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100 attojoules is 10^-16 joules. So achieving 100 attojoule switches means 10,000 trillion operations would take 1 joule of energy. Actual calculations would take more energy to move information and perform other tasks.

Atomic Scale Materials and Devices - Goal 100 attojoules optical switches

Funding
FY2011 $16.030 million
FY2012 $9.563 million
FY2013 $2.0 million

Description: This thrust examines the fundamental physics of materials at the atomic scale in order to develop new devices and capabilities. A major emphasis of this thrust is to provide the theoretical and experimental underpinnings of a new class of semiconductor electronics based on spin degree of freedom of the electron, in addition to (or in place of) the charge. A new all optical switch capability will also be investigated. It includes a new, non-invasive method to directly hyperpolarize biological tissues, leading to novel quantitative neurodiagnostics. New materials and prototype devices will be developed to demonstrate a new class of optoelectronics that operate with ultra-low energy dissipation (~100 atom-Joules (aJ)/operation).

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Lockheed Martin and LaserMotive, Inc., recently demonstrated the capabilities of an innovative laser power system to extend the Stalker Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) flight time to more than 48 hours. This increase in flight duration represents an improvement of 2,400 percent.

Stalker is a small, silent UAS used by Special Operations Forces since 2006 to perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.
Stalker UAV fly for 48 hours with wireless laser recharging

LAser Motive has a 7 page laser power beaming fact sheet

LaserMotive has demonstrated wireless power systems with a receiver specific power as high as 800 W/kg. By comparison, lithium-ion batteries used in small UAVs are generally used with a specific power in the range of 200-500 W/kg.

With current laser cells, the deliverable power is limited mainly by cell cooling, and it can easily exceed 6 kW/m2, or about 1 HP per square foot.

Current diode laser technology and reasonable apertures can produce useful beam intensity at the receiver out to a range of ~10km. Longer distances can be achieved by switching to higher-quality sources (such as fiber lasers), although there is a penalty in cost and efficiency can be achieved by switching to higher-quality sources (such as fiber lasers), although there is a penalty in cost and efficiency.


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DARPA 2013 budget justification is out and it updates progress on DARPA projects. (336 pages)

(Formerly part of Synthetic Biology project)
The goal of Living Foundries is to create a revolutionary, biologically-based manufacturing platform to provide new materials, capabilities and manufacturing paradigms for the DoD and the Nation. The program seeks to develop the new tools, technologies and methodologies to transform biology into an engineering practice, speeding the biological design-build-test cycle and expanding the complexity of systems that can be engineered. The goal is to enable the rapid development of previously unattainable technologies and products, leveraging biology to solve challenges associated with production of new materials, novel capabilities, fuels and medicines and providing novel solutions and enhancements to military needs and capabilities. For example, one motivating, widespread and currently intractable problem is that of corrosion/materials degradation - a challenge that costs the DoD nearly $23 billion per year and has no near term solution in sight. Living Foundries offers the potential to program and engineer biology, and enable the capability to design and engineer systems that rapidly and dynamically prevent, seek out, identify and repair corrosion/materials degradation. Ultimately, Living Foundries aims to provide game-changing manufacturing paradigms for the DoD, enabling distributed, adaptable, on-demand production of critical and high-value materials, devices and capabilities in the field or on base. Such a capability will decrease the DoD's dependence on tenuous material and energy supply chains that could be cut due to political change, targeted attack or environmental accident. Living Foundries aims to do for biology what very-large-scale integration (VLSI) did for the semiconductor device industry - i.e. enable the design and engineering of increasingly complex systems to address and enhance military needs and capabilities.

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DARPA 2013 budget justification is out and it updates progress on DARPA projects. (336 pages) One of the best funded projects is program to enable military vehicle to be developed and built 10 times faster.

The goal of the META program is to develop novel design flows, tools, and processes to enable a significant improvement in the ability to design complex defense and aerospace systems that are correct-by-construction. The program seeks to develop a design representation of meta-language and a domain-specific component model library from which system designs can quickly be assembled and their correctness verified with a high degree of certainty. Such a "fab-less" design approach is complemented by a foundry-style manufacturing capability, consisting of a factory capable of rapid reconfiguration between a large number of products and product variants through bitstream reprogramability, with minimal or no resultant learning curve effects. Together, the fab-less design and foundry-style manufacturing capability is anticipated to yield substantial---by a factor of five to ten---compression in the time to develop and field complex defense and aerospace systems.

The META effort will also explore the initial design of a next generation ground vehicle by employing a novel, model-based correct-by-construction design capability, a highly-adaptable foundry-style manufacturing capability, and crowd-sourcing methods to demonstrate 5x-10x compression in the timeline necessary to build an infantry fighting vehicle. Beginning in FY 2012, the specific ground vehicle application work will be funded in PE 0602702E, Project TT-04, Advanced Land Systems.

Funding
FY 2011 $49 million
FY 2012 $56 million
FY 2013 $75 million


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David Stipp - The first strong evidence that a drug could slow aging in mammals came out in 2009 when scientists reported that chronically feeding doses of rapamycin to mice significantly extended their average and maximum lifespans. Yet rapamycin, a drug used to help prevent rejection of transplanted organs, causes multiple side effects in people, including elevated triglycerides and cholesterol, increasing the risk of heart disease; moderate immune suppression, perhaps increasing infection risks; and low blood platelet levels, which raises the specter of dangerous bleeding. In recent years another especially surprising and troubling side effect has come to the fore: Chronically taking large doses of rapamycin induces “insulin insensitivity” in both rodents and humans, leading to rising blood sugar and potentially to type 2 diabetes.

The troubling data on rapamycin’s side effects have come mainly from studies in which sizable doses were taken by sickly people, many of whom were on potent immunosuppressants such as cyclosporin (chiefly organ transplant patients). These data aren’t necessarily indicative of rapamycin’s side effects when taken in smallish amounts by healthy adults as a broad-spectrum reducer of degenerative disease risks (which is one way to describe an anti-aging drug). Most, if not all, of rapamycin’s side effects are dose-dependent—smaller doses pose less risk. Thus, it seems possible that a dosing regimen could be found that confers preventive gains with little risk. One expert on mTOR and aging, Mikhail Blagosklonny at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., has proposed that intermittent doses of rapamycin might do the trick. Not coincidentally, Blagosklonny authored the recent theory paper downplaying the drug’s reported diabetes risk

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A recent paper suggests that the diabetes risk is overblown.

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DARPA 2013 budget justification is out and it updates progress on DARPA projects. (336 pages)

Enabling Quantum Technologies

FY 2011 $8.385 million
FY 2012 $9.233 million
FY 2013 $15.70 million


Description: This thrust emphasizes a quantum focus on technology capabilities including significantly improved single photon sources, detectors, and associated devices useful for quantum metrology, communications, and imaging applications. In addition, this thrust will examine other novel classes of materials and phenomena such as plasmons or Bose-Einstein Condensates (BEC) that have the potential to provide novel capabilities in the quantum regime, such as GPS-independent navigation via atom interferometry and communications, and ultrafast laser technologies.

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DARPA 2013 budget justification is out and it updates progress on DARPA projects. (336 pages)

1. Fundamentals of Nanoscale and Emergent Effects and Engineered Devices - IE Cold Fusion Investigation

Funding
FY2011 $16.745 million
FY2012 $11.65 million
FY2013 $5.5 million

This is the project where DARPA is spending about $34 million to investigate cold fusion on the nanoscale. They have found and generated excess heat for at least 2.5 days.

Description: The Fundamentals of Nanoscale and Emergent Effects and Engineered Devices program seeks to understand and exploit physical phenomena for developing more efficient and powerful devices. This includes developing devices and structures to enable controllable photonic devices at multiple wavelengths, engineering palladium microstructures with large deuterium loadings to study absorption thermodynamics and effects, enabling real-time detection as well as analysis of signals and molecules and origin of emergent behavior in correlated electron devices, and developing stabilization and scale-up methods to fabricate high pressure crystal structures at low pressures. Arrays of engineered nanoscale devices will result in an order of magnitude (10 to 100 times) reduction in the time required for analysis and identification of known and unknown (engineered) molecules. This program will develop novel nanomaterials for exquisitely precise purification of materials, enabling such diverse applications as oxygen generation and desalination, ultra-high sensitivity magnetic sensors, and correlated electron effects such as superconductivity. This program will compare the phenomenology of various biological, physical and social systems and abstract the common features that are responsible for their properties of self-organization, emergent behavior, and physical intelligence.

This looks like they are trying to investigate the science of cold fusion / low energy nuclear reactions

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BBC News - Reaction Engines is showcasing its revolutionary Sabre engine technology at the Farnborough air show. They are two-thirds of the way through an important test campaign at its Culham base.

Sabre would burn hydrogen and oxygen to provide thrust - but in the lower atmosphere this oxygen would be taken from the atmosphere.

At high speeds, the engine is required to cope with 1,000-degree gases entering its intake. These have to be cooled prior to being compressed and burnt with the hydrogen.

REL's solution is a module containing arrays of extremely fine piping that can extract the heat and plunge the intake gases to minus 140C in just 1/100th of a second.

Ordinarily, the moisture in the air would be expected to freeze out rapidly, covering the pre-cooler's pipes in a blanket of frost and dislocating their operation.

But the company's engineers have also devised a means to stop this happening, permitting Sabre to run in jet mode for as long as is needed before making the transition to full rocket mode to take Skylon into orbit.

It is the critical "pre-cooler" technology with its innovative helium cooling loop that REL is validating currently on an experimental rig at Culham.

1. Pre-cooler
During flight air enters the pre-cooler. In 1/100th of a second a network of fine piping inside the pre-cooler drops the air's temperature by well over 100C. Very cold helium in the piping makes this possible.

2. Jet engine
Oxygen chilled in the pre-cooler by the helium is compressed and used to fuel the aircraft. In the test run, a jet engine is used to draw air into the pre-cooler, so the technology can be demonstrated.

3. The silencer
The helium must be kept chilled. So, it is pumped through a nitrogen boiler. For the test, water is used to dampen the noise from the exhaust gases. Clouds of steam are produced as the water is vaporized.

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A multi-institutional team of researchers that included scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has created the first artificial molecules whose chirality can be rapidly switched from a right-handed to a left-handed orientation with a beam of light. This holds potentially important possibilities for the application of terahertz technologies across a wide range of fields, including reduced energy use for data-processing, homeland security and ultrahigh-speed communications.

Chirality is the distinct left/right orientation or “handedness” of some types of molecules, meaning the molecule can take one of two mirror image forms. The right-handed and left-handed forms of such molecules, called “enantiomers,” can exhibit strikingly different properties. For example, one enantiomer of the chiral molecule limonene smells of lemon, the other smells of orange. The ability to observe or even switch the chirality of molecules using terahertz (trillion-cycles-per-second) electromagnetic radiation is a much coveted asset in the world of high technology.


(Top) Scanning electron microscopy image of optically switchable chiral THz metamolecules, (Bottom) The purple, blue and tan colors represent the gold meta-atom structures at different layers, with the two silicon pads shown in green. (courtesy of Zhang, et. al)

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SpaceFlightNow - SpaceX's Grasshopper testbed for a reusable rocket booster could fly soon from the company's Texas test facility on a short hop designed to demonstrate its ability to take off and land under thrust on a launch pad.

The Grasshopper test vehicle stands 106 feet tall, and its initial flights will reach 240 feet and last about 45 seconds to check the design of the rocket's landing system.

SpaceX technicians added four steel landing legs and a support structure to a qualified Falcon 9 rocket first stage. The Grasshopper program is the first step in achieving SpaceX's goal of developing a reusable booster, which would require the rocket's first stage to fly back to a landing pad at or near the launch site.

SpaceX's Grasshopper vehicle in McGregor, Texas. Credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now
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DARPA 2013 budget justification is out and it updates progress on DARPA projects.

The two projects below were covered last year. $4.6 million in funding for the Tip-based nanofabrication project was cancelled for 2012. However, it appears that the 2012 goals were achieved in 2011.

1. Tip-Based Nanofabrication (TBN)

Funding of $11.618 million for 2011, no funding for 2012 and 2013

The Tip-Based Nanofabrication (TBN) program developed the capability to controllably manufacture, for selected defense applications, nano-scale structures such as nanowires, nanotubes, and quantum dots with nanometer-scale control over the size, orientation, and position of each nanostructure, using Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) cantilevers and tips. The selected defense applications included optical and biological sensors, diode lasers, light emitting diodes, infrared sensors, high density interconnects, and quantum computing. In addition to tip-based approaches, other methods for controlled nano-manufacturing were considered, including optical and bio-inspired approaches.

FY 2011 Accomplishments:
- Demonstrated operation of multi-tip arrays for use in manufacturing complex components.
- Demonstrated precision and control of the process and functionality for specific device designs.
- Demonstrated a low cost and scalable tip-based array of nano-patterning elements (over 20,000 elements) that allows for high throughput nano-fabrication and high resolution (less than 50 nanometers) over large areas.
- Demonstrated the fabrication of semiconducting nanowires, graphene ribbons, quantum dots, Kane q-bits, carbon nanotubes and other structures using tips-based nano-manufacturing (TBN) for specific device applications.
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