Peter's Quasi-Daily Blah-g

DARPA announced successful tests of its new autonomous vehicles on Wednesday, all part of the agency’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program. And while the tests sound impressive, we found ourselves transfixed by one little visual detail: The 12-ton tank’s glowing green eyes.

The RACER Heavy Platform (RHP) vehicles are enormous, weighing in at 12 tons and measuring 20 feet long. The vehicles are programmed using the Textron M5 base system, already used in many driverless vehicles by the U.S. Army, and are meant to complement the RACER Fleet Vehicles (RFVs) which are comparatively small at just 2 tons and 11 feet long.

The vehicle tests, aided by teams from the University of Washington and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, happened at military training sites in Texas back in late 2023, but are just being announced by DARPA today.

Videos from the Texas tests are now available on YouTube, demonstrating the fully autonomous driving of these gigantic vehicles in off-road conditions. And again, we can’t stop staring into the vehicle’s glowing green eyes. They give the entire demonstration an almost Pixaresque feel. Just look at that little face.

DARPA also posted a new video to YouTube showing the smaller RFV tests, which were notable for their adaptability in an autonomous mode. The teams running the tests had no experience in the area, making it as close to fresh for them as possible. The goal, of course, was to see how these types of vehicles could perform in a completely foreign environment.

“Using fully unoccupied RFVs, RACER demonstrated autonomous movement within a 15 square mile terrain area including highly diverse ground vegetation cover, trees, bushes, rocks, slopes, obstructed ditches, and creek crossings typical of the varied, complex Texas terrain familiar to armored maneuver,” DARPA said in its press release.

DARPA has been working on autonomous vehicles for decades, starting in earnest back in 1983 with the Strategic Computing Initiative. And it’s incredible how far the U.S. military has come. During testing, the Autonomous Land Vehicle of 1985 would get confused with just a little bit of snow on the road. But that kind of obstacle is clearly no issue here in the 2020s.

“Having two radically different types of vehicles helps us advance towards RACER’s goal of platform agnostic autonomy in complex, mission-relevant off-road environments that are significantly more unpredictable than on-road conditions,” Stuart Young, RACER program manager, said on Wednesday.

DARPA didn’t respond to emailed questions about the glowing green eyes, which we still can’t stop staring at. But we’ll update this post if we hear back. Do you know what purpose the green eyes serve? We’d love to hear about it in the comments.

In the hours after Iran announced its drone and missile attack on Israel on April 13, fake and misleading posts went viral almost immediately on X. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a nonprofit think-tank, found a number of posts that claimed to reveal the strikes and their impact, but instead used AI-generated videos, photos, and repurposed footage from other conflicts that showed rockets launching into the night, explosions, and even President Joe Biden in military fatigues.

Just 34 of these misleading posts received over 37 million views, according to ISD. Many of the accounts posting the misinformation were also verified, meaning they have paid X $8 per month for the ‘blue tick’ and their content is amplified by the platform’s algorithm. ISD also found that several of the accounts claimed to be open source intelligence (OSINT) experts, which has, in recent years, become another way of giving legitimacy to their posts.

One X post claimed that “WW3 has officially started,” and included a video seeming to show rockets being shot into the night—except the video was actually from a YouTube video posted in 2021. Another post claimed to show the use of the Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense system, during the attack, but the video was actually from October 2023. Both these posts garnered hundreds of thousands of views in the hours after the strike was announced, and both originated from verified accounts. Iranian media also shared a video of the wildfires in Chile earlier this year, claiming it showed the aftermath of the attacks. This, too, began to circulate on X.

“The fact that so much mis- and disinformation is being spread by accounts looking for clout or financial benefit is giving cover to even more nefarious actors, including Iranian state media outlets who are passing off footage from the Chilean wildfires as damage from Iranian strikes on Israel to claim the operation as a military success,” says Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at ISD. “The corrosion of the information landscape is undermining the ability of audiences to distinguish truth from falsehood on a terrible scale.”

X did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.

Though misinformation around conflict and crises has long found a home on social media, X is often also used for vital real-time information. But under Elon Musk’s leadership, the company cut back on content moderation and disinformation has thrived. In the days following the October 7 Hamas attack, X was flooded with disinformation, making it difficult for legitimate OSINT researchers to surface information. Under Musk, X has promoted a crowd-sourced community notes function as a way to combat misinformation on the platform to varying results. Some of the content identified by ISD has since received community notes, though only two posts had by the time the organization published its findings.

“During times of crisis it seems to be a repeating pattern on platforms such as X where premium accounts are inherently tainting the information ecosystem with half truths as well as falsehoods either through misidentified media, or blatantly false imagery suggesting that an event has been caused by a certain actor or state,” says Moustafa Ayad, ISD executive director for Asia, the Middle East and Africa. “This continues to happen and will continue to happen in the future, making it even more difficult to know what is real and what is not.”

And for those that are part of X’s subscription model and ad revenue sharing model, going viral could potentially mean making money.

Though it’s not clear that any of the users spreading fake or misleading information identified by ISD were monetizing their content, a separate report released by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) earlier this month found that between October 7 and February 7, ten influencers, including far-right influencer Jackson Hinkle, were able to grow their followings by posting antisemitic and Islmaphobic content about the conflict. Six of the accounts CCDH examined were part of X’s subscription program, and all ten were verified users. The high-profile influencers part of X’s ad revenue sharing program receive a cut of advertising revenue based on ”organic impressions of ads displayed in replies” to their content, according to the company.

Venus Aerospace has completed the inaugural test flight of a drone fitted with its "rotating detonation rocket engine" (RDRE) — accelerating it to just under the speed of sound. The company wants to one day build superfast commercial jets using this new type of engine. 

In the test flight, conducted Feb. 24, the company flew the drone, which is 8 feet (2.4 meters) long and weighs 300 pounds (136 kilograms) to an altitude of 12,000 ft (3658 m) by an Aero L-29 Delfín plane, before it was deployed and the RDRE was activated, company representatives said in a statement. 

The drone flew 10 miles (16 km) at Mach 0.9 — over 680 miles per hour — using 80% of the RDRE’s available thrust. The successful flight proved the viability of RDRE and the associated onboard flight systems. Three weeks earlier, Venus Aerospace demonstrated the viability of its RDRE technology with a long-duration test burn — during which engineers showed their engine worked for the duration of this test flight.

Related: Wild new NASA plasma tech reduces drag during hypersonic flight

Rather than using a continuous burn like most rocket engines, RDRE operates by a detonation wave continuously rotating around an annulus, or ring-shaped, chamber. The fuel, hydrogen peroxide, is injected into the annulus and the repeated detonations become self-sustaining after the initial ignition. In the RDRE test flight, the annulus was approximately 12 inches  (25.4 centimeters) in diameter and produced 1,200 pounds (544 kg) of thrust.

The RDRE technology is 15% more efficient than conventional rocket engines, Venus Aerospace representatives said in a statement. As a result, an RDRE-propelled craft could theoretically travel farther on the same amount of fuel as conventional engines that combust fuel at constant pressure. Some have also theorized it could be as much as  25% more efficient than current technologies.

The successful test flight raises the odds of commercially viable supersonic flight. One of the long-term goals for Venus Aerospace is to develop a commercial supersonic aircraft that could travel at Mach 9 (over 6,800 mph) (11,000 km/h)

For comparison, the Concorde aircraft could fly at just over Mach 2 (just under 1,550 mph, or 2,500 km/h), while the forthcoming Lockheed SR-72 prototype is expected to fly at speeds greater than Mach 6 (approximately 4,600 mph, or 7,400 km/h). To put this into context, a vehicle flying at Mach 9 could travel from London to San Francisco in an hour. 

Just as Concorde was noisy at take-off, the RDREs’ constant detonations will make any craft fitted with them incredibly loud. And unlike conventional jet engines, which offer much smoother accelerations, the rapid, repeated cycles of acceleration from the continuous detonations may also cause increased stress and fatigue of the engines and associated support structures.

Because RDRE could have military applications, Venus Aerospace is also collaborating with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

For now, Venus plans further test flights using drones One test flight engineers are considering involves fitting the current RDRE on a larger drone capable of achieving hypersonic flight — five times faster than the speed of sound (approximately 3,900 mph, or 6,200 km/h). 

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No one knows better than the folks who manufacture and market automobiles how crucial the choice of color is. Now, hoping to chase the concept of some of BMW’s technologies, Toyota is developing a method to modify their vehicles’ colors, chameleon-like, by using heat and light.

As initially spotted by USA Today, the technique has been in development for two years and Toyota last month filed for a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The patent describes all cars with the paint leaving the factory with a single color, the color-changing material, in whatever default hue is chosen. Once at a dealer or other Toyota facility with the correct equipment, the color can be changed as desired. The method of which would include either large panels or even a movable panel that would heat the paint first, followed by applications of specific wavelengths of light. This whole process would allow the molecules in the paint to be shifted to reflect different wavelengths of light, creating different visible colors (similar to how "Structural Blue" on Lexus models achieves its color). Temperature sensors on the car would be employed in the process to help ensure the correct parameters are achieved for the right color.

Because these very specific conditions must be met for color changing, owners need not worry that if they drive their Camrys into Death Valley, they might shift from grey to hot pink.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2022, BMW showed a color-change concept known as E Ink on its iX electric SUV that was based on the electrophoretic technology used in e-readers. In that technology, the vehicle is wrapped, and an electric current causes pigments to pass through microcapsules, changing the exterior from white to gray to black, controlled by using an app on a mobile phone. Up to 32 colors could be displayed on 240 E Ink segments, each segment individually controlled.

Certainly, both these developments are conceptual now and not yet ready for prime time in a dealer’s showroom. But perhaps a hot pink Camry might not be bad.

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