Tim McMillan

1 month ago | thedebrief.org | Tim McMillan

In the high-stakes battle space of the future, airborne high-energy weapons and laser targeting systems will face the daunting challenge of intercepting advanced drones and hypersonic missiles—often at blistering Mach speeds—where precision is everything and the margin for error is virtually nonexistent. A single miscalculation, a momentary distortion in a beam of light, could spell the difference between mission success and failure.

1 month ago | thedebrief.org | Tim McMillan

In a lab-simulated flight through a digital forest besieged by shifting winds, a drone steers itself with remarkable skill—ducking obstacles, changing course in real-time, and reaching its target with human-like agility. The system directing the drone isn’t powered by a massive server or trained on petabytes of data. Instead, it’s being guided by a tiny, energy-sipping brain-like chip — a new type of artificial intelligence that learns as it acts, much like the human mind.

1 month ago | thedebrief.org | Tim McMillan

Tuesday’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) hearing on global threats was primarily dominated by the fallout from a recent security breach, where top U.S. officials mistakenly added The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief to a Signal group chat discussing plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen.

1 month ago | thedebrief.org | Tim McMillan

In the dark, crushing silence of the deep ocean, a new kind of sonar could soon be making waves—not with high-powered acoustic blasts or flashy emissions but with the barely perceptible hum of a stealth underwater drone’s propeller. In a breakthrough that could revolutionize underwater exploration and military surveillance, research funded by the U.S. Navy demonstrated that autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) can use their self-generated noise to “see” beneath the ocean floor.

1 month ago | thedebrief.org | Tim McMillan

In a recent study, researchers from Ruhr University Bochum in Germany have demonstrated that the well-known “rubber hand illusion” can significantly reduce pain perception. The findings, published in PAIN Reports, suggest that the illusion of body ownership over an artificial limb can alter pain perception in real time, providing potential implications for pain management and therapy.