Arctic Ice Loss Threatens National Security: A Path Forward.

Global warming is causing a dramatic reduction in Arctic sea and land ice and thawing permafrost. Because of the Arctic's role in influencing climate, loss of Arctic ice is affecting weather patterns globally and in the Northern Hemisphere in particular. Events such as droughts and coastal flooding, exacerbated by global warming, result in food and water shortages and mass human migrations that can destabilize governments and threaten U.S. national security interests. The loss of sea ice is also changing the geo-political situation in the Arctic. An emerging class of technologies associated with the restoration of Arctic ice can slow global warming and mitigate the threats posed to our national security and foreign policy by the changing geo-political situation in the region and globally. This article posits that an emerging class of technologies associated with the restoration of Arctic ice can slow global warming and mitigate the threats posed to our national security and foreign policy by the changing geo-political situation in the region and globally. It recommends that the United States fund efforts to study Arctic ice restoration technologies and take the lead in developing and coordinating an international response to mitigate Arctic sea ice loss and the impending global warming crisis.

Bioinspired engineering of exploration systems for NASA and DoD.

A new approach called bioinspired engineering of exploration systems (BEES) and its value for solving pressing NASA and DoD needs are described. Insects (for example honeybees and dragonflies) cope remarkably well with their world, despite possessing a brain containing less than 0.01% as many neurons as the human brain. Although most insects have immobile eyes with fixed focus optics and lack stereo vision, they use a number of ingenious, computationally simple strategies for perceiving their world in three dimensions and navigating successfully within it. We are distilling selected insect-inspired strategies to obtain novel solutions for navigation, hazard avoidance, altitude hold, stable flight, terrain following, and gentle deployment of payload. Such functionality provides potential solutions for future autonomous robotic space and planetary explorers. A BEES approach to developing lightweight low-power autonomous flight systems should be useful for flight control of such biomorphic flyers for both NASA and DoD needs. Recent biological studies of mammalian retinas confirm that representations of multiple features of the visual world are systematically parsed and processed in parallel. Features are mapped to a stack of cellular strata within the retina. Each of these representations can be efficiently modeled in semiconductor cellular nonlinear network (CNN) chips. We describe recent breakthroughs in exploring the feasibility of the unique blending of insect strategies of navigation with mammalian visual search, pattern recognition, and image understanding into hybrid biomorphic flyers for future planetary and terrestrial applications. We describe a few future mission scenarios for Mars exploration, uniquely enabled by these newly developed biomorphic flyers.