
Where was world's first missile made 70 years ago? The country is..., over 20000 missiles were fired at...
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World's first missile: The world's first missile was developed by two German scientists, Walter Dornberger and Werner von Braun. During World War II, the German dictator Hitler ordered both of them to create a weapon for the Nazi army that could strike from a distance, utilizing combat aircraft or other launchers. These were the V-1 and V-2 rockets. In 1944, they were used in a barrage of attacks on London. In fact, as early as 1935, German engineer Braun started working on a classified missile programme. Walter Dornberger was the head of artillery for the German army. Dornberger played a crucial role in both World War I and World War II. He was in charge of Germany's V-2 rocket missile and the Peenemünde Army Research Center project. Following Hitler's directives, the German village of Peenemünde was converted into a missile manufacturing factory before World War II. Hitler's Terrible Blunder
According to a BBC report, these German engineers assured Hitler that success in rocket testing would easily allow them to win World War II. German scientist Albert Speer was also with them, but Hitler did not agree. The Second World War began in 1939, while the missile program started in 1935. However, Hitler approved the programme to create missiles from rockets in 1943. By then, the German army had already suffered defeats on many fronts in the war. If Hitler had granted approval in the early stages, the story might have been different. Hitler's Secret Missile Factory
The village of Peenemünde in Germany was turned into a secret missile factory. Peenemünde was located on the banks of the Peene River in an island of Germany, where this river flows into the Baltic Sea. This large tourist spot was where engineers conducted the rocket missile program from 1936 to 1945, as the area within a 400-kilometer radius was extremely desolate.
About 12,000 Jewish workers were assembled for the missile factory and testing. The world's first cruise missile factory was spread over 25 kilometers. There is a museum in Peenemünde where pieces of rockets, engines, and other equipment are preserved. Germany's Successful Missile Test
Germany's rocket Aggregate 4 (A-4) was successfully tested in 1942. This was the world's first long-range rocket. It was named the Vengeance Weapon or revenge weapon. The British intelligence agency learned about this rocket factory in 1943. The British Royal Air Force conducted the largest air raid here on August 17, 1943. The factory was relocated to the town of Mittelwerk. After the war, the Allied powers led by the United States, Russia, and Britain tried to acquire the A-4/V-2 missile technology.
The first operational cruise missile V-1 was the world's first operational cruise missile. Due to its loud motor, it was called a buzz bomb or doodlebug. Between 1943 and 1945, more than 20,000 missile attacks were carried out on Britain and its allied countries using this rocket. Most of these were conducted on London and the Belgian city of Antwerp between June 1944 and March 1945. It had about one ton of explosive and a range of up to 240 kilometers, but it failed to hit its targets. The first attack was carried out from Germany on Britain on June 13, 1944, during Normandy. The British forces were taken by surprise by this new weapon and it was dubbed the flying bomb.
In 1944, Dornberger he was made the chief artillery commander in the German army. But as soon as World War II ended, he was captured again. He was accused of torturing slave labourers for preparing the world's first missile, the V-2 rocket.
Von Braun was, in true terms, was the missile man of Germany. He developed ballistic missiles for the U.S. Army, making it a superpower. With the help of such powerful rockets, America launched its first satellite. After World War II, German scientists received invitations from allied countries such as America, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France. Von Braun preferred to stay in America. He was part of America's classified space mission Apollo, which enabled American astronauts to reach the moon. With Von Braun's rocket technology, America developed intercontinental missiles capable of striking from one continent to another.
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Time of India
3 hours ago
- Time of India
Can AI quicken the pace of math discovery?
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Near a bank of chairs, a glass display shows a prosthetic arm that can be controlled by the wearer's brain signals. "By improving mathematics, we're also understanding how AI works better," said Alondra Nelson, who served as a top science adviser in President Joe Biden's administration and is a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. "So I think it's kind of a virtuous cycle of understanding." She suggested that, down the road, math-adept AI could enhance cryptography and aid in space exploration. Live Events Started after World War II to compete with the Soviet Union in the space race, DARPA is most famous for fostering the research that led to the creation of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet we use today. At the agency's small gift store, which is not accessible to the public, one can buy replicas of a cocktail napkin on which someone sketched out the rudimentary state of computer networks in 1969. DARPA later funded the research that gave rise to drones and Apple's digital assistant, Siri. But it is also responsible for the development of Agent Orange, the potent defoliant used to devastating effect during the Vietnam War. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories "I'm sure this isn't 100% innocent," Andrew Granville, a mathematician at the University of Montreal, said of DARPA's math initiative, although he emphasized that he was only speculating about eventual outcomes. DARPA is, after all, part of the Pentagon , even if it has traditionally operated with enviable independence. The U.S. military is rapidly incorporating AI into its operations, with the aim of not losing out to China and its People's Liberation Army or to Russia, which has been testing out new technologies on the battlefield in Ukraine. At the same time, Granville praised the endeavour, which comes as the Trump administration is cutting funding for scientific research. "We are in disastrous times for U.S. science," Granville said. "I'm very pleased that DARPA is able to funnel money to academia." A surfer and skateboarder in his free time, Shafto, 49, sat in a sparse conference room one recent afternoon, imagining a future when AI would be as good at solving multistep problems as it is at trying to glean meaning from huge troves of texts, which it does through the use of probability theory. Despite the unseasonably raw weather, Shafto seemed dressed for the beach in a blue-and-white Hawaiian-style shirt, white flannel trousers and sandals, with a trilby hat on the table before him. His vibe was, on the whole, decidedly closer to that of Santa Cruz than of Capitol Hill, largely in keeping with DARPA's traditional disregard for the capital's slow, bureaucratic pace. (The agency sets priorities and funds outside scientists but does not do research on its own; academics like Shafto spend an average of four years as program managers.) "There are great mathematicians who work on age-old problems," Shafto said. "That's not the kind of thing that I'm particularly interested in." Instead, he wanted the discipline to move more quickly by using AI to save time. "Problems in mathematics take decades or centuries, sometimes, to solve," he said in a recent presentation at DARPA's headquarters on the Exponentiating Mathematics project, which is accepting applications through mid-July. He then shared a slide showing that, in terms of the number of papers published, math had stagnated during the last century while life and technical sciences had exploded. In case the point wasn't clear, the slide's heading drove it home: "Math is sloooowwww." The kind of pure math Shafto wants to accelerate tends to be "sloooowwww" because it is not seeking numerical solutions to concrete problems, the way applied mathematics does. Instead, pure math is the heady domain of visionary theoreticians who make audacious observations about how the world works, which are promptly scrutinized (and sometimes torn apart) by their peers. "Proof is king," Granville said. Math proofs consist of multiple building blocks called lemmas, minor theorems employed to prove bigger ones. Whether each Jenga tower of lemmas can maintain integrity in the face of intense scrutiny is precisely what makes pure math such a "long and laborious process," acknowledged Bryna R. Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern University. "All of math builds on previous math, so you can't really prove new things if you don't understand how to prove the old things," she said. "To be a research mathematician, the current practice is that you go through every step, you prove every single detail." Lean, a software-based proof assistant, can speed up the process, but Granville said it was "annoying, because it has its own protocols and language," requiring programming expertise. "We need to have a much better way of communication," he added. Could artificial intelligence save the day? That's the hope, according to Shafto. An AI model that could reliably check proofs would save enormous amounts of time, freeing mathematicians to be more creative. "The constancy of math coincides with the fact that we practice math more or less the same: still people standing at a chalkboard," Shafto said. "It's hard not to draw the correlation and say, 'Well, you know, maybe if we had better tools, that would change progress.'" AI would benefit, too, Shafto and others believe. Large language models like ChatGPT can scour the digitized storehouses of human knowledge to produce a half-convincing college essay on the Russian Revolution. But thinking through the many intricate steps of a mathematical problem remains elusive. "I think we'll learn a lot about what the capabilities of various AI protocols are from how well we can get them to generate material that's of interest," said Jordan S. Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is part of a team applying for an Exponentiating Mathematics grant. "We have no intuition yet about which problems are going to be hard and which problems are easy. We need to learn that." One of the more disconcerting truths about artificial intelligence is that we do not entirely understand how it works. "This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology," Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, wrote in a recent essay. 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New Indian Express
6 hours ago
- New Indian Express
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Time of India
14 hours ago
- Time of India
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