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DARPA

Ringside Seat: Braaaaaaains for Freedom

Paul Waldman AND Jaime FullerApr 02, 2013

As big-government liberals, we're always heartened when the federal government undertakes ambitious projects to solve fundamental problems and better Americans' lives. Today, President Obama announced the BRAIN initiative, and no, it doesn't have anything to do with preparation for the inevitable zombie apocalypse, during which our precious gray matter will become food for the undead.

You Can Hide, But You Can't Run

Paul WaldmanSep 06, 2012

As exciting as it is to watch Olympic sprinters tear down the track, the truth is that running fast for short distances is just not really human beings' thing. Usain Bolt, the fastest human ever to walk the planet, has reached a top speed of 27.78 miles per hour, which is an amble to a cheetah or a gazelle. Heck, your dachshund can almost certainly outrun you, even with its stubby little legs. What gave our ancestors an evolutionary advantage was their stamina, the ability to chase down prey by running and running until the poor wildebeest ran out steam and dropped.

The bright side of this story is that in the not-too-distant future, robots will be able to hunt and capture your slowpoke self without too much trouble, should the authorities determine that you have a suspicious bulge in your pocket or you need to be punished for jaywalking. Boston Dynamics, a robotics company that uses your tax dollars (in the form of grants from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to make crazy advanced robots that mimic animals in all kinds of interesting ways, just announced that their Cheetah robot has reached a speed of 28.3 miles per hour, faster than any human. What's different about it is that it has legs, not wheels, potentially making it (and robots like it) highly maneuverable. Gaze upon it and tremble:

Budget Insanity

PaulJun 21, 2011

It's nice to see that Republicans in Congress are focusing their budget-cutting energy on making wise cuts:

If there’s a program within the Energy Department’s sprawling bureaucracy that lawmakers love, chances are it’s the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy.

But its popularity on and off Capitol Hill doesn’t guarantee the future success for ARPA-E — the program designed to support radical new energy technologies — in the tussle over the federal budget and debt…

Last week, the House Appropriations Committee approved a budget to cut ARPA-E's funding to $100 million, marking the latest stop in the energy spending roller coaster.

Charge It Up

PaulJun 09, 2011

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Your Tax Dollars at Work, Squishy Dextrous Edition.

Paul WaldmanOct 27, 2010

If robots are ever going to do all our housework and pick up all our garbage, they're going to need to improve their dexterity. The human hand is a marvel of coordination, strength, and subtlety. Figuring out how to produce robot hands that can do anything like what a human hand can do has been a famously difficult engineering challenge.

But the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been working on it, and now some scientists working with a DARPA grant have come up with a marvelously low-tech and creative solution, as Popular Science tells us:

Getting to the Clean Energy Equivalent of the Internet.

Nancy ScolaOct 27, 2009

There have, in the last few days, been two pilgrimages of high-ranking Washington officials to geek meccas that are worth noting, though only one of them made any real news. President Obama went to MIT to publicly state that denying climate change is now an extremist position. "The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized," Obama argued in Cambridge on Friday.