ID cards for service members. But there are also some highlights about new weapons the Russian military got this year or plans to get in the next one.

Barrage tests

In 2018, the Russian nuclear forces tested its ability to fire missiles as fast as possible, the minister reported. This ability is crucial in an all-out nuclear war when the enemy is trying to obliterate your nuclear arsenal and limit the damage of retaliation strike.

One test in May involved the strategic nuclear submarine Yury Dolgoruky, which fired a barrage of four Bulava missiles from the White Sea to a target range in Kamchatka. It was the first time such a volley was fired from a Borei-class submarine.

Another multiple launch was done last month when an upgraded Tupolev Tu-160 bomber fired 12 Kh-101 cruise missiles at a target range in the Arctic.


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Eye 1

London police deploy 'lawless' facial recognition tech, watchdog group discovers it is '100% inaccurate'

Chloe Taylor
CNBC
Tue, 18 Dec 2018 16:19 UTC
facial recognition
© Kim Brunhuber/CBC
Police in London will deploy facial recognition technology in a two-day trial starting on Monday.

Covering London's Soho, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, the tech will scan faces in crowds and run them against a database of people wanted by London's Metropolitan Police and the courts.

If the technology alerts officers to a match, police on the ground will review it and carry out further checks to confirm the individual's identity.

The scanners will be deployed for around eight hours per day and positioned visibly alongside a uniformed police presence. The rollout is part of a wider policing strategy to reduce crime and violence in Westminster.
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Microscope 2

Self-organizing molecules could store data in individual atoms

Dan Robitzski
Futurism
Mon, 17 Dec 2018 11:11 UTC
data storage element
© University of Basel, Department of PhysicsGraphic animation of a possible data memory on the atomic scale: A data storage element -- consisting of only 6 xenon atoms -- is liquefied by a voltage pulse.
Bit Crush

In data storage, the perpetual goal is to find ways to store greater amounts of information on devices that take up less physical space. Taken to its extreme end, that goal recently has led to physicists cracking the code of storing digital information into specially-crafted molecules, using individual atoms as the ones and zeroes of binary code.

For the past several years, scientists have been refining the nanotechnology that lets them accomplish all that. It's a promising concept, but building the actual storage systems - assembling molecules to hold atoms that are manipulated to one state or another - is still too difficult and costly to be practical.

A new technique could change that, according to new research published Monday in the academic journal Small. A team of physicists developed a self-assembling metallic molecular network - meaning that the lattice pieced itself together once its building block molecules were arranged in the right order and subjected to the right temperature and pressure - so scientists no longer need to expend huge amounts of work and money building the tiny structures themselves.

Comment: See also:

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Robot

Robots becoming more human-like with e-skin

Tim Sandle
Digital Journal
Sun, 16 Dec 2018 22:37 UTC
Human skin is a sensitive organ that allows us to differentiate different pressures of touch and temperature. Getting a robot to replicate that has proved challenging. A new breakthrough in electronic skin helps boost robot sensitivity.
e-Skin on Robot
© Yoshikazu Tsuno, AFP/FileUniversity of Tsukuba professor and president of Cyberdyne Yoshiyuki Sankai (L) unveils a robot suit at the Japan Robot Week exhibition in Tokyo, on October 18, 2012.
The aim behind the new research is to develop ways to enable robots and prosthetic devices more closely obtain the properties of human skin in order to enable machines to have better tactile interactions with the environment.

The researchers have developed an ultrathin, stretchable electronic skin, which has the potential to be applied to a variety of human-machine interactions, such as prosthetic devices and wearable health monitors, as well as with full-fledged robots.

The biggest challenge the researchers faced, as R&D Magazine reports, was transferring ultrathin electrical circuits onto complex three-dimensional surfaces. They then needed to develop the electronics so that they were stretchable to enable full movement.
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Galaxy

"Farout"! Newfound object is the farthest Solar System body ever spotted - second discovered this year

Sarah Lewin
Space.com
Mon, 17 Dec 2018 13:01 UTC
2018 VG18
© Roberto Molar Candanosa/Carnegie Institution for ScienceThe location of 2018 VG18 compared to the orbits of other solar system objects. It lives up to its nickname "Farout"!
A newly discovered object is the most-distant body ever observed in the solar system - and the first object ever found orbiting at more than 100 times the distance from Earth to the sun.

The discovery team nicknamed the object "Farout," and its provisional designation from the International Astronomical Union is 2018 VG18. Preliminary research suggests it's a round, pinkish dwarf planet. The same team spotted a faraway dwarf planet nicknamed "The Goblin" in October.

"All that we currently know about 2018 VG18 is its extreme distance from the sun, its approximate diameter, and its color," David Tholen, a researcher at the University of Hawaii and part of the discovery team, said in a statement. "Because 2018 VG18 is so distant, it orbits very slowly, likely taking more than 1,000 years to take one trip around the Sun." [The Evidence for 'Planet Nine' in Our Solar System (Gallery)]

Comment: For more on that 'Planet X' the researchers were actually looking for: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Butterfly

Stunning fossils show pterosaurs had primitive feathers like dinosaurs

Michael Le Page
New Scientist
Mon, 17 Dec 2018 22:01 UTC
A feathered pterosaur
© Yuan ZhangA feathered pterosaur
Two spectacular fossils found in China show that the flying reptiles known as pterosaurs had primitive feathers to help keep them warm, just like many dinosaurs. The finding suggests that feathers evolved far earlier than we thought.

The wings of pterosaurs were made of skin, muscles and fibre, so they had no need of flight feathers. The feathers they had are small and tufty.

"They are almost certainly just for insulation," says Mike Benton at the University of Bristol, UK, a member of the team that discovered one of the fossils about two years ago. The second specimen was found several years ago but its importance is only now being appreciated.

Fossils found as long ago as the 1840s revealed that pterosaurs had fur on their head and bodies. Palaeontologists came up with the term "pycnofibres" to describe it, to distinguish it from the hair of mammals and the feathers of birds.

In the recently discovered fossils, these pycnofibres are exceptionally well preserved. Much of the head, body and limbs of these pterosaurs were covered by hair-like filaments, just we have long thought was the case.

Comment: See also:

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Padlock

Biometrics fail: Android phone facial recognition system broken into with 3D printed head

Thomas Brewster
Forbes
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 12:00 UTC
3D printed head used to break into Android phones
Anyone worried about anyone having their device compromised by a 3D printed head such as this one or by another method, should perhaps consider not using facial recognition at all. Instead, use a strong alphanumeric passcode.
Facial recognition is cropping up everywhere. From shopping malls to the workplace, it's likely something is scanning your face every day. But rather than invade your privacy, facial recognition on smartphones is supposed to protect your digital life from snoops.

If you're an Android customer, though, look away from your screen now. We tested four of the hottest handsets running Google's operating systems and Apple's iPhone to see how easy it'd be to break into them. We did it with a 3D-printed head. All of the Androids opened with the fake. Apple's phone, however, was impenetrable.

Two heads are better...

The head was printed at Backface in Birmingham, U.K., where I was ushered into a dome-like studio containing 50 cameras. Together, they combine to take a single shot that makes up a full 3D image. That image is then loaded up in editing software, where any errors can be ironed out. I, for instance, had a missing piece of nose.
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Info

Cave in China makes carbon dating more precise

James Urquhart
Chemistry World
Fri, 14 Dec 2018 17:44 UTC
Hulu Cave
© Hai Cheng/Jiaotong UniversityThe stalagmites in the Hulu Cave have been used to calibrate radiocarbon dating with unprecedented accuracy.
Stalagmites in a Chinese cave have given scientists all they need to reconstruct the historical record of atmospheric radiocarbon (carbon-14) back to the carbon dating limit of around 54,000 years ago. The researchers claim that the work is a step closer towards the 'Holy Grail' of carbon dating - precisely refining the calibration of carbon-14 against a calendar timescale so that dating of historical treasures can become ever more accurate.

Carbon dating of artefacts is possible because radioactive carbon-14 is continually created in the upper atmosphere. Plants incorporate this radiocarbon from carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. By measuring the radioactivity of an artefact that has a biological origin - anything from paper to textiles and cosmetics - its age can be calculated.

However, carbon dating requires calibrating because levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere vary from year to year. Tree ring data provides a good gauge for carbon dating because their growth reflects their yearly uptake of atmospheric carbon-14. But tree ring data only goes back around 13,000 years.
Carbon Dating
© Hai Cheng/Jiaotong UniversityThe cave system is unusual as the stalagmites have relatively little 'dead carbon' in them, making it possible to use them as a standard to calibrate radiocarbon dating against.
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Windsock

Climate Science and the Myths of Renewable Energy - FOS Steve Goreham

Friends of Science
Youtube
Sat, 01 Jul 2017 16:40 UTC
maunder minimum frozen river thames london
Steve Goreham is a speaker, an author, a researcher on environmental issues, and an independent columnist. He's the Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America, a non-political association dedicated to informing about the realities of climate science and energy economics. Steve gave this presentation at the Friends of Science 'Climate Dogma Exposed' event in Calgary on May 9th 2017. He says "contrary to what your political leader, professor, and newspaper tell you, global warming is dominated by natural factors. As a result, thousands of climate and energy laws across hundreds of nations, all summed together, are not going to have a measurable effect on Earth's temperatures."

Comment: See also:

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Pirates

U.S. Navy to release genetically engineered organisms into the ocean to detect enemy subs

Tracey Watson
dcdirtylaundry.com
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 13:09 UTC
Marinobacter
Marinobacter
No longer content to tinker with the genetic design of crops and humans, scientists - at the behest of the U.S. Military - are now turning their attention to the world's oceans. As reported by Defense One, the Pentagon is looking at various ways in which to genetically engineer marine microorganisms into living surveillance equipment capable of detecting enemy submarines, divers and other suspicious underwater traffic.

The Military is also looking at using genetic engineering to create living camouflage in which creatures react to their surroundings to avoid detection, along with a host of other potentially nefarious applications.

While such modifications might appear to offer benefits to national security endeavors, there will be a price to pay - as is always the case when scientists interfere with genetic design. What will the effects of mass genetic pollution be on our oceans, and what irreversible and devastating results may be unleashed?
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