Betcha didn’t know that USB flash drives weren’t allowed in the US military. Or maybe you did — you know, considering that one with Japan-US troop deployment maps went missing in mid-2008. Oops . At any rate, the Department of Defense has reportedly lifted said ban, but as with anything related to The Man, gobs of red tape will be involved. For starters, they won’t be reintroduced “wholesale,” instead being reserved for “mission essential applications.” We’re also told that the drives themselves must contain specific security features, and administrators will be able to track the use of ‘em from the outset. For those unaware, the ban was originally put into place just over a year ago after virus-laden USB keys disrupted military networks, presumably flashing Blingee’d faces of Kim Jong-il onto CIA surveillance screens.

Apparently the Department of Defense believes that PS3s are a better value when it comes to supercomputers than IBM products specifically designed for the purpose. Granted recent price drops probably didn’t hurt in justifying a 2,200 console order either. This isn’t the first time that the DoD is using PS3 consoles for supercomputing. In fact, these 2,200 units are going to be added to an existing Linux cluster of 336 PS3s used by the United States Air Force . According to Justification Review Documents, the purchase is all about getting the best value out the DoD’s budget: With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.

New Scientist has recently published an article that discusses the memristor , the long theorized basic circuit element that can generate voltage from a current (like a resistor), but in a more complex, dynamic manner — with the ability to “remember” previous currents. As we’ve seen, HP has already made progress developing hybrid memristor-transistor chips , but now the hubbub is the technology’s applications for artificial intelligence. Apparently, synapses have complex electrical responses “maddeningly similar” to those of memristors, a realization that led Leon Chua (who first discovered the memristor in 1971) to say that synapses are memristors, “the missing circuit element I was looking for” was with us all along, it seems. And of course, it didn’t take long for DARPA to jump into the fray, with our fave DoD outfit recently announcing its Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics Program (SyNAPSE — cute, huh?) with the goal of developing “biological neural systems” that can “autonomously process information in complex environments by automatically learning relevant and probabilistically stable features and associations.” In other words, they see this as a way to make their killer robots a helluva lot smarter — and you know what that means , don’t you? Read - New Scientist: “Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence” Read - DARPA: ” Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics” Filed under: Science Are memristors the future of Artifical Intelligence? DARPA thinks so originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:54:00 EST

The Pentagon’s wacky sci-fi department DARPA has been working on robotic hummingbird-based drones to serve as miniature spies. They’re not nearly as agile or adorable as real hummingbirds, but DARPA is well on their way to achieving that dream. Program manager Todd Hylton is aiming for “an approximately 10-gram aircraft that can hover for extended periods, can fly at forward speeds up to 10 meters per second, can withstand 2.5-meter-per-second wind gusts.” Right now, though, the teeny robobird can only fly for about 20 seconds at a time. But with some hard work, some day we will produce a robotic hummingbird that will strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. Wait, is fear the right word? [ Wired ]

The Pentagon’s current crop of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are insanely powerful—the “Hellfire” is so named for a reason—but also fairly imprecise, often killing innocent, nearby civilians. The DoD’s new UAVs hope to cut down on such casualties. In a recent briefing, the Department of Defense laid out its new plans: Smaller and far more precise UAVs with badass names like ” Suburb Warrior ” and “Sniper” that will hunt in groups, rather than just blowing suspected hideouts to pieces with Hellfire missiles. The Suburb Warrior, for example, is designed to fire volleys of mini-missiles in tight formation, which makes a nice change from previous missiles that often demolished entire city blocks. Unfortunately, these new UAVs should see production in about five years, by which time who knows what kind of battles we’ll need to fight—or who’ll be leading the Pentagon.

Boeing was pretty bullish about its aircraft-mounted laser system only a few short months ago, but it looks the program’s future is now considerably more uncertain, even as the sole aircraft to be equipped with the rig begins its first flight tests. Apparently, everything with the tests themselves has been going according to plan, with both the high-energy laser itself and the “beam control / fire control apparatus” along for the ride, and Boeing is even reportedly still on track for a missile-intercept demonstration later this year. The recent funding shakeup at the Pentagon, however, has thrown Boeing and its partners in the project for a bit of a loop, with the department now apparently intending to keep only one of the planes in service (instead of the proposed seven) as it transitions the rest of the program towards a purely R&D effort. Filed under: Misc. Gadgets , Transportation Boeing’s Airborne Laser begins flight tests, future uncertain originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:28:00 EST

Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project and made off with several terabytes of code. The Pentagon, and consequently the Wall Street Journal , suspects Chinese involvement. The Joint Strike Fighter, also known as the F-35 Lightning II Fighter, is the most costly project in Pentagon history, so it’s a little bit problematic that some spies scampered in and nicked an unknown, but undoubtedly large, quantity of data without getting anywhere near caught. The cyber-spies encrypted the data on its way out, so nobody’s really sure where they came from or where the data went, but some IP addresses have been tracked to China, prompting a little bit of back-and-forth between the DoD and the Chinese government.