Lifeboat Foundation

As the Pentagon makes a push toward scaling production of autonomous systems and weapons, Anduril Industries is accelerating its own manufacturing capabilities through a new software-based production hub called Arsenal.

The California-based defense technology company announced Wednesday it will build the first Arsenal facility in the U.S., using funding from a recent $1.5 billion Series F investment round. Chris Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, told reporters the firm’s goal is to consolidate manufacturing in order to “hyperscale” production across its product lines, including uncrewed combat drones and autonomous underwater vehicles.

“When we say hyperscale, we mean the ability to produce tens of thousands of a given system,” he said in a briefing. “This is the target that we’re setting for ourselves right now.”

The Air Force Research Lab is working with the Space Warfighting Analysis Center and the Defense Innovation Unit to test space data transport concepts.

Metalens is a kind of optical metasurface composed of metaatoms for manipulating incoming light’s amplitude, phase, and polarization. Unlike traditional refractive lenses, metalens can modulate the wavefront from plane to spherical at an interface. It has garnered widespread attention due to its novel physical properties and promising potential applications.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have retrospectively confirmed that implosion asymmetry was a major aspect of fusion experiments before achieving ignition for the first time at the Lab’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s most energetic laser.

Scientists at the University of Akron and the University of Pittsburgh have overturned long-held assumptions in new research that finds water can be a help for adhesion.

When it comes to materials for quantum sensors, diamond is the best game in town, says Cornell University professor Gregory Fuchs. Now he and a team of scientists have upped diamond’s game by generating exquisite imagery of diamond undergoing microscopic vibrations.

What does the inside of a cell really look like? In the past, standard microscopes were limited in how well they could answer this question. Now, researchers from the Universities of Göttingen and Oxford, in collaboration with the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), have succeeded in developing a microscope with resolutions better than five nanometers (five billionths of a meter). This is roughly equivalent to the width of a hair split into 10,000 strands. Their new method was published in Nature Photonics.

Shock experiments are widely used to understand the mechanical and electronic properties of matter under extreme conditions, like planetary impacts by meteorites. However, after the shock occurs, a clear description of the post-shock thermal state and its impacts on material properties is still lacking.

Soon, data storage centers are expected to consume almost 10% of the world’s energy generation. This increase is, among other things, due to intrinsic limitations of the materials used—ferromagnets. Consequently, this problem has ignited a quest for faster and more energy-efficient materials.