Last spring, 3,000 British troops deployed an invisible automated intelligence network, known as a “digital targeting web”, in the humid forests of the eastern regions of Estonia as part of a NATO exercise called Hedgehog.
The system was cobbled together over the course of four months – an astonishing speed of weapons development, usually measured in years. Its purpose is to connect all the things that look for targets – “sensors” in military parlance, and to connect all those things (“shooters”) to a single, shared wireless electronic brain.
Eighty years after Total War transformed the continent, the Hedgehog tests prompt a brutal new calculation of European defence. But leaning too heavily on this new mathematics of war could be a risky bet. Read the full story.
-Arthur Holland Mitchell
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MIT Technology Review Described: How a controversial startup hopes to cool the planet
Stardust Solutions believes it can solve climate change at low cost.
An Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year to launch specially equipped aircraft into the stratosphere. Once they reach the required altitude, those planes will scatter particles engineered to reflect enough sunlight to cool the planet, reportedly without causing environmental side effects.
But many solar geoengineering researchers are skeptical that Stardust will attract the customers needed for global deployment in the next decade. He is also highly critical of the idea of a private company setting the global temperature for us.
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