The mission statement at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is pretty much this: Look beyond the cutting edge, throw money at whatever's out there (and we do mean "out there"), and see what happens. Case in point: DARPA's budget request for the government's fiscal year 2009, in which the agency is asking for $3.29 billion to investigate, among other things, laser-guided bullets, robotic vehicles for land, sea, and air, and a project called Synapse, for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics--chips that mimic gray matter.
For more, see this post on Wired's Danger Room blog: "DARPA 2009: Brains-on-a-Chip, Transparent Displays"
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Discuss: DARPA's wacky spending plans
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