DARPA INFOSEC Mandate DARPA | EOP | Congress In Wired briefing 01 May 2008, Danger Room reports on the new DARPA Information Security program mandated by Congress and ratified by the President. The UNISCA First Committee INFOSEC Chair briefing to the UN General Assembly is particularly àpropos to the initiative. "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was created 50 years ago in response to the Soviets' launch of Sputnik. In less than a year, DARPA put together the infrastructure that guided the American space effort for decades to come. Now, DARPA has been given new marching orders: to help America fight and win battles online.

Under a directive signed by the President – and recently approved by Congress – nearly every arm of the government's security apparatus is starting work on a massive national cybersecurity initiative designed to protect the United States from electronic attack and strike at adversaries online. DARPA's role: to create a cyberwarfare range where all these new forms of electronic combat can be tried out. According to a defense official familiar with the program, "Congress has given DARPA a direct order; that's only happened once before – with the Sputnik program in the '50s."

Danger Room's sister blog, Threat Level, has a good writeup of the cybersecurity initiative, which has been labeled as a Manhattan Project-type effort. In the case of cybersecurity, there is at least talk of big money: about $30 billion dollars. For its part, DARPA's "National Cyber Range" would create a virtual environment where the Defense Department can mock real warfare, both defense and offense.

DARPA today issued an announcement, describing how the range would be a test where the government could conduct unbiased, quantitative and qualitative assessment of information assurance and survivability tools in a representative network environment ; replicate complex, large-scale, heterogeneous networks and users in current and future Department of Defense (DoD) weapon systems and operations ; enable multiple, independent, simultaneous experiments on the same infrastructure ; enable realistic testing of Internet/Global-Information-Grid (GIG) scale research ; develop and deploy revolutionary cyber testing capabilities, and enable the use of the scientific method for rigorous cyber testing.

This is clearly a serious deal for the agency: DARPA Director Tony Tether is a scheduled speaker at the proposers' day workshop scheduled for mid-May, and apparently plans to help handpick the contractors. Tether is known for his close involvement in DARPA contracts. Many of the details surrounding this program will be classified."

Quantum sensor effect in bird navigation? Institute for Electronic Structure and Lasers, Foundation for Research and Technology, Heraklion | University of Crete In arXiv:0804.2646, arXivblog, and Slashdot reports, Kominis investigates the potential for Zeno effect-based quantum sensing in bird navigation. "How birds use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate has puzzled researchers for decades. In recent years, a growing body of evidence has pointed to the possibility that a weak magnetic field can influence the outcome of a certain type of chemical reaction involving the recombination of pairs of ions in bird retinas. The trouble is that the ion recombination is known to happen too quickly for the Earth's weak magnetic field to have any effect. Now it looks as if the quantum Zeno effect may explain the process (abstract). This is the "watched-pot-never-boils" effect, in which the act of observing a quantum system maintains it for longer than expected. This is extraordinary news, because it means a quantum sensor is determining the macroscopic behavior of living birds. Kominis says we may well see these effects elsewhere, and mentions that a similar mechanism might be at work in photosynthesis."

MagiQ Research Labs Andrew Hammond | MagiQ Technologies MagiQ Technologies (NYC) has founded MagiQ Research Labs in Somerville, MA. The lab will provide a technical, engineering and production facility base for public and private sectors in medical optics, quantum information, fiber sensing, aerospace and defense applications, and has been established under research grants from ARO, DARPA, and NASA.

Room-temperature quantum oscillations in diamond crystals UCSB|CNSI|Kavli TU Delft|Ames DOE In Science Express, Science and concurrent UCSB press release, Hanson, Awschalom et al. report on striking experimental observations of quantum oscillations in diamond crystals at room temperature. "We were stunned by these unexpected experimental results, and extremely excited by the ability to control and monitor single quantum states, especially at room temperature," said David Awshalom. "To our surprise, when looking at longer times, the oscillations disappeared, then re-appeared. At first it looked like an artifact, but repeated measurements reproduced this behavior," said co-author Ronald Hanson, a postdoctoral student at UCSB during this period who is now a professor at Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands.

Workshop on Neuromorphic Computing DSO As profiled in Wired and BAA SN08-16, DSO is hosting a workshop on neuromorphic adaptive plastic scalable electronics to be held on 04 March, 2008. "Briefly, the vision for the anticipated DARPA SyNAPSE program is to enable electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels. As compared to biological systems, today’s intelligent machines are less efficient by a factor of one million to one billion in real world, complex environments. The key to achieving the vision of the SyNAPSE program will be an unprecedented multidisciplinary approach that can coordinate aggressive technology development activities in the following SyNAPSE areas: 1) hardware; 2) architecture; 3) simulation; and 4) environment. Hardware includes neuromorphic electronics with novel, high density, plastic, synaptic components; architecture includes neuromorphic design from microcircuit to complete system; simulation includes large-scale digital simulation of neuromorphic circuits and functional neuromorphic systems; and environment includes virtual training, testing and benchmarking for neuromorphic systems realized in hardware or simulation. "