O Phantom Twist é um drone concebido para se tornar quase invisível durante o voo. Ainda existem limitações, mas a equipa que o criou acredita que, no futuro, a tecnologia poderá ser utilizada em áreas como monitorização de vida selvagem, observação ambiental e inspeção de infraestruturas.
Ukrainian manufacturer F-Drones has delivered its first batch of F10 FPV drones to the U.S. military under the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program. The initial shipment consists of 2,000 unmanned aerial vehicles, making the F10 the first Ukrainian drone authorized for export to the United States as part of the initiative. According to Militarnyi, the first […]
How do we combat the scourge of school shootings? The distinctly cyberpunk gamble that some places of learning are taking: rapid response drones.
Multiple schools across three states will soon have their own veritable platoons of pepper-spraying drones to hunt down active shooters, The Washington Post reports, waiting to spring into action the moment they’re called on.
Traveling at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and capable of smashing through the windows, the so-called “Campus Guardian Angels” can reach a gunman within just fifteen seconds, the manufacturer Mithril Defense claims.
In addition to blasting a shooter with pepper spray, they can also distract them with loud sirens and flashing lights, and even ram into them at high speeds.
“Once I get the drones on you, you just can’t escape them,” Bill King, a Mithril cofounder and retired Navy SEAL, told WaPo.
It remains a fringe solution, but seems to be picking up steam. The state of Florida last year allocated more than $557,000 to a pilot program to deploy the drones at three different high schools. Georgia recently approved its own $500,000 pilot to test Mithril’s system at five public schools. And in Colorado, a new K-12 public charter school decided it would pay to use the drones on its own.
The drones aren’t autonomous and are instead remotely controlled by human operators at Mithril’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. Somewhere between 30 and 90 of the drones will be placed throughout a school in storage boxes, which helps them arrive quickly at the scene.
But the efficacy of the drone defense systems remains a big question mark — and hopefully we’ll never have to know — as is whether these solutions distract from addressing the systemic causes of mass shootings, like weak gun control and poor mental health support services.
Mithril has promised that its tech could help local law enforcement who respond to a shooting by locating the shooter and relaying critical information, but that would require a high degree of coordination in a hectic and dangerous environment. What if the drone operators target the wrong person, or cause law enforcement to mistake an innocent person for the shooter because the drones happen to be near them? Are these drone operators ready to make split-second decisions in a life or death situation for the people on the ground?
“It’s almost like where gaming and school safety collide,” Curtis Lavarello, CEO of the School Safety Advocacy Council, told WaPo. “I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools.”
It’s not the only tech-inflected solution being adopted to combat mass shootings. There are already numerous startups offering AI-powered gun detection systems, but their performance has been dubious. One called Omnilert called the cops on an innocent 16-year-old after it mistook his bag of Dorito chips for a weapon, and is being sued by a survivor of a Tennessee high school shooting after it failed to detect the handgun used by the shooter.
Ukraine could deploy combat laser systems against aerial targets within the next 2–3 months, according to Brigadier General Andrii Lebedenko, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The development of these systems is being carried out by specialists within the Armed Forces in cooperation with private Ukrainian defense companies. The experimental system, named “Tryzub” (“Trident”), […]
Ukrainian forces have tracked down and destroyed a rare and high-value Russian Forpost-R reconnaissance and strike UAV capable of carrying guided munitions. The drone, which can deploy KAB-20 laser-guided aerial bombs, was detected and shot down on July 27, 2026, by operators of the 7th “Topota” Battalion of the 414th Separate Brigade “Madyar’s Birds” while […]
A glimpse of the future of battlefield logistics has gone viral. A video circulating widely on social media in recent days – even drawing the attention of military analyst Rob Lee (@RALee85 on X) – shows soldiers from Ukraine’s 3rd Separate Special Purpose Regiment “Prince Sviatoslav the Brave” receiving a food delivery from KFC in a Glovo-branded paper bag. […]
This week, U.S. forces in the Middle East intercepted and destroyed an Iranian Shahed-series drone using an interceptor drone that had previously been combat-tested in Ukraine, according to a U.S. official cited by Business Insider. The engagement marked the first operational use by the U.S. military of the American-developed Merops system to destroy a hostile […]
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