The Pentagon halted its cooperation with Marvel Studios’ blockbuster movie The Avengers because the US Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.
Last year, the Pentagon’s Falcon HTV-2 glider — which the US Air Force says can fly from New York to LA in under 12 minutes, disappeared. Nobody knew why! Now we know why: it went so fast it ripped itself apart.
Picture, if you will, the self-driving Prius that Google invented — quiet, safe, sedate, room for five. Now imagine the exact, polar opposite — a six-wheeled, self-navigating robo-truck built for off-roading and ramming, a .50-cal machine gun on its roof and room for zero. That’s the Crusher.
DARPA director Regina Dugan will soon be stepping down from her position atop the Pentagon’s premiere research shop to take a job with Google. Dugan, whose controversial tenure at the agency lasted just under three years, was “offered and accepted at senior executive position” with the internet giant, according to Darpa spokesman Eric Mazzacone. She felt she couldn’t say no to such an “innovative company,” he adds.
We love DARPA’s unsettlingly lifelike BigDog bot. We love it in spite of the fact that it’s absolutely terrifying in motion. Now it has some bestial competition: the DARPA Cheetah. Ugh. Its legs. Its legs are so frightening.
The Pentagon’s new Avatar project, unveiled by Danger Room a few weeks back, sounds freaky enough: Soldiers practically inhabiting the bodies of robots, who’d act as “surrogates” for their human overlords in battle.
Our tools for extinguishing fire are almost as primitive as our forefathers who discovered it. Extinguishers that attempt to choke or disrupt the chemical reaction often do just as much damage, so DARPA’s been working on a high-tech alternative.
The military’s UAV fleet will soon be getting a small addition — DARPA’s hummingbird-shaped covert surveillance drone.
