Brain-Scanning Binoculars Harness Soldiers' Unconscious Minds to Locate Threats

Soldiers scanning the battlefield for threats may soon get a new tool: a brain-scanning set of binoculars that can pick up on a soldier's unconscious recognition of a potential threat and bring it to his conscious attention. It's just one of many ways DARPA and other military research groups are looking to have soldiers mind-meld with their machines and materiel, and as the BBC reports, it demonstrates how remarkably close we are to deploying mind-control on the battlefield.

The specific binocular device that DARPA is developing is known as Sentinel (for System for Notification of Threats Inspired by Neurally Enabled Learning, because that's not an unwieldy acronym or anything), and it basically uses the power of the human brain to scan and filter imagery in realtime, picking up on both what the soldier recognizes consciously and what his unconscious might perceive as well. Through electroencephalogram (EEG), the device can pick up on a brain signal known as P300 that signifies an unconscious recognition of something visual.

 

It can take the brain some time to become conscious of things it sees, and when seconds are critical--say, in the case of a convoy barreling toward a buried IED--the Sentinel recognizes the P300 signal imparted by the unconscious perception of that threat and alerts the soldier that he has just seen something significant, trimming the time between his seeing something and actually perceiving the threat.

This isn't DARPA's or the military establishment's first foray into mind-control on the battlefield, but it's one of the first to actually be working well in practice--in the lab at least. The device itself is still too big for the battlefield at 15 pounds (eventually Sentinel's makers want to get it down to five pounds) and it requires the use of EEG sensors that need to be further developed so they can be taken on and off the head like a hat or helmet. But in simulations in both tropical and desert terrains, Sentinel helped spot 30 percent more simulated threats than the human brain could alone.

It's the first step toward a militarized brain-machine interface, something that could augment all kinds of soldier systems in the future, from visual recognition systems like Sentinel to mind-controlled aerial or ground-based drones. As we've reported here previously, breaking down the barrier between the brain could also turn the soldiers themselves into more efficient machines, stimulating the brain to lengthen a soldier's attention spans and sharpen his decision-making skills. Much more on this emerging technology over at BBC.

Who Or What Left This 60,000-Ton Ancient Artifact Under The Sea?

Put on your tin-foil hats and special anti-Illuminati underwear. A recently discovered mysterious ancient rock structure under the Sea of Galilee, possibly built in the same era as Stonehenge, has archaeologists stumped. To a certain slice of the population, any unexplained man-made rock pile is clearly evidence of an extraterrestrial visit.

Before we get too carried away, let's look at the actual data. The researchers, from Ben-Gurion University, Tel Aviv University, University of Haifa and Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research, all in Israel, describe the cairn as a cone of unhewn basalt rocks, measuring approximately 70 meters in diameter and 10 meters tall. The site itself rests near a now-defunct ancient outlet of the Jordan River, an area that has had economic importance in the area since the Bronze Age. Due to various contextual details, the researchers suspect that the cairn was constructed sometime between the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE. Their findings were published in a recent issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

 

The paper is relatively thin on details. To date, the only data the researchers have are their side-scan sonar images and new photographs from a dive team. No excavations have yet been undertaken, and thus the purpose, age and even how the thing was built are all currently up for debate. The researchers aren't even sure if the cairn was assembled on dry land, during a period of low water levels in the lake, or if it was purposefully build underwater. Nearby sites have yielded huts and hearths, indicating that at some point in the past, that whole area was above-water and inhabited. Other research points to earthquake-related subsidence of the land surrounding the Sea of Galilee, so it is quite possible that all of these archaeological sites in the area were built along the lakeshore, then submerged after an earthquake shifted the land.

These days, the cairn sits about 30 feet underwater, surrounded by schools of tilapia fish. Which brings us to the researcher's theory that this cairn is supposed to be an ancient fishery, a structure that attracts fish, making it easier to catch them and support a large settlement along the shore. Smaller fisheries have been found in the Sea of Galilee, so this theory isn't as far-fetched as one might think. But until the researchers excavate the cairn and determine if it was meant to be underwater, the purpose of the cairn remains pure conjecture.

Army Demonstrates a Weapon That Shoots Laser-Guided Lightning Bolts

Over at Picatinny Arsenal, the research and development facility and proving ground for the U.S. Army's weaponry, engineers are developing a device that shoots lighting bolts along a laser beam to annihilate its target. That's right: lighting bolts shot down laser beams. This story could easily end right here and still be the coolest thing we've written today, but for the scientifically curious we'll continue.

The Laser-Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC) can be used to destroy anything that conducts electricity better than the air or ground surrounding it (unexploded ordnance seems a good candidate here). It works off of some pretty basic principles of physics, using a laser to carve an electromagnetic path through the air that accommodates a high-voltage beam. Create that path, crank up the voltage, and your target is toast.

 

It works like this: a high intensity, super-short duration (maybe two-trillionths of a second) laser pulse will actually use air like lens--surrounding air focuses the beam, keeping the laser pulse nice and tight rather than scattering it. If the pulse is strong enough, it actually creates an electromagnetic field around itself that's so powerful it strips electrons from air molecules, essentially creating a channel of plasma through the air. Since air is composed of neutral particles (that act as insulators) and the plasma channel is a good conductor (relative to the un-ionized air around it) the path of the laser beam becomes a kind of filament.

In other words, just as lightning arcs from cloud to ground via the path of least resistance, a high-voltage current will find its way down this filament rather than arcing unpredictably through the air. In other words, the laser just creates the path of least resistance between the power source and the target. Laser, lightning, destruction of target--in that order.

Of course, the LIPC requires a lot of hardware, like a laser capable of really short pulses and a power source to provide both laser and lightning. In other words, it's not very practical (as with most laser weapons, it suffers comparatively from the fact that bullets fly straight, have a long shelf life, are easy to carry, and are really cheap). But a laser-guided lightning weapon? It doesn't have to be practical to be amazing.

With Russian Help, Europe Prepares to Search for Life on Mars

The European Space Agency signed final contracts with Thales Alenia Space Italy for work on a pair of missions to assess if the planet Mars has or ever had life, officials said at the Paris Airshow this week.
 
Until last year, the ExoMars program was a joint project between ESA and the U.S. space agency NASA. But NASA dropped out, citing budget problems.
 
The Russian space agency Roscosmos stepped in to provide two Proton rockets to send an orbiting atmospheric probe and test lander to Mars in January 2016, and a follow-on rover in August 2018 that will drill below the planet's surface to look for spores and bacteria.
 
Roscosmos also is providing a landing system for the rover and scientific instruments.
 
"It took some time, some energy, some efforts from a lot of different parties. It was not easy to move from an ESA-NASA cooperation to an ESA-Roscosmos cooperation," Jean-Jacques Dordain, head of ESA, told reporters after signing a 230 million euros [$300 million] contract with Thales Alenia.
 
Thales Alenia, selected as the ExoMars prime contractor five years ago, plans to spend 146 million euros on the 2016 orbiter and lander. The satellite is being designed to search the thin Martian atmosphere for telltale gasses associated with biological activity. It also will serve as the key communications relay for the 2018 rover.
 
The lander primarily is intended to test the technologies needed to touch down on Mars, a notoriously difficult task that has bedeviled nearly all of Russia's previous efforts and has given NASA trouble as well. The United States currently has two operational rovers on Mars, Curiosity and Opportunity.
 
After pulling out of the ExoMars program, NASA said it would send a second Curiosity-type rover to Mars in 2020.
 
The rest of the ExoMars budget will be spent on the 2018 rover, a mission that will make the first direct search for life since NASA's 1970s-era Viking landers.
 
Instead of sampling the planet's radiation-blasted surface as the Viking probes did, the ExoMars rover will use a radar sounder to search for subterranean water and then drill down about six feet (two meters) for samples that will be processed through onboard laboratories.
 
"If there is any life and if we discover it, it will be unambiguous," said Vincenzo Giorgo, Thales Alenia's vice president of exploration and space. "On Viking everybody thought, 'We found it, we found it,' but then nobody could prove it."
 
Thales Alenia Space is a joint venture owned 67 percent by France's Thales and 33 percent by Italy's Finmeccanica .