darpa

Most DARPA challenges serve some sort of obvious military or intelligence purpose. But the agency has us scratching our heads over its latest competition, the Network Challenge: a $40,000 cash prize will go to the first person who finds the correct latitude and longitude of ten weather balloons located within the continental United States.

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Yes, hard to believe, but it was 40 years ago today that the first two nodes of what would become Arpanet connected, thus beginning the Internet As We Know It. In the ensuing four decades, the Internet would change our world as profoundly as radio and the printing press had before it. So to celebrate, we’ve compiled five milestones in the Internet's young life.

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Got a great idea for an antibody biosensor but unsure what to do with it? Darpa wants you. The Department of Defense's future-tech wing is seeking proposals for its newly inaugurated Antibody Technology Program, the latest bid for technologies that can pinpoint specific biological agents ranging from bioterror threats to swine flu.

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iRobot, who brought us the Roomba and friends, have now devised a ball-shaped, undulating "chembot" under the auspices of -- who else -- DARPA. The lovable machine resembles something you might find on a surreal dim sum platter: a pale, doughy blob that changes shape, inflates, deflates, and will ultimately be able to squeeze through tiny cracks in pursuit of its target.

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Medics still use morphine to relieve the pain of wounded soldiers on the modern battlefield, but have to watch out for morphine reducing breathing and blood pressure to dangerous levels. That may all change with a DARPA-backed combination drug that has successfully limited morphine delivery when it detects low blood oxygen levels.

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In January, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, told a stunned conference audience that they had managed to create a remote-controlled cyborg beetle by attaching a computer chip to the brain of a giant insect. Now, the paper explaining how they did it has been published in the journal Frontiers In Neuroscience, and they have released a video of the cyber-bug in action.

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Mad science agency DARPA has a new addition to its wish list: technology to clean up thousands of pieces of orbiting space junk. Surely, world peace can't come far behind on the agenda.

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A couple of months ago, Sandia National Laboratory, in conjunction with Boston Dynamics (they of Big Dog fame) and DARPA, announced the creation of a robot that could jump 25 feet in the air. Designed for use in urban combat, the robot, named the Precision Urban Hopper (PUH), would give special forces troopers their own lightweight, easily deployable ground UAV.

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Helicopters won't transform into rampaging Decepticons anytime soon, but near-future rotor blades could actively change shape on the fly.

Military lab DARPA has put out a call for rotor blades that could boost payloads by 30 percent and range by 40 percent, as well as reduce sound by 50 percent and vibration by 90 percent compared to the usual fixed rotor blades.

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On the battlefield, communication is key. So while improving comms between our troops is a vital part of the military's technological mission, the mad scientists over at DARPA are scheming up a new way to deny communication to the enemy in a very precise way. DARPA is seeking proposals for a way to use an array of low-power transmitter nodes in the sky and on the ground to perform "surgical jamming" that will knock out communications signals "on the order of a city block corner" while leaving surrounding areas unaffected.

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