US missile test deal offers hope to Marshalls slum

The Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll
© AFP/US Army/File

AFP

MAJURO (AFP) - The United States has struck a deal with the Marshall Islands to continue using the key missile testing range at Kwajalein Atoll through to 2066, officials said on Wednesday.

The deal, which ends an eight-year impasse, offers new hope to the nearby overcrowded Marshalls island of Ebeye, referred to locally as the "slum of the Pacific".

It will extend the United States' use of the Reagan Test Site for an additional 50 years from 2016, and it hikes their annual rental for Kawjalein Atoll by about $4 million.

Drones Spray, Track the Unwilling in Air Force Plan

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By Adam Rawnsley
WIRED

Here’s how the U.S. Air Force wants to hunt the next generation of its enemies: A tiny drone sneaks up to a suspect, paints him with an unnoticed powder or goo that allows American forces to follow him everywhere he goes — until they train a missile on him.

On Tuesday, the Air Force issued a call for help making a miniature drone that could covertly drop a mysterious and unspecified tracking “dust” onto people, allowing them to be tracked from a distance. The proposal says its useful for all kinds of random things, from identifying friendly forces and civilians to tracking wildlife. But the motive behind a covert drone tagger likely has less to do with sneaking up on spotted owls and more to do with painting a target on the backs of tomorrow’s terrorists.

Effectively tracking foes has become a high priority — and deeply secret — research effort for the Pentagon, which has struggled at times to sort out insurgent from innocent in places like Afghanistan. The Navy has a $450 million contract with Herndon, Virginia’s Blackbird Technologies, Inc. to produce tiny beacons to make terrorists trackable. The Defense Department has been pouring serious cash — $210 million that they’ll admit to — to find advanced new ways to do this so-called “Tagging, Tracking and Locating” work, as Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger noted inPopular Science last year.

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StunRay disables your brain with inverse blindness

Genesis Illunimation

Evan Ackerman
DVICE

Until we figure out how to make a phaserthat can be set to stun, we've been stuck with non less-lethal options like tasers (which can kill) and laser dazzlers (which can cause eye damage). StunRay is basically just a big flashlight, except with the ability to disable you by causing "inverse blindness."

If you're wondering what inverse blindness looks like, it's easy to do to yourself: just stare at a bright light for a minute or two and then look around. It's not dark, really, but you can't see anything very well, and it's because the exposure to bright light has overloaded the neurons that connect your retinas to your brain, and mostly all you can see is a featureless white expanse. The technical term for this is "loss of contrast sensitivity," and it's an effective way of disabling someone.

A company called Genesis Illumination is working what's basically a giant fancy flashlight called StunRay that can inflict this loss of contrast sensitivity or inverse blindness or neural overload or whatever you want to call it on people at long range in a split second. Each burst of super bright light incapacitates subjects for five seconds or so without causing any pain, and subjects fully recover in about five minutes. The "fully recover" bit is key, since StunRay won't roast your eyeballs like a laser dazzler can.

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Air Force Wants Neuroweapons to Overwhelm Enemy Minds

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Noah Shachtman
Wired

It sounds like something a wild-eyed basement-dweller would come up with, after he complained about the fit of his tinfoil hat. But military bureaucrats really are asking scientists to help them “degrade enemy performance” by attacking the brain’s “chemical pathway[s].” Let the conspiracy theories begin.

Late last month, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing revamped a call for research proposals examining “Advances in Bioscience for Airmen Performance.” It’s a six-year, $49 million effort to deploy extreme neuroscience and biotechnology in the service of warfare.

One suggested research thrust is to use “external stimulant technology to enable the airman to maintain focus on aerospace tasks and to receive and process greater amounts of operationally relevant information.” (Something other than modafinil, I guess.) Another asks scientists to look into “fus[ing] multiple human sensing modalities” to develop the “capability for Special Operations Forces to rapidly identify human-borne threats.” No, this is not a page from The Men Who Stare at Goats.

But perhaps the oddest, and most disturbing, of the program’s many suggested directions is the one that notes: “Conversely, the chemical pathway area could include methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.” That’s right: the Air Force wants a way to fry foes’ minds — or at least make ‘em a little dumber.

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