Advanced Concepts Team

To try to explain the mechanism behind these patterns, the team borrowed a simple computer model from economics. The model treated all insurgencies like a marketplace--groups of people constantly deciding whether to act. Rather than coordinating, the groups simply watch the news. The size of the carnage reported at any given time determines the probability that a group of a given size will strike next. Like clockwork, the attacks over the course of the conflict--from the smallest to the most deadly--have the same distribution.

Insects can execute flying feats more impressive than fighter jets, and a team of researchers has now learned the trick behind one of them. They used high speed video cameras and a new 3D reconstruction technique to show how fruit flies execute their acrobatic turns. As they report in the 9 April Physical Review Letters, despite the complex wing motions, a fly can execute quick pirouettes by adjusting just a single parameter that controls the difference between the way its left and right wings oscillate. The results may be relevant for engineers designing flight control strategies for tiny robotic insects for search-and-rescue and surveillance.

Most of these devices have been able to identify and distinguish only between specific odors they've previously been trained to recognize, however, says neuroscientist Rafi Haddad of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. If an artificial nose is ever to replace the real thing, he says, it will have to be able to classify odors it has never encountered before.

DARPA for several years has been working on a program dubbed System F6 that seeks to prove that a cluster of small spacecraft can perform the mission of a large spacecraft by communicating wirelessly with one another in space

DARPA plans to launch three dedicated System F6 spacecraft either to low Earth orbit or geostationary orbit in mid-2013 to 2014

semi-autonomous cluster reconfiguration