Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., said after the House Intelligence Committee's classified briefing on New Jersey drones, she's not concerned about any threat and it's irresponsible to scare the public. Drones spotted flying over Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in Southern California over the past week posed no threat to operations at the installation, according to reports. James C. Sartain told The Warzone that between Dec. 9 and 15, "there were six instances of unmanned aerial systems (UAS)" seen entering the airspace over Camp Pendleton. Sartain also said the UAS did not pose any threat to installation operations. The publication also learned from base personnel that countermeasures to take out the drones were not necessary as air and ground operations were not impacted.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks addressed the plan and how the U.S. will continue to counter the rising aggression from China. The Pentagon has started to assess the possibility of developing an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered fleet of drones and autonomous systems that officials argue will allow the U.S. to compete with and counter threats from China. We are not seeking to be at war, but we have to be able to get this department to move with that same kind of urgency because the PRC isn't waiting," Kathleen Hicks, the deputy secretary of defense, said during an interview earlier this week with The Wall Street Journal. Hicks spoke about the potential uses of such an AI fleet during a speech on Wednesday, revealing the department would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the project, aiming to produce thousands of systems for use over land, air and sea ready for first deployment within two years. China has focused heavily on AI research and development, producing ...

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said it is essential for the United States to protect its intellectual property and loosen its reliance on China's supply chain to win the race for quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductor chip supremacy. You know, we had the Russians and we won that race. We have to win this one," McCaul told Fox News Digital at the Milken Global Conference. McCaul, the House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair, said that whoever gets to quantum first is going to rule the world. Additionally, China has been very clear that their 100-year goal is to enact complete "military and economic domination of the world," a mission that McCaul asserted the U.S. cannot allow to happen. U.S. investors have pushed billions into China's AI sector, a February report from CSET showed. China is currently investing heavily in quantum computing, AI and advanced weapons systems. As such, McCaul stressed the importance of U.S. corporations working to protect their intellectual property. "We have to stop exporting our technology to China that they can put in things like the hypersonic missile, for instance, or the spy ballon, for that matter, had American parts in it, component parts," McCaul said. Despite the national security concerns, McCaul noted that the U.S. can work with China's extensive market as long the country understands the critical supply chains intertwining the two nations. One of these critical supply chains involves semiconductors. McCaul first introduced the CHIPS for America Act in 2020, and it was signed into law in August 2022. The Act provides $280 billion in new funding to bolster domestic manufacturing and research for semiconductors domestically. McCaul said the Act is part of a broader effort to pull semiconductor reliance out of Taiwan and South Korea. In fact, TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor foundry, is located on the island of Taiwan. "You know, I introduced the CHIPS bill to try to move some of that out of country.

New research opens the horizons regarding what a "computer" can be and how small a computational unit can get Considering a "computer" as anything that processes information by taking an input and producing an output leads to the obvious questions, what kind of objects could perform computations? And how small can a computer be? As transistors approach the limit of miniaturization, these questions are more than mere curiosities, their answers could form the basis of a new computing paradigm. In a new paper in EPJ Plus by Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, researcher Gerard McCaul, and his co-authors demonstrate that even one of the more basic constituents of matter -- atoms -- can act as a reservoir for computing where all input-output processing is optical. "We had the idea that the capacity for computation is a universal property that all physical systems share, but within that paradigm, there is a great profusion of frameworks for how one would go about actually trying to perform computations," McCaul says.

U.S. officials have told airlines to "be prepared" for an expanded ban on carry-on electronic devices allowed on airplanes. Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan confirmed to reporters Tuesday that the administration is considering expanding the ban on laptops, which currently applies to U.S.-bound flights from eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa. An expanded ban on devices larger than cellphones could potentially include "more than a couple" other regions, including flights from Western Europe. Lapan reminded reporters that DHS Secretary John Kelly has alluded to the ban "likely" being expanded. DHS officials, however, are still deciding where and how the new restrictions will be implemented.