DARPA's Shredder Challenge! Win $50.000 till December 4, 2011

Reading Between the Lines The first of five puzzles. Each puzzle is a shredded document that DARPA put through a brand-new commercial shredder. The pieces were then arrayed text-side up and scanned at 400 dpi. DARPA. Environment Clean Generations

DARPA’s latest tech challenge should make you hesitate to throw out your shredded documents, instead opting for the handy caveman solution of simply burning them. Until DARPA comes up with a way to read ashes as well as messages on shredded paper.  Environment Clean Generations

Troops often confiscate the remains of destroyed documents — the SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden took plenty of paperwork, for instance — but they’re difficult if not impossible to reconstruct, as DARPA explains on the challenge website. So DARPA is turning to puzzle lovers and computer scientists in search of a new technique. Winners will take home $50,000 and the sense of pride that comes with unnerving millions of people who thought their shredded documents were secure.

To make the five puzzles, DARPA officials bought some commercial-grade paper shredders and put single-sided handwritten documents through them. Some are multiple pages long, and although the pages were shredded separately, their remnants have been mixed together. The pieces were arranged text-side up and scanned at 400 dpi. To solve the puzzles, competitors must reconstruct the documents and answer a puzzle embedded in the context of the rebuilt document, DARPA says. As the puzzles increase in difficulty, solvers can win more points. The puzzles were unveiled Oct. 27 and solvers will have until Dec. 4 to make sense of them.Environment Clean Generations

Go to the DARPA Shredder Challenge site, register, and download the five puzzles, which come with high-resolution TIFF images and a text file containing instructions and puzzle-specific questions. Registered participants can submit solutions for any or all of the puzzles.

“The goal is to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community,” DARPA explains.Environment Clean Generations

So maybe shredding paper is not as secure as we all thought. Unless you use it to line the hamster cage, in which case puzzle solvers would have a lot more to deal with.

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Energy form Soldier's Underware

Soldiers: Your underwear of the future will do more than prevent crotch rot. It'll protect you from injuries, monitor your vitals, and even "harvest" your energy. That is, if a new project from Darpa's Defense Sciences Office works out as planned. That's an illustration, above, of what Darpa thinks its "Warrior Web" onesie might look like.

So far, the project is still in the draw-a-cartoon-with-a-six-pack-in-tights stage -- a long way off from the "adaptive, compliant, nearly transparent, quasi-active joint support suit," which can "mitigate musculoskeletal injury caused by discrete dynamic events while maintaining soldier performance," dreamed up by Darpa. An introductory meeting of potential researchers is set for mid-October, 2011.

Musculoskeletal injuries (a blanket term for anything from pain caused by overuse to stress fractures and joint derangements) are a real problem in the military.

 According to a 2010 study, there were 743,547 injury-related musculoskeletal conditions amongst military personnel in 2006. In 2004, 44 percent of military fatalities resulted from unintentional injuries. These Achilles tendon strains, torn meniscuses, and sore labrums slow our soldiers down, rendering them less effective and placing them in more danger.

But protecting their knees is just the start of what Warrior Web aims to do. Darpa says it's looking for experts in the following fields for the Warrior Web:

• Joint support and musculoskeletal injury mitigation

• Dynamics of soldier action and external load

• Biomechanical and joint modeling and testing

• Efficient and compliant actuation

• Energy regeneration and harvesting

• Dynamic structural stiffness tuning

• Adaptive sensing and control for biomechatronics

• Materials, fabrics, and structures to enhance the human-to-equipment interface

Wait --- "musculoskeletal injury mitigation"? "Energy regeneration"? Is this glorified pair of long underwear supposed to reduce inflammation and heal stress fractures while it pumps B-12 (or maybe amphetamines) into the blood stream? Sounds, uh, ambitious. And if I were a soldier, I'd be wary of modeling any garment that is going to "harvest" anything from me.

This isn't the military's first  crazy-suit pipe dream. (In 2003, MIT bragged that they would soon show us  a nanotech-made muscle suit that can heal and deflect bullets. In 2010, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon each showed off hydraulic-powered  exoskeleton suits designed to help soldiers carry heavier loads while putting minimal strain on their joints and ligaments.

And of course, let us never forget the super-strength cyborg penguin suit  of 2008.) So Warrior Web may not be an entirely original concept, but it's certainly the most ambitious. After all, it's basically underwear with strengthening and healing powers.

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Self-Powering Nano-Device

             Scientists working with DARPA and Department of Energy backing have cracked the code on a kind of technological milestone, for the first time developing a nano-device capable of powering itself by harvesting energy from vibrations while at the same time transmitting data wirelessly over long distances. That kind of technology could have huge implications for devices ranging from surveillance implements to airborne sensors to implantable medical devices.

            Publishing their findings in the journal ACS Nano Letters, the team describes a nanogenerator that turns mechanical vibrations scavenged from anything from a person’s pulse to a breeze to a person walking or cars driving over a bridge into electricity to power the device. 

            That in and of itself isn’t so impressive, as such vibration-driven generators already existed previously.

            The game-changer here is the fact that this nano-device can generate and store (in a capacitor) enough energy to also transmit wireless signals to a receiver up to 30 feet away via a transmitter roughly equivalent to those in Bluetooth headsets. 

           The idea that something so small might be able to transmit data across distances could lead to new generations of medical sensors powered by a person’s own blood flow, environmental sensors powered by the ebb and flow of atmospheric air, and wearable sensors that run and transmit on the power leftover by the wearer’s own footsteps.

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Falcon HTV2 - The 20,000 km/h Aircraft

About three hours ago the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA launched the fastest plane ever into the sky. The Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 is still in research and development, but had its second test run. And how fast was the plane flying in its test run? The Falcon HTV-2 is supposed to fly through the atmosphere at 13,000 mph or 20,000 km/h. That’s 20 times faster than the speed of sound, and fast enough to fly from New York to Los Angeles in 12 minutes.

            From that we know all was going well until the craft entered its glide phase and lost communication with DARPA’s monitoring stations. DARPA’s Twitter feed tell us that the HTV-2 launched around 8 am PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and was successfully boosted into the Earth’s atmosphere at near orbital speeds by the Minotaur IV Lite launch vehicle. The HTV-2 then separated from the rocket and used its Reaction Control System to orient itself for reentry. After entering a reentry phase, the craft entered a pull-up phase to control the speed and altitude of the glide.

            Once in the glide phase, the HTV-2 was supposed to perform maneuvers to test the aircraft’s aerodynamic performance. The last phase was to be its Terminal Phase, which has the aircraft roll and dive into the ocean to end the flight.

            DARPA said in a Twitter post that it lost telemetry with the unmanned aircraft after the Glide Phase about two hours ago. The latest Tweet from DARPA says that “downrange assets did not reacquire tracking or telemetry.” DARPA tweeted that the HTV-2 has an autonomous flight termination capability and it would update us with more info. 

           On the Falcon HTV-2’s first flight, DARPA also lost contact with the vehicle nine minutes into the flight before completing its controlled landing in the ocean. The first flight proved it could travel 3.6 miles per second and still maintain GPS signals. 

            The intent of the second flight was to perform more tests while the plane is in flight to increase DARPA’s technical understanding of the hypersonic flight regime. The testing is something that can’t fully be replicated on the ground and must be tested in the air to validate the assumptions of DARPA’s aerospace engineers. 

            Monitoring stations along the craft’s flight path over the Pacific Ocean could not find the HTV-2, which means the craft is still MIA. We will keep you updated when we hear the latest news from DARPA about the status of the HTV-2.

           

   

     

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