Material Intelligence: The Programmable Matter

The new era is an epoch of smart materials where materials and non living things can have intelligence without any circuits, processing power, mechanical gadgets involved - it comes directly from the materials properties at nano-scale. Intelligent materials are being developed for a lot of purposes and include functionalities like:

• Piezoelectric materials - convert vibrations to electricity and converse.
• Shape memory alloys - remember their shape at temperature zones.
• Magnetostrictive materials - reshape under magnetic influence and converse.
• Magnetic shape memory alloys - change shape under significant magnetic field.
• Magnetocaloric materials - reversibly change their temperature in ratio to magnetic field.
• pH-sensitive polymers - change their volume with ambient pH.
• Temperature responsive polymers - respond to temperature changes.
• Halochromic materials - change colour with acidity.
• Chromogenic systems - change colour with electricity, heat or light. LCDs use such materials.
• Ferrofluids - strongly magnetizable fluids just by presence of magnetic field.
• Photomechanical materials - change shape with light.
• Polymorph materials - mold with hot water.
• Self-healing materials - heal their own wear and tear.
• Dielectric elastomers -  produce high strain with electricity.
• Thermoelectric materials - convert temperature difference to electricity and converse.

This opens the doors to a new science of programming matter itself. Using any combination of materials above or other such materials it is possible to program the material to achieve basic functionalities that would normally take a computer processor or human brain to perform. A BBC news article mentions discovery of shape memory alloys that can be reshaped indefinitely by heating and cooling without wear and tear. The martensite structure of the shape memory alloys allows the materials to 'decide' conditionally and by the use of conditional programming of the materials they can be used to perform functions like automatic window openers or even as the means to guide solar panels on the Hubble Space Telescope to always point towards sun.

The programming of materials opens a front at nano-scale physics that uses the skills of computing and materials science to acquire results with no complexity at the macro level.

Top 10 Space Weapons

While exotic weapons design and 'alien-ware' style weaponry is still a distant future but the speed our current technology and capabilities it is diversifying and moving towards that future is remarkable. Space.com lists top ten weapons that have yet been deployed by different nations to work from or in space as a form of space warfare to support operations on earth or a conflict in space. The list ranges from ICBMs, High altitude Non-nuclear EMPs, Cosmic satellites and China's satellite destroying missiles to Soviet Union's Almaz Space Station, DARPA's electromagnetism controlled stream of molten metal and the X-37B, the Orbital Vehicle with capabilities to throw Tungsten rods at targets on earth.

Read the the article on Top 10 Space Weapons for more.

Pi - 3.14 - π

-- Compiled from multiple sources.

Pi (π) is an infinite, non-repeating (sic) decimal - meaning that every possible number combination exists somewhere in pi. Converted into ASCII text, somewhere in that infinite string if digits is the name of every person you will ever love, the date, time and manner of your death, and the answers to all the great questions of the universe.



It is not true that an infinite, non-repeating decimal must contain ‘every possible number combination’. The decimal 0.011000111100000111111 is an easy counterexample. However, if the decimal expansion of π contains every possible finite string of digits, which seems quite likely, then the rest of the statement is indeed correct. Of course, in that case it also contains numerical equivalents of every book that will never be written, among other things.

Let me summarize the things that have been said which are true and add one more thing.

1. π is not known to have this property, but it is expected to be true.
2. This property does not follow from the fact that the decimal expansion of π is infinite and does not repeat.

The one more thing is the following. The assertion that the answer to every question you could possibly want to ask is contained somewhere in the digits of π may be true, but it's useless. Here is a string which may make this point clearer: just string together every possible sentence in English, first by length and then by alphabetical order. The resulting string contains the answer to every question you could possibly want to ask, but most of what it contains is garbage, you have no way of knowing what is and isn't garbage a priori, and the only way to refer to a part of the string that isn't garbage is to describe its position in the string, and the bits required to do this themselves constitute a (terrible) encoding of the string. So finding this location is exactly as hard as finding the string itself (that is, finding the answer to whatever question you wanted to ask).

In other words, a string which contains everything contains nothing. Useful communication is useful because of what it does not contain.

You should keep all of the above in mind and then read Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel. (A library which contains every book contains no books.)

Electronic insect

Engineers around the world keep inventing with inspirations from the nature. This one being an insect could be an excellent candidate for surveillance.

Earth sniped

A satirical depiction of how it would look to an astronaut on the Moon if earth gets hit by an ultra hard asteroid at an ultra high speed. A better satirical caption would be, "...all my stuff was there!"

Electromagnetic Pulse Capacitor Comparison

Happy independence day to all Pakistanis. As a independence day gift, we are releasing high tech interest base research on electromagnetic pulse as a part of this blog.
 

Electromagnetic Pulse

The term electromagnetic pulse (sometimes abbreviated EMP) is a burst of electromagnetic radiation that results from an explosion (usually from the detonation of a nuclear weapon) and/or a suddenly fluctuating magnetic field. The resulting rapidly changing electric fields or magnetic fields may couple with electrical/electronic systems to produce damaging current and voltage surges.

In military terminology, a nuclear bomb detonated hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface is known as a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) device. Nuclear electromagnetic pulse has three distinct time components that result from different physical phenomena. Effects of a HEMP device depend on a very large number of factors, including the altitude of the detonation, energy yield, gamma ray output, interactions with the Earth’s magnetic field, and electromagnetic shielding of targets.

The case of a nuclear electromagnetic pulse differs from other kinds of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) in being a complex electromagnetic multi-pulse. The complex multi-pulse is usually described in terms of three components, and these three components have been defined as such by the international standards commission called the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

The three components of nuclear EMP, as defined by the IEC, are called E1, E2 and E3.

Capacitor Comparison for EMP use:

• Ceramic capacitors range from low to high voltage but are vulnerable to aging (and change in crystal structure over time) and have to be reheated up to curie point to reverse the aging effect.
• Polymeric capacitors produce up to 60,000V but temperature stability is poor; inappropriate for radio frequency applications due to excessive dielectric heating.
• Glass Capacitors although have a high working temperature and are very stable but their capacitance is in picofarads.
• Ultra-capacitors have a maximum working voltage upto 24.4 V and hence need a large amount to series connections to build up an EMP device.

Class II ceramic capacitors provide bet material for the EMP effect to successfully occur over a voltage of ~ 50,000V.

To further improve the dissipation rate electrical grade castor oil or similar high dielectric constant fluid can be used along with extended foil plates in combination with the ceramic capacitors to use their high voltage to generate EMP.

Featured re-post. Original post at Astroaviator.com as my first blog post there.

Drone hacking via GPS Spoofing; how Iran hacked the US drone

shared via Juggaar under CC-BY-NC-ND license.

The US stealth drone was captured by Iran spoofing its GPS coordinates tricking the bird to land within the Iranian territory instead of it's actual programmed landing zone, Afghanistan. Iranian engineers, only a few months back, claimed that the drone’s GPS was reconfigured which made it land inside Iran.

NATO monitors the long Iran-Afghan border for weapon smuggling into Afghanistan. Three years ago the Iranians claimed to have designed their own drone with a range of 300 miles reachable to Israel. The captured stealth drone has been built with very sophisticated technology. A same kind of stealth plane was monitoring the US raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. The captured stealth drone costed up to $6 million and was manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

According to the US officials, RQ in its name means that it is unarmed and some industry experts who have written about the Sentinel stealth is that its design makes it more of an operational platform not an intelligence gathering aircraft. It was used to fly support during the Bin Laden raid. However, according to the Iranian news, the drone was shot down and recovered almost completely intact which goes as a warning to the US.

According to an unnamed Iranian engineer who has been working on the US bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, the spoofing method used allowed the Iranians to divert the landing of the bird without even hacking into the remote-control signals of the US control centre.

The GPS weakness of aircraft has been a concern for US since a long time. Such an attack is much more sophisticated than ECM jamming due to being executed under cover and finding out the hacker is not possible until the spoofing has already been done. The attack method allows the GPS receiver to send wrong GPS signals which makes the drone believe that it is located somewhere in space while it is flying at its normal altitude, making it to reduce altitude and actually land. The US officials lay the claim of their loss of the stealth drone on a supposed malfunction from their end.

The Iranian engineer, however, claims the GPS navigation to be the weakest point. After being “jammed” by sending noise over the normal communications, the bird automatically goes into autopilot mode and doesn’t know what to do next. It can then be tricked and commanded into doing whatever the controller wants.

None of the current GPS systems are “spoof proof” due to several reasons. The main reason being the near impossibility to validate consistently on a “one way” communications channel because of “replay attacks”. Therefore all the GPS sytems require an additional channel that is not possible to jam.

Claims have also been made that Iran has sold the stealth to China so that China may undertake serious investigations on the other hand Pakistan is also believed to have shared with China, the stealth technology from the stealth helicopter that crashed in Abbottabad attack.