DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, is an agency of the U.S department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military. In the past 50 years, DARPA has been responsible for funding the development of many new technologies in use today.
It’s been in business since 1958. The agency was one-half of Eisenhower’s response to the Sputnik challenge. NASA was the other half. Both agencies were given the same urgent brief: Regain our technological lead and keep it.
DARPA is one of the most important technology research and development organizations on the planet
Here are some of their technologies, we commonly use today.
GPS: We would be quite literally lost without today’s global positioning system (GPS). But long before the current NAVSTAR GPS satellites were launched, came a constellation of just five DARPA satellites called Transit. First operational in 1960, they gave US Navy ships hourly location fixes as accurate as 200 meters.
SIRI : The Siri voice-recognition system embedded in the latest iPhone was born out of DARPA research. Apple acquired Siri, the company and the technology it had developed, in 2010. Siri was founded in 2007, but the original research upon which the technology was built – Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) – was funded by DARPA in order to develop better tools for soldiers in the field.
The Internet: The most famous accomplishment of DARPA is the internet. Begun as a project on packet switched networks resulting in the ARPANET — a highly-controlled, private network of research institutions — but quickly expanded in the 1980s into what we recognize today as the internet.
Futur Projects : Instant Nutrition
To enable tomorrow’s soldier to achieve “metabolic dominance” over his body, DARPA is working on a transdermal patch that releases instant nutrition through the skin. “We’re researching the kinetics of moving substances through membranes,” says Stephen Moody, head of the advanced processes and packaging team in Natick, Massachusetts. DARPA is also searching for a more direct way to turbocharge the body, eliminating the need for food altogether. This new branch of science, called “cellular energetics,” seeks ways to zap energy-producing mitochondria straight into a person’s cell structure.
