10 Cutting-Edge Government Programs’ Strange Projects

The U.S., the UK, Europe, and Russia have established groundbreaking government programs. Their strange projects use cutting-edge technology to develop a variety of astounding materials, instruments, devices, resources, and agricultural advances.

One program was even created expressly for the purpose of publishing a magazine. Another program has undertaken projects not only to militarize AI and improve its offensive and defensive weapons systems but also to allow humans to breathe underwater.

Whether these projects succeed or fail, they’re certainly innovative, cutting-edge, and strange.

Related: 10 World-Changing Examples of Turning Dumb Technology into Smart Technology

10 Engineering Living Materials

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has set itself a new objective: combining traditional building materials with such live materials as bone, skin, bark, and coral. This cutting-edge approach would allow such construction materials to be grown where needed, thus reducing transportation costs. Living building materials could also repair themselves, “respond to” environmental changes, and reduce or eliminate cutting and sizing by having already been grown to the dimensions needed for various building projects.

DARPA’s Engineered Living Materials project has a more distant goal as well: engineering “structural properties directly into the [materials’] genomes,” thereby eliminating the current need to use “scaffolds [or] external development cues” to construct buildings’ desired shapes, qualities, and characteristics.^[1]

9 Resilient Tunnel Plug Project

Natural catastrophes endanger infrastructure—the facilities, structures, and services—that communities need to function. However, the U.S. Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Resilient Tunnel Project’s Resilient Tunnel Plug (RTP) is capable of sealing subway tunnels, thereby preventing water from a flooded subway system from entering stations and other subway lines. Thus, flooding is limited without interfering with the subway’s normal train traffic.

When the RTP demonstrated its ability to hold back water for a full 21 days, David Cadogan, Director of Engineering and Development at ILC Dover, an engineering development and manufacturing company, knew they had a winner, he said.^[2]

8 ARTS

The ARTS program of the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has nothing to do with painting, sculpture, or any other such cultural medium. It’s an acronym for Anonymous Real-Time Speech. This program’s technologies alter a speaker’s speech as it is spoken in real time, making it impossible to put words in the mouth of the actual speaker.

Otherwise, the speaker’s words, spoken on an earlier occasion, could be recorded and later exploited in various ways. After the program’s initial focus on English, Spanish, and other widely used languages will be included. The program’s primary “goal is to protect against speaker identification tools, human listeners, and machine learning assessments.”^[3]

7 Electrofuels

The U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) also has several groundbreaking programs and initiatives in the works, one of which is its Electrofuels program. This is when microorganisms are used to create liquid transportation fuels that could be up to 10 times more energy efficient than current biofuels production methods.”

As the ARPA-E website explains, “Most biofuels are produced from plant material… created through photosynthesis, an inefficient process [where] solar energy [is converted] into chemical energy [stored] in plants.” The production of biofuels from such energy is further hampered by the need for significant processing.

Biofuels completely circumvent photosynthesis by using self-reliant microorganisms that don’t require solar energy for biofuel production. They can directly use energy from electricity and chemical compounds such as hydrogen to produce liquid fuels from carbon dioxide.^[4]

6 Autonomous Robotic Surgery

It seems that, in certain situations, the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) wants to replace your surgeon with an autonomous robot surgeon. The Agency’s website laments the fact that, although the robotic systems now in place are used as advanced surgical tools, they do not perform surgical procedures with autonomy.

In 2024, though, ARPA-H requested information from respondents concerning how robots could perform surgery in remote emergency settings where surgeons are not available, in situations in which human surgeons could not perform operations due to perceptual or access limitations, to “elevate the performance of new or nonspecialist surgeons,” and to perform routine surgical tasks.^[5]

5 Microvane Technology

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has begun using microvane drag technology on its C-17 Globemaster III military transport aircraft. The Laboratory’s website explains that microvanes are small 3D-printed devices resembling a thin blade.

The technology employs a “strong adhesive bonding [with which] a dozen of these [low-cost] devices are attached to the rear of the C-17’s exterior,” thereby enabling them to reduce drag by 1%. This improves the aircraft’s operational capabilities while conserving fuel and extending mission range. These capabilities enable the Air Force to deploy and sustain the Joint Force more effectively in geographically dispersed and resource-constrained theaters.^[6]

4 Harnessing Oceans’ Microbiomes

The mission of the Joint European Disruptive Initiative (JEDI) is to place Europe at the forefront of “emerging and disruptive technologies.” To this end, the Initiative is ever ready to focus on the next big thing in its continuous production of cutting-edge technology. To do so, JEDI works with over 6,000 technology and scientific leaders from academia, industry, and tech startups in 29 countries across Europe and the rest of the world.

By launching its “Democracy 2.0 JEDI Grandchallenge,” the Initiative hopes to thwart technological attacks by unfriendly countries that conduct mass surveillance, spread hate conspiracy theories, and threaten privacy in a concerted attempt to undermine democracy.

The Grandchallenge consists of six related challenges for which the Initiative seeks proposals: Fighting e-censorship, detecting deepfakes in real time, ensuring that social networks do not become echo chambers, developing face-recognition without mass-surveillance potential, fighting cognitive manipulation, and devising explainable artificial intelligence.^[7]

3 Programmable Seeds

The UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency identifies itself as a UK research and development funding agency built to unlock scientific breakthroughs beneficial to all. One funding opportunity, the development of programmable seeds capable of removing additional carbon dioxide, would improve food security and the delivery of medicines to those in need.

The £62.4-million project seeks to develop synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts by which to “imbue plants with new functionalities” and to introduce “a new generation of major crops that are more productive, resilient, and sustainable.”^[8]

2 Encounter Magazine

An unlikely joint project by the UK Information Research Department (IRD) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Encounter magazine initially received mixed reviews from its readers. American novelist, critic, and political activist Mary McCarthy (herself a contributor) found the periodical as “vapid [as] a [long-dead] college magazine [produced by] putrefying undergraduates.” British historian A.J.P. Taylor denounced its contents as bland and apolitical.

Despite their views, though, the magazine was popular, and its quality improved as it attracted such contributors as Nancy Mitford, Vladimir Nabokov, Edith Wharton, W. H. Auden, Bertrand Russell, and other acclaimed writers.

Even in its not-so-good early days, Encounter was perceived as a possible Cold War weapon by writer and critic Anthony Hartley, a perception that, as the New Statesman points out, proved “prophetic.”

The magazine debuted in 1953 with two editors, English poet Stephen Spender and U.S. journalist and author Irving Kristol, at the helm. It was “full of life and ideas,” American poet John Berryman said, calling it “the most consistently interesting magazine [then] being published.” Works by Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Schlesinger, and Mary McCarthy appeared between its covers.

It turns out that this highly literate and literary magazine was the response of its publishers, the UK and the U.S., to the success of Soviet propaganda among artists and leftists. As the National Post observed, although “several CIA administrators explained why this program was necessary, no word, [was offered as to ] why the promotion of freedom had to be secret––or why the CIA was involved.” Like other operations involving the IRD and the CIA, this one remained clandestine.^[9]

1 AI Militarization and Other Projects

Not to be outdone by the U.S. or the UK, the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects (RFARP) has a few strange cutting-edge projects up its sleeve as well. In 2022, Rajesh Uppal, writing for the International Defense, Security & Technology website, announced an arms race in emerging technologies waged by Russia and China against the rest of the world.

RFARP, characterized by Uppal as the Russians’ counterpart to the U.S.’s DARPA, is focused on such “high payoff technologies [as] hypersonic vehicles, AI, unmanned underwater vehicles, cognitive technologies, and directed energy weapons” as well as “rail guns.”

Rather than copying Western models, as Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said China tends to do, his country prefers to develop its own technologies, among which are what Uppal calls the militarization of AI and the intelligence analysis of drone photographs to detect arms caches and terrorist shelters. Another technology is associated with “the automatic detection of aviation, naval equipment, [and] land armament on images obtained from space.”

Sergei Garbuk heads RFARP’s information research department and added that other projects are still underway. Uppal cites even more of them, including combat robots, combat robot-androids, underwater robots, a “quadcopter controlled by human thought,” airships employing “photonics-based radar” to enhance missile defense, and “liquid respiration technology,” which would allow humans to breathe underwater.^[10]