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The British government said on Tuesday it would commit its largest-ever tranche of military aid to Ukraine as part of a package worth £500 million ($622 million). The assistance will include further deliveries of Storm Shadow air-launched, precision-guided missiles, as well as vessels and vehicles. The Paveway IV—the latest in the Paveway series of bombs—converts unguided munitions, also known as "dumb bombs," into precision-guided weapons. They can use laser guidance or satellites to find their way to a target. "The Paveway IV will enable Ukraine to strike back" at Russian forces and target high-value assets such as command centers and...

A new high-tech laser weapon developed by the UK that is capable of shooting down enemy drones and missiles could be sent to Ukraine. The weapon, dubbed DragonFire, was originally slated for deployment by 2027, but Grant Shapps, the UK defense secretary, said he hoped to "speed up" production so it could be put to use on Ukraine's front line. Speaking to journalists on a visit to the Porton Down military research hub in Salisbury, England, Shapps said he would look to see if the pace can be increased even further "in order for Ukrainians perhaps to get their hands...

Iranian officials are claiming victory over the United States as diplomats gather this week for negotiations over a revamped nuclear deal, discussions that are likely to result in the Biden administration lifting tough economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabiei said Tuesday that his country's leaders will not sit down for talks with the Americans, including U.S.-Iran envoy Robert Malley. American diplomats, however, expect indirect communications through intermediaries. Rabiei said the negotiations, which will occur in Vienna, represent a victory over the United States and the former Trump administration's "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran, which included...

Video of the Update of the Israel Defense Forces.

CHINA used green lasers fired from satellites to gather intelligence for a surprise hypersonic missile attack on Hawaii, it has been warned. The satellite was recorded flashing lasers for a fraction of a second by a livestream camera attached to a telescope on top of a mountain on one of the islands.A live-fire launch of a Chinese hypersonic missile Credit: China Military Initially the lights were thought to come from a NASA satellite before it was finally established it was a Chinese pollution monitoring satellite the Daqi-1. But questions immediately began to be raised about why the Chinese would feel...

Citing a Zerohedge report, The Gateway Pundit noted that the Chinese altimeter satellite ICESAT-2/43613, fired green laser bursts over Maunakea, Hawaii on January 28, 2023. That Chinese military operation occurred simultaneously with the arrival of a Chinese spy balloon, which entered U.S. airspace over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska also on January 28, 2023. After being allowed to fly over the entire U.S. mainland, including sensitive military installations, the Chinese spy balloon was finally shot down off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, 2023. Within the last 24 hours, a “high altitude object,” presumably another Chinese spy balloon,...

Green laser scan, 1-28-23 (Credit: Subaru-Asahi Star Camera/YouTube) I’m not entirely sure where to begin with this one. First, in all the kerfuffle over China’s wandering weather spy balloon which, coincidentally (or not), initially entered US airspace on January 28th, I (we?) missed out on the news that on that same date, bright green lasers shot over the night sky in Hawaii. No, really. Initially, the lasers were thought to have come from a NASA spacecraft:A camera attached to a telescope on Hawaii’s tallest peak recently captured footage of a series of eerie, bright green lines that shot across...

Northrop Grumman is pitching a way to free up space and weight on existing ships for additions like lasers and microwave weapons. The company provides the prime power equipment for the SPY-6 radar and the SEWIP Block 3 electronic warfare system, both of which will be built into the Flight III destroyers and backfit onto Flight IIA destroyers. Rather than build two separate prime power systems, each controlling one weapon system, Northrop Grumman has created a Multifunction Prime Power System... Northrop has estimated it would cut the cost of the power system by 20% on both the existing Flight IIA...

Optical High Density Nanolaser Array Driver Researchers have developed a new all-optical method for driving multiple high-density nanolaser arrays using light traveling down a single optical fiber. The optical driver creates programmable patterns of light via interference. Credit: Myung-Ki Kim, Korea University New all-optical pumping chip-based nanolaser technology could aid in meeting the ever-growing need to move more data faster. A new all-optical approach for driving multiple highly dense nanolaser arrays has been developed by researchers in Korea. The method could enable chip-based optical communication links that process and move data much faster than current electronic-based devices. “The development of...

The age of the ray gun is almost upon us after the US Navy took delivery of a near-operational high-energy tactical laser weapon called the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system from Lockheed Martin that can be installed in existing warships. When the first laser was invented by Theodore Maiman at the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu, California, in 1960, it was almost immediately seen as a potential superweapon – the death-ray of science fiction come to life. While the ability to generate beams of coherent light provided scientists and engineers with a unique tool that...

Tiny self-propelled robo-fish can swim around, latch on to free-floating microplastics and fix itself if it gets damaged Scientists have designed a tiny robot-fish that is programmed to remove microplastics from seas and oceans by swimming around and adsorbing them on its soft, flexible, self-healing body. Microplastics are the billions of tiny plastic particles which fragment from the bigger plastic things used every day such as water bottles, car tyres and synthetic T-shirts. They are one of the 21st century’s biggest environmental problems because once they are dispersed into the environment through the breakdown of larger plastics they are very...

Right about the time the world was hoping to rise out of a semiconductor crisis, we’re learning that the conflict in Ukraine could plunge the world further back into a chip shortage. Little known companies like Ukraine’s Cryoin play large roles in the global production of semiconductors, Wired noted this week. Cryoin, for example, makes the neon gas used to power lasers that make patterns on chips. It supplies to the U.S., Europe, Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan – and the ripple effects of disruption in its supply “can be felt around the world,” the report says. Business development director...

ARLINGTON, Va. – The Navy wants its next warship to fire hypersonic missiles and lasers that would be ten times more powerful than the service’s existing laser weapons, according to the most detailed outlook to date of the DDG(X) next generation warship issued by the service. The warship, the largest the Navy’s attempted in more than 20 years, is designed to provide the service with the power to drive a new generation of directed energy weapons and high-power sensors that will follow the Navy’s current fleet of Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers. The warship is estimated to start construction in 2028,...

Preamplifiers that boost laser beams at the National Ignition Facility. (LLNL/Damien Jemison) PHYSICS ========================================================================= A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy. For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record 1.3 megajoule energy output – and for the first time, exceeding energy absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it. Although there's still some way to go, the result represents a significant improvement on previous yields: eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments conducted in 2018. It's a huge achievement. Physicists at the...

The principle underlying dynamical ptychography One of the topics investigated in recent physics studies is strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SF-QED). So far, this area has rarely been explored before, mainly because the experimental observation of SF-QED processes would require extremely high light intensities (>1025W/cm2), over three orders of magnitude higher than those attained using the most intense PetaWatt (PW)-class lasers available today.A SF-QED process that has proved to be particularly difficult to observe is the Schwinger process. This is a process that occurs close to the so-called Schwinger limit (1029/cm2), which is associated with the optical breakdown of the quantum...

A former Corning Inc. scientist has been charged in connection with an alleged scheme to steal technology from a government-funded project he was working on and transfer it to China. Wang Ji, 59, was indicted late last month by a federal grand jury in Rochester, New York, on charges of economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and unlawful exports. According to the recently unsealed indictment, Wang, who worked for the company from 1998 to 2019, was assigned as the lead scientist to work on a project initiated and partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA injected...

Matter and antimatter are always created (or destroyed) in equal amounts. But there appears to be a dearth of antimatter in the universe. What happened to it?

A stunning fresco in the garden of Pompeii's Casa dei Ceii (House of the Ceii) has been painstakingly laser-cleaned and touched up with new paint by expert restorers. The artwork — of hunting scenes — was painted in the so-called 'Third' or 'Ornate' Pompeii style, which was popular around 20–10 BC and featured vibrant colours. Poor maintenance since the house was dug up in 1913–14 saw the hunting fresco and others deteriorate, particularly at the bottom, which is more vulnerable to humidity. The main section of the fresco depicts a lion pursuing a bull, a leopard pouncing on sheep and...

The Air Force Research Laboratory announced that their Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator, or SHiELD program is advancing at a fast clip, with several major subsystems scheduled for delivery and assembly in the near future. The Air Force describes the SHiELD program as an initiative that is essentially a defensive armament, intended to give airframes that carry a version of the SHiELD laser pod the ability to shoot down air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles — a task that comes with a host of technical hurdles to overcome. Namely, shooting down missiles at supersonic speeds is incredibly difficult.

Researchers invent a novel vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser, the workhorses of datacenters and optical sensors.SummaryResearchers at the George Washington University have developed a new design of vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) that demonstrates record-fast temporal bandwidth. This was possible by combining multiple transverse coupled cavities, which enhances optical feedback of the laser. VCSELs have emerged as a vital approach for realizing energy-efficient and high-speed optical interconnects in data centers and supercomputers.The SituationVCSELs are a vital class of semiconductor laser diodes accompanying a monolithic laser resonator that emits light in a direction perpendicular to the chip surface. This class of lasers is gaining...