PROJECT TALOS delivers a future generation combat suit to US Special Forces

The United States military could soon have its very own Iron Man suit. The prototype is set to debut within weeks. The suit is a robotic exoskeleton designed to enhance human abilities in battle. Time will tell how well it compares to Tony Stark’s superhero suit, but the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) is being devised to assist its wearer in lifting heavy loads, protect them from bullets and provide the lucky soldier with information concerning their environment using sensors, cameras and advanced displays. TALOS will have bulletproof armor, 360-degree cameras with built-in night vision capabilities, sensors that can detect injuries and apply wound-sealing foam.

Admiral McRaven, the Commander of USSOCOM, has tasked the TALOS Team with delivering a first generation combat suit that provides evolutionary improvement to survivability and endurance no later than 20 June 2014. The first independently operational combat suit prototype and associated support equipment, yielding a revolutionary improvement in operator capability, lethality and survivability has been directed to be delivered no later than 30 July 2018.

In Greek mythology Talos was a giant man, or according to others maybe a bull, made of bronze that guarded the island of Crete. This giant was given the task of patrolling the island by walking around three times a day. Talos would drive pirates from the shore with a fiery death embrace or by throwing rocks.

TALOS is being developed by engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the United States Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM), as well as other researchers at other academic institutions and businesses. The suit’s technology will be rigorously tested. According to William McRaven, head of the United States Special Operations Command, military personnel hopes to have operational systems join in battle no later than August 2018. If the suit is done correctly it will produce a revolutionary improvement in capability and survivability for special operations.

The TALOS project started out as a way to explore how modern technology can be used to protect special operations officers better in combat zones. McRaven said,

This technology could give American soldiers a huge comparative advantage over our enemies and give our warriors the protection they need. With all the advances in modern technology, I know we can do better.

With so much technology at our hands it definitely sounds as if the U.S. military will have a totally different look and feel in the near future. Who knows, perhaps robotic soldiers may eventually outnumber human soldiers. This news of the Iron Man prototype debuting next month makes this seem like a real possibility.

Source: www.guardianlv.com
Official website of the project: https://talos.us/

FIFA WORLD CUP 2018 Blyat prediction

Quarter finals:


England 2:2 Sweden (2:3 after 120mins)

Russia 1:3 Croatia (Smolov, Rakitic, Rakitic, Mandzukic)

SEMI finals:


France 1:1 Belgium (5:6 after penalties, Mbappe misses the crucial one)

Sweden 0:2 Croatia (Modric, Perisic)

THE GRAND FINAL:


Belgium 2:3 Croatia (ALL TIME greatest world cup final in the UEAF history)

Goal scorers: Mertens, Mandzukic, Modric, Hazard, VRSALJKO)

Mitachi swore he won't go to lunch in the Memory never again

Лог от чата в "Обяд А, У?" от днес:

[11:50:19 AM] Dimitar Dreharov: guys
[11:50:20 AM] Dimitar Dreharov: tr?
[11:50:30 AM] Жоро Про: може, може
[11:50:31 AM] Dimitar Dreharov: ne sum hodil ot 300000000 godini
[11:50:32 AM] Dimitar Dreharov: :D
[11:50:40 AM] Dimitar Dreharov: (svetlinni)
[11:50:43 AM] Dimitar Dreharov: (cwl)
[11:50:49 AM] Жоро Про: :D
[11:50:49 AM] ti6o_69: след незабравимото Memory от вчера, как може да не искаш да повторим Митак
[11:51:04 AM] Dimitar Dreharov: N E V E R A G A I N

Обещаното си е обещано Митачи, я да видим дали си го спазил :P

FIFA WORLD CUP 2018 - England vs Belgium will take their final positions in the group via number of yellow cards

[16:06] Влад: днес ще е много интересно между Англия и Белгия
и двата отбора са с еднакви показатели
като се гледат жълтите картони
предвид че и двата отбора ще искат да избегнат силни съперници
ще искат да паднат тоя мач
ама няма как да стане при 0:0
никой няма да иска да вкарва
и единственият начин да станеш втори е да имаш повече жълти картони
очаквам доста груб мач :D

[16:10] Влад: всъщност има още един вариант
да направят рекорд по автоголове


Прогноза: Англия 5:4 Белгия (резултат за жълти картони)

Прогноза 2: Англия 2:1 Белгия (брой автоголове в мача)

Good women will be hard to find, but still better than the android ones in 2017

Movie "Cherry 2000" Plot: In the future, a man travels to the ends of the earth to find that the perfect woman is always under his nose. When successful businessman Sam Treadwell finds that his android wife, Cherry model 2000 has blown a fuse, he hires sexy renegade tracker E. Johnson to find her exact duplicate. But as their journey to replace his perfect mate leads them into the treacherous and lawless region of 'The Zone', Treadwell learns the hard way that the perfect woman is made not of computer chips and diodes, but of real flesh and blood!

More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_2000

JAXA: Japan is the fourth country in the world to land on the moon

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is set to move forward with a plan to go to the moon, landing an unmanned probe on the lunar surface as early as 2018. If JAXA is successful, this would make Japan the fourth country in the world to land on the moon.

Aside from the distinction of being one of the few countries to have reached the moon, Japan's lunar trip will also mark further preparations for exploring Mars. According to sources, JAXA will be developing a high-precision soft-landing technology to aid the mission. It will be called SLIM, standing for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, and will use Epsilon solid-fuel rockets.

JAXA's plan for a moon landing was presented to an expert panel made up of officials in the country's Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry. If the space policy committee of the Japanese government approves the plan, this will prompt the science ministry to request funding for the project, dealing with budgetary requests for the coming fiscal year.

Moon landing attempts in the past were unsuccessful because they missed their landing targets by some miles. With the use of SLIM, though, JAXA is hoping it will be able to pull off a soft landing within the intended landing site's 328-feet radius.

In 2007, JAXA launched the lunar orbiter, Kaguya. During its time in space, the orbiter took photos of craters and other distinct features of the moon. The next landing mission will be using data gathered by Kaguya to better determine locations and increase landing accuracy.

The lunar orbiter also discovered a shaft in the moon's surface about 196 feet in diameter and 262 feet deep. The shaft is being considered as a location for a moon base in the future and a potential landing site for the 2018 mission.

Japan showed it has what it takes to develop advanced landing technology through the Hayabusa probe, which has been landed on the Itokawa asteroid. However, gravity levels on an asteroid are different from levels on the moon, meaning different technology will have to be developed to allow JAXA to land on the moon.

Aside from landing on the lunar surface with the SLIM probe, Japan also has plans of sending a rover to the moon by the end of 2016. A private sector project, it will require landing craft and rockets built by an American company.

The other nations to have successfully landed unmanned probes on the moon are China, the former Soviet Union and the United States.

Source: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/48266/20150424/japan-aiming-for-moon-landing-by-2018-according-to-jaxa.htm

JAXA official website: http://global.jaxa.jp/

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is set to move forward with a plan to go to the moon, landing an unmanned probe on the lunar surface as early as 2018. If JAXA is successful, this would make Japan the fourth country in the world to land on the moon.

Aside from the distinction of being one of the few countries to have reached the moon, Japan's lunar trip will also mark further preparations for exploring Mars. According to sources, JAXA will be developing a high-precision soft-landing technology to aid the mission. It will be called SLIM, standing for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, and will use Epsilon solid-fuel rockets.

JAXA's plan for a moon landing was presented to an expert panel made up of officials in the country's Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry. If the space policy committee of the Japanese government approves the plan, this will prompt the science ministry to request funding for the project, dealing with budgetary requests for the coming fiscal year.

Moon landing attempts in the past were unsuccessful because they missed their landing targets by some miles. With the use of SLIM, though, JAXA is hoping it will be able to pull off a soft landing within the intended landing site's 328-feet radius.

In 2007, JAXA launched the lunar orbiter, Kaguya. During its time in space, the orbiter took photos of craters and other distinct features of the moon. The next landing mission will be using data gathered by Kaguya to better determine locations and increase landing accuracy.

The lunar orbiter also discovered a shaft in the moon's surface about 196 feet in diameter and 262 feet deep. The shaft is being considered as a location for a moon base in the future and a potential landing site for the 2018 mission.

Japan showed it has what it takes to develop advanced landing technology through the Hayabusa probe, which has been landed on the Itokawa asteroid. However, gravity levels on an asteroid are different from levels on the moon, meaning different technology will have to be developed to allow JAXA to land on the moon.

Aside from landing on the lunar surface with the SLIM probe, Japan also has plans of sending a rover to the moon by the end of 2016. A private sector project, it will require landing craft and rockets built by an American company.

The other nations to have successfully landed unmanned probes on the moon are China, the former Soviet Union and the United States.

Source: www.techtimes.com/articles/48266/20150424/japan-aiming-for-moon-landing-by-2018-according-to-jaxa.htm

JAXA official website: http://global.jaxa.jp/

The heart-stopping moment when the mirror of The Biggest, Boldest, Riskiest Space Telescope James Webb first looks at the sky

Full scientific source: http://www.sciencemag.org/

b]GREENBELT, MARYLAND[/b]—For months, inside the towering Building 29 here at Goddard Space Flight Center, the four scientific instruments at the heart of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, or Webb) have been sealed in what looks like a house-sized pressure cooker. A rhythmic chirp-chirp-chirp sounds as vacuum pumps keep the interior at a spacelike ten-billionth of an atmosphere while helium cools it to –250°C. Inside, the instruments, bolted to the framework that will hold them in space, are bathed in infrared light—focused and diffuse, in laserlike needles and uniform beams—to test their response.

The pressure cooker is an apt metaphor for the whole project. Webb is the biggest, most complex, and most expensive science mission that NASA has ever attempted, and expectations among astronomers and the public are huge. Webb will have 100 times the sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope. It will be able to look into the universe’s infancy, when the very first galaxies were forming; study the birth of stars and their planetary systems; and analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets, perhaps even detecting signs of life. “If you put something this powerful into space, who knows what we can find? It’s going to be revolutionary because it’s so powerful,” says Matt Mountain, director of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., and former JWST telescope scientist. Like that of Hubble, however, Webb’s construction has been plagued by redesigns, schedule slips, and cost overruns that have strained relationships with contractors, partners in Canada and Europe, and—most crucially—supporters in the U.S. Congress. Other missions had to be slowed or put on ice as Webb consumed available resources. A crisis in 2010 and 2011 almost saw it canceled, although lately the project has largely kept within its schedule and budget, now about $8 billion.
But plenty could go wrong between now and the moment in late 2018 when the telescope begins sending back data from its vantage point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. It faces the stresses of launch, the intricate unfurling of its mirror and sunshield after it emerges from its chrysalis-like launch fairing, and the possibility of failure in its many cutting-edge technologies. Unlike Hubble, saved by a space shuttle mission that repaired its faulty optics, it is too far from Earth to fix. And not just the future of space-based astronomy, but also NASA’s ability to build complex science missions, depends on its success.

That’s why those instruments sat in Goddard’s pressure cooker for what is known as cryo-vacuum test 3 (CV3). And it is why Webb’s other components—including the mirror and telescope structure, the “bus” that will supply power and control the telescope, and the tennis court–sized, multilayer parasol that will help keep it cool—must undergo a gauntlet of testing, alone and in combinations, until the whole spacecraft is ready. For those on the inside, the strain will only increase as assembly continues, the tests get bigger and more comprehensive, and the spacecraft is launched into space. Only when Webb opens its eye and successfully focuses on its first star will the strain be released.

In the mid-1990s, after Hubble had had its optics corrected and was busy revolutionizing astronomy, researchers began planning its successor. The catch phrase in NASA at the time, championed by agency chief Daniel Goldin, was “faster, better, cheaper.” Goldin challenged NASA engineers and the astronomical community to come up with a follow-on that was cheaper than Hubble but bigger, with a mirror 8 meters across. He received a standing ovation when he described the plans to the American Astronomical Society in 1996. Whereas Hubble covered the whole range of visible light, plus a smidgen of ultraviolet and infrared, the Next Generation Space Telescope (as it was then known) would be a dedicated infrared observatory.

If you put something this powerful into space, who knows what we can find? It’s going to be revolutionary because it’s so powerful.
Matt Mountain, director of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, and former JWST telescope scientist

For astronomers, the infrared spectrum was a beckoning frontier. Visible light from the most distant objects in the universe, the very first stars and galaxies that formed after the big bang, gets stretched so much by the expansion of the universe that it ends up in the infrared range by the time it reaches us. Many chemical signatures in exoplanet atmospheres also show themselves in the infrared region. Yet Earth’s atmosphere blocks most infrared. Webb will give us “the first high-definition view of the midinfrared universe,” says Matt Greenhouse, JWST project scientist for the instrument payload at Goddard.

To capture that light, however, NASA engineers had to overcome huge challenges. The first was heat: To keep the infrared glow of the telescope itself from swamping faint astronomical signals, Webb would need to operate at about –233°C, 40° above absolute zero (40 K). That would require entirely new instrument designs. Size and weight constraints posed additional hurdles: An 8-meter mirror would never fit inside a rocket fairing, so it would have to fold up for launch. The sunshield, too, would have to be collapsible and made of a superthin, lightweight membrane. And the telescope structure would have to be absolutely rigid but lightweight enough to limit the weight of the whole orbiting observatory to no more than 6 tonnes, just a few percent of the weight of a similar-size ground-based telescope. “We knew we would have to invent 10 new technologies” to make the telescope work, says NASA’s JWST Program Director Eric Smith, in Washington, D.C.

Take the mirror. Hubble’s was made from a single slab of glass, but Webb’s folding mirror would need to be segmented, made up of separate hexagonal pieces—a design used in many top ground-based instruments, including the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. The segments would have to be minutely controlled to meld them into a single optical surface, with their reflected light completely in step—a process known as phasing. In Webb, each hexagonal segment will sit on six actuators that control its orientation, plus one in the center to adjust its curvature.

Now too large to fit inside a plane, Webb will make its final prelaunch journey by ship, down the California coast and through the Panama Canal to French Guiana—home of Europe’s spaceport, and a waiting Ariane 5 launcher, part of Europe’s contribution to the project. In October 2018, the Ariane will fling Webb toward L2, a gravitational balance point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, directly away from the sun. The journey will take 29 days.

Тhe world's fastest self-driving cars AUDI RS goes to the market ... by "themselves"

Two Audi RS7 performance sedans raced around a track in northern Germany. The car without a driver won this matchup by five seconds.

In its effort to bring autonomous-driving technology to the streets, Volkswagen AG’s Audi is testing unmanned vehicles at speeds as fast as 305 km/h. In these experiments, the car decides for itself the best way to take the corners in its race against human drivers.

The map the car gets “just contains the left and right boundaries of the track,” Peter Bergmiller, an Audi technician, said Tuesday during a test on a track in Oschersleben (193 kilometres west of Berlin) with a vehicle named Bobby. “The car starts to think about it and generates its optimal line.”

Auto makers from Mercedes-Benz to Tesla Motors Inc. are developing systems to ease the strain of driving by letting cars park themselves and even take over the wheel in stop-and-go traffic. By showing that computers are able to push cars to their limits on race tracks, Audi is aiming to convince regulators that the technology can be safe in the real world.

If authorities open the door to self-driving features, “the first systems for piloted driving could come to market in a few years,” Audi development chief Ulrich Hackenberg said in a presentation of the brand’s autonomous-driving technology.

There’s a lot at stake in getting cars equipped with these features on the road. Technology for self-driving cars is forecast to become an $87 billion market by 2030, according to Boston-based Lux Research.

Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/news/industry-news/audi-puts-driverless-race-car-to-the-test-and-it-wins/article21104181/

Green Line - The Third Line of Sofia Subway is put into service. 550 000 passengers use the Sofia underground railway at 2018

The 16 km long third line is planned to connect Ovcha Kupel neighbourhood (in southwest Sofia) and Vasil Levski neighbourhood (in northeast Sofia), with 19 stations in total, including two transfer stations in the city centre, with both of the already operational lines. According to the Municipality, they estimate the line will be put into service by 2018.

There will be 8 overground and 11 underground stations. The project design contract was awarded to the Czech company Metroprojekt Praha a.s.

In March 2014, a tender for construction of the central section of the line was announced. The section is 7 km long and includes 7 stations, two of them transfer to lines 1 and 2. With the announcement of the tender it became clear, that the initial plans for 19 stations had been partly amended and 2 of the stations will be not be built, one at Doyran boulevard and another at Shipka street. The tunnel of the central section shall be excavated by a TBM, while the construction of stations shall be awarded to other companies. The construction of the section shall be completed within 45 months.In January 2015, a tender for 20 trains, that shall serve the central section of the line, was announced. Driverless train operation, with Grade of Automation 3 (GoA 3), and platform screen doors will ensure the safety of the passengers.

The Sofia subway will be used by 550 000 passengers in 2018, according to Stoyan Bratoev, Executive Director of municipality-owned company Metropoliten EAD.

In a Sunday interview for the Focus news agency, he said that the Sofia subway was being used by 80 000 a 300 000 passengers and their number was to reach 550 000 with the completion of the main part of the third subway line.

He said that the subway stations on the route to Sofia Business Park in the Mladost residential district and to Sofia Airport were being built, adding that their launch in 2014 was expected to boost the number of passengers by around 90 000 to a total of 380 000.

Bratoev noted that the third subway line was to bring 170 000 new passengers in 2018, provided that it was built in its entirety, or 110 000 extra passengers, provided that only the central part was built. …