Laser Mounted Combat Vehicles Are Set to Roll-Out in 2017

    The development of lasers for combat purposes goes as far back as at least the Regan era, as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) from that time period had many innovate ideas about how we could develop a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system. Many of these anti-ballistic ideas featured lasers prominently. Despite this fact, laser weapons haven’t really ever proliferated on the battlefield, but that could soon change.

    The army, together with General Dynamics, an aerospace and defense company, is developing a short-range laser weapon that can identify and intercept drones, mortar shells, and other flying threats.

     The weapon system could be mounted on the roof of an armored personnel vehicle, and it features a 5 kilowatt laser, a step-up from General Dynamics’ previous effort, which came in at just 2 kilowatts. It has its own radar, so it stays operational even if the existing systems in the vehicle go down.

     The joint venture is also looking to integrate a jamming system to the weapon, so it does not have to fire a shot to take down a threat. Remarkably, their current tests show that the system can identify and destroy UAVs 21 times out of 23.

    This development shows how the changing landscape of war—the advent of technologies like drones and autonomous weapons—spawns a host of new innovations that ultimately reshape combat…and even society itself. In the end, those behind the work note that this laser system is just one of many in development that aims to protect soldiers in dangerous environments.

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New Research Shows How Stars Turn to Gold

    A study of the nearby dwarf galaxy Reticulum II hints at an exotic origin of the heaviest elements on Earth—through the merger of neutron stars. 

    Astrophysics has managed to paint a pretty accurate picture of how the elements were formed. Hydrogen and helium were created in those first staggering moments after the Big Bang; “metals” (all heavier elements) were later created through nuclear fusion in the central furnaces of super-massive stars.

    The problem is, once iron and nickel are formed, the fusion process requires more energy than it releases, which has predictable results—the star collapses. So how do heavier elements such as gold, lead, copper, and platinum form?

    The explanation is “neutron capture,” in which existing heavy elements accrete neutrons one at a time; subsequently, these neutrons beta decay into protons and voilà—you have a ready-made new element. Neutron capture may happen slowly, over long periods in stellar cores, or all at once, through a catastrophic neutron bombardment.

   Ultimately, astronomers are undecided about how such elements are formed—in supernova explosions, which are relatively common, or in something rare and exotic, such as the merger of neutron stars.

    Surprisingly, a new study of the dwarf galaxy Reticulum II hints that it is the latter.

The new research shows that of Reticulum II’s nine brightest stars, seven have a greater amount of heavy elements formed from rapid neutron capture than other dwarf galaxies; this fact, coupled with the excessive amounts of neutron capture-derived elements in the galaxy, seems to prove that a rarer mechanism than supernovae.

    Ancient stars in the Milky Way betray the same signatures of neutron capture, suggesting that an identical process obtains in larger galaxies as in the dwarfs—and that even Earth’s heavy elements were similarly formed. Which means the gold in that piece of jewelry you’re wearing may have been born inside colliding neutron stars.

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