Ehang Flying Car Company's Passenger Drones Make First Manned Flights

Future is Arriving in Dubai: Police Hoverbikes

The US Navy is Getting Much Closer to an Operational Railgun

The Navy’s futuristic electromagnetic railgun is set to take a major developmental step forward this summer as developers work to increase the number of shots it can fire per minute and the power behind the system.

The railgun has been a pet project for the Navy for more than a decade since early testing of a prototype for a shipboard system began in 2006. The gun uses electromagnetic force to launch projectiles at high speeds, allowing the system to function without the powder mechanism conventional shipboard guns.

In theory, a railgun would be safer and potentially cheaper to fire than traditional weapons. Navy plans have called for installing the railgun on the Navy’s three DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyers, but it’s not clear when that will happen.

For now, officials with the Office of Naval Research are working to build the program up to its target capability envelope.

This summer and into next year, work will focus on increasing the power with which projectiles are fired to the target of 32 megajoules, and increasing what’s known as the rep rate to 10 shots per minute, or one every six seconds, said Dr. Tom Beutner, head of Naval Air Warfare and Weapons for ONR.

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The Moment you KNOW You're Living in the Future

Lockheed is Investing in a Fiber Laser Production Line

The world’s largest defense company is taking a big step towards battlefield laser weapons. In a few weeks, Lockheed Martin will start production of high-efficiency fiber-optic modules that can be wired together into a wide variety of different weapons. Production will start with a prototype 60-kilowatt rocket-killer for the Army, they said, but it could easily scale to larger numbers, higher power, or both. Lockheed envisions its lasers potentially arming Littoral Combat Ships, AC-130 gunships, F-15 fighters, and one day even the F-35.

“We’re testing this facility out with a view to ramping it up,” Lockheed business developer Iain Mckinnie told me when I quizzed him after a roundtable with reporters. “In many ways, it’s… a test production facility, to test out how do we optimize this , to make it as efficient as possible [or] respond as quickly as possible [if], let’s say, if an urgent need came up.”

“I can’t get into the exact dollar figures of the investment,” he added, “but it is certainly very high profile within the corporation.”

The plan is to ramp up not just production but power. Fiber lasers like Lockheed’s generate use large numbers of small modules to generate many low-power beams. These run through fiber-optic cables to a “spectral beam combining” unit that turns the dozens or hundreds of weak lasers into one strong one. Increasing the power is simply a matter of adding more modules — along with appropriate power and cooling, that is, but small individual modules are much easier to cool than a single large “slab” of laser-generating material, the previous state of the art. (Overheating has been a particular problem for lasers in the past, since it distorts the beam into uselessness).

“Our 60 kW design is scalable to over 100 kW, if we populated it with more fibers. Right now the customer’s only asking for 60,” said Lockheed senior fellow Rob Afzal. “That’s kind of the core advantage. You can have a system that you can choose to populate with 10, 20, 50, 100 lasers.”

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Chinese Scientists Have Geneticaly Modified Human Embryos Using CRISPR

In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted—rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month about the ethical implications of such work.

In the paper, researchers led by Junjiu Huang, a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, tried to head off such concerns by using 'non-viable' embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, that were obtained from local fertility clinics. The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications.

"I believe this is the first report of CRISPR/Cas9 applied to human pre-implantation embryos and as such the study is a landmark, as well as a cautionary tale," says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "Their study should be a stern warning to any practitioner who thinks the technology is ready for testing to eradicate disease genes."

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Jan Scheuermann is the new Clint Eastwood, Becomes First Person to fly F-35 Simulator With Just her Mind

Jan Scheuermann, a quadriplegic and the pioneering patient for an experimental Pentagon robotics program, continues to break ground in freeing the mind from the limitations of the body.

The 55-year-old mother of two in 2012 agreed to let surgeons implant electrodes on her brain to control a robotic arm. More recently, she flew an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter simulator using nothing but her thoughts, an official said.

Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, cited the breakthrough last week at the first annual Future of War conference. The event was organized by the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C.

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The Future is *NOW*: Using DNA to Generate Face Shots

While still somewhat primitive, this is something out of a science fiction book and, of course (!), already controversial.

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US Navy Wants to Place Railgun on USS Lyndon B Johnson (Zumwalt Class Destroyer)

Engineering studies to include an electromagnetic railgun on a Zumwalt-class destroyer (DDG-1000) have started at Naval Sea Systems Command, NAVSEA’s head said Thursday.

The work will do the math to determine if the Zumwalt-class will have the space, power and cooling to field a railgun – likely replacing one of the two 155mm BAE Advanced Gun Systems (AGS) ahead of the ship’s deck house, Vice Adm. William Hilarides told USNI News following remarks at the Office of Naval Research Naval Future Force Science and Technology Expo.

“We have begun real studies – as opposed to just a bunch of guys sitting around – real engineering studies are being done to make sure it’s possible,” Vice Adm. William Hilarides said following remarks at

The likely candidate for the weapon would be the third planned Zumwalt, Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) currently under construction at General Dynamics Bath Iron Works (BIW) with an expected delivery date of 2018.

He said the first two ships – Zumwalt (DDG-1000) and Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001) – would be less likely to field the capability initially due to the schedule of testing with the new class.

“The team is working diligently now but it would not happen until after delivery of the ships – probably the third ship is where we’d have it,” Hilarides said.
“That would certainly be my recommendation.”

The Navy is in early stages of testing and fielding a railgun – which forgoes the gunpowder in the shells of conventional naval guns and instead uses high powered electromagnetic pulses along a set of rails to shoot a projectile at super sonic speeds.

The Navy plans to test a BAE Systems prototype railgun onboard the Joint High Speed Vessel USNS Millinocket (JHSV- 3) next year.

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US Navy Declares USS Ponce Laser Weapon Cleared for Operational Use

The U.S. Navy is has declared an experimental laser weapon on its Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB) in the Persian Gulf an operational asset and U.S. Central Command has given permission for the commander of the ship to defend itself with the weapon, the head of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) told reporters on Wednesday.

The 30 kilowatt Laser Weapon System (LaWS) was installed aboard USS Ponce this summer as part of a $40 million research and development effort from ONR and Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) to test the viability of directed energy weapons in an operational environment, said ONR Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder.

“The captain of that ship has all of the authorities necessary if there was a threat inbound to that ship to protect our sailors and Marines [and] we would defend that ship with that laser system,” Klunder said.

“It would be [used] against those [unmanned aerial vehicles], slow moving helicopters, fast patrol craft.”

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Glybera: The First Gene Therapy "Drug" Released in Europe

The Western world's first gene therapy drug is set to go on sale in Germany with a 1.1 million euro ($1.4 million) price tag, a new record for a medicine to treat a rare disease.

The sky-high cost of Glybera, from Dutch biotech firm UniQure and its unlisted Italian marketing partner Chiesi, shows how single curative therapies to fix faulty genes may upend the conventional pharmaceutical business model.

After a quarter century of experiments and several setbacks, gene therapy is finally throwing a life-line to patients by inserting corrective genes into malfunctioning cells - but paying for it poses a challenge.

The new drug fights an ultra-rare genetic disease called lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD) that clogs the blood with fat. The medicine was approved in Europe two years ago but its launch was delayed to allow for the collection of six-year follow-up data on its benefits.

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After Cell Transplant, Paralyzed Man Can Walk

A paralysed man has been able to walk again after a pioneering therapy that involved transplanting cells from his nasal cavity into his spinal cord.

Darek Fidyka, who was paralysed from the chest down in a knife attack in 2010, can now walk using a frame.

The treatment, a world first, was carried out by surgeons in Poland in collaboration with scientists in London.

Details of the research are published in the journal Cell Transplantation.

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The Future Off Hold (finally): Aeromobil to Unveil Production Ready Flying Car This Month

While the practical challenges to a flying car are myriad, Slovakia's Aeromobil has steadily tried to overcome them. The company plans to unveil a production-ready version of its 'Flying Roadster' at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna, Austria on October 29.

The latest version—Aeromobil 3.0—is the result of continuous work by designer Štefan Klein that dates back to 1990. The Aeromobil 2.5 prototype made its first flight about one year ago.

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Scientists Regenerate Rat Muscle Tissue

Muscle lost through traumatic injury, congenital defect, or tumor ablation may soon be regenerated from within. A team of researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center has shown how stem cells in the body of mice and rats can be mobilized to form new muscle in damaged regions.

"Working to leverage the body’s own regenerative properties, we designed a muscle-specific scaffolding system that can actively participate in functional tissue regeneration," explains Sang Jin Lee, senior author on the study. This scaffold was implanted in the rats' tibialis anterior muscle (which is found below the knee), serving as a kind of home for the muscle progenitor cells to grow and develop.

After four weeks, a significant population of host stem cells and a mature network of blood vessels had formed within the scaffolds, with the most effective scaffold holding up to four times the number of cells of plain scaffolds thanks to its myogenic factor – a protein, in this case insulin-like growth factor 1, that binds to specific DNA sequences to encourage or accelerate the formation of muscular tissue (in a process called myogenesis).

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Paging Ripley: Daewoo has Introduced Exoskeletons for its South Korean Shipyard

At Daewoo’s South Korean shipyard, lifting and moving massive slabs of metal as if they’re made of foam could soon be a basic job requirement for workers. Of course, they’ll have some help: robotic exoskeletons, which made their debut last year at the company’s manufacturing facility, are on the rise.

After successfully testing the exoskeletons last year, the shipbuilding giant hopes to soon outfit some of their employees with the technology, giving them the superhuman strength to take production to new heights, New Scientist reports. The prototypes tested allowed workers to pick up 65-pound objects and manipulate them with ease, but Daewoo plans to increase the exoskeletons’ carrying capacity to roughly 220 pounds with design improvements.

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Mind Controlling Google Glass

30 Years of the Future

ReWalk Exoskeleton Approved for use by US Regulators

U.S. health regulators have approved a first-of-a-kind set of robotic leg braces that can help some disabled people walk again.

The ReWalk system functions like an exoskeleton for people paralyzed from the waist down, allowing them to stand and walk with assistance from a caretaker.

The device consists of leg braces with motion sensors and motorized joints that respond to subtle changes in upper-body movement and shifts in balance. A harness around the patient's waist and shoulders keeps the suit in place, and a backpack holds the computer and rechargeable battery. Crutches are used for stability.

ReWalk is intended for people who are disabled due to certain spinal cord injuries.

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Paul Root Wolpe's Ted Talk Call for a Bio Ethics Review

Liquid Metal Changes Shape, Moves on Command by Chinese Researchers

In the science-fiction classic, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the T-1000 is a robotic assassin with a liquid metal endoskeleton that can assume the form of any object or person. Its liquid nature makes it immune to attack by bullets and impervious to mechanical damage in general.

The T-1000 is an entirely fictional device that might as well be magic as far as conventional manufacturing techniques are concerned. And yet this might be about to change thanks to the pioneering work of Lei Sheng, Jie Zhang and Jing Liu at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

These guys have taken the first tentative steps to making liquid machines that work like the T-1000. Their first attempts can assume various shapes, move around and then transform into other shapes more or less without limit. And they say the work has profound implications for the design of robots, future machines and the nature of manufacturing.

While the most familiar liquid metal is the toxic mercury, there are other metals and alloys that are liquid at room temperature and much more benign. In particular, a gallium-indium-selenium alloy, with a melting point of around 10°C, has received much recent attention because it can be used for cooling microprocessors and even for liquid metal printing techniques.

Now Lei Sheng and co have made this liquid metal assume simple shapes by placing a thin film of it in water and applying an electric field.

With careful arrangement of the voltages and electrode geometries, these guys can make the metal form into a sphere. They say this is the result of the balance between the surface tension in the liquid metal and the electronic forces applied to its surface.

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