Mine Sweeper
We have all played this Microsoft game, Mine Sweeper, at one point or another in our lives, guessing which block might be booby-trapped, flagging it and the adrenaline of clicking on the right one in order not to lose the game. Mine sweeping is a technology encompassing signal processing and pattern recognition techniques to detect the unexploded ordinance.
During the current war in the Middle East, the news of a vehicle finding an Improvised Explosive Device (I.E.D.) or mine, and the injuries that result.
This technology is also used as a humanitarian act, helping to find unexploded ordinance in other countries and safely retrieve it before an unsuspecting civilian falls victim.
The Next Cold War
The next war that seems to be impending is not that will be fought in the battlegrounds of some distant country which we will only recall when we flip over to a news channel, but that of our own computers. It seems that we have in fact been in the fringes of a cyber war. As frightening as this sounds, we cannot dismiss the great technological advances will come from our need to conceal our most prized possession, our privacy within the electronic realm. Cryptography and codes used to encrypt have long since been around, and the defense invests quite heavily on it. The shy attempt of the Chinese government to break U.S. security through cyberspace is alarming, but to be expected. Our next big war will be through the “inner tubes of the interwebs”, and how we respond to such a threat will be witnessed soon enough. The first shot has been taken.
The Age of Weapons of Mass Destruction
The exact origins of Chemical Warfare (CW) are unknown, but it is believed that their use is prehistoric with smoke from fire being used as an irritant. The first documented case of chemical warfare came from India, when archers used snake venom at the tips of the arrows for delivering much deadlier blows to the enemy. As time went on, the use of chemical warfare became more of the battlefield.
Chemometrics is the process by which data of what chemicals are present within a sample of air is extracted and analyzed. There are many methods to detect the presence of deadly or poisonous levels of substances using optical concepts. The LIBS, IR and UV spectroscopy are a few of the methods used for extracting the data. Spectroscopy allows for the detection of the substance through analysis of what peaks show up in the data, correlating light absorption and chemical properties.
