Create your own private Idaho

You can now create your own bespoke Brigadoon gathering to engage your unique audience, reward your employees, thank your clients, or dig deeper into an issue, a city, or an industry.

Brigadoon is available to produce a private and highly-curated aperitivo social, salon dinner, workshop, local business expedition, and cultural excursion as well as a sport adventure and multi-day experience that leaves your participants smarter and more energized.

The Brigadoon bespoke service can craft the right solution, program, or custom format to advance your business objectives.

All Brigadoon gatherings ensure maximum conversations, deeper connections, and operate under Brigadoon House Rules - no powerpoints, no attribution, no lanyards, and no apps - ever.

Plus, the Brigadoon bespoke service handles the time-intensive process of securing venues and meetings, organizes the necessary logistics, crafts the menus, and ensures the proper communication and marketing materials have been developed.

One step closer to a batsuit for soldiers

Defense One reports, with Defense Department money, researchers from Florida Atlantic University are using advanced polymers and carbon nanotubes to engineer a new type of body fabric that could prove 300 times as strong as today’s state of the art, but just as light.

Hassan Mahfuz, the lead investigator on the project at FAU, says, “The whole idea is to absorb the energy and be able to dissipate very quickly so it doesn’t concentrate” and pierce the fabric and the person inside of it.

Full post - here.

War, with robots: An inside look at how Marines and robots will fight side by side

Illustration by Jacqueline Belker/Staff

Todd Smith in The Marine Corps Times writes:

Somewhere off the coast of a tiny island in the South China Sea small robotic submarines snoop around, looking for underwater obstacles as remotely-controlled ships prowl the surf.

Overhead multiple long-range drones scan the beachhead and Chinese military fortifications deeper into the hills.

A small team of Marines, specially trained and equipped, linger ­farther out after having launched from their amphibious warship, as did their robot battle buddies to scout this spit of sand.

Their Marine grandfathers and great-grandfathers might have rolled toward this island slowly, dodging sea mines and artillery fire only to belly crawl in the surf as they were raked with machine gun fire, dying by the thousands.

But in the near-term battle, suicidal charges to gain ground in a fast-moving battlefield is a robot’s job.

This imagined scenario involves a host of platforms, teamed with in-the-flesh Marines, moving rapidly across wide swaths of the Pacific. Those small teams of maybe a platoon or even a squad could work alongside robots in the air, on land, sea and undersea, to gain a short-term foothold that then could control a vital sea lane Chinese ships would have to bypass or risk sinking simply to transit.

Full post - here.

Dumb or smart? The future of military robots

As armies look to advance their use of robots, they are faced with the choice of either developing ‘dumb’ software able to follow human instructions or ‘smart’ technology that can carry out tasks autonomously. Both systems raise questions, as Ross Davies reports.

Full post - here.