The wacky guys with no names at DARPA (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) recently announced their newest shopping list for black-ops, futuristic, higher than hi-tech breakthroughs just waiting for some young lads or lasses on our side to find them.
This year’s list includes requests for: high-speed systems to manufacture vaccines, blue laser communications for submarines at depth and speed, a new generation of supercomputers that will solve advanced crytography like child’s play, self-forming and defending networks with their own GPS compass if not a moral one, real-time automated translation devices, and of course opening up new frontiers in quantum phenomena in computers, cryptography, and communications.
Michael Cooney,’s “Layer 8″ column in Network World unpacks some of the RFPs to get at some of the general categories of applications that include: unmanned and urban warfare, super light but strong space craft, Mach 6 atmospheric flight, virtual combat assistants, tagging and tracking capabilities, anti-biological attack, and of course, buckets of, anti-corrosive “glassy” coatings for naval vessels, and nano-tech that will manipulate matter at the atomic level.
What? No anti-gravity paint?