China Unveils Strange Device to Find Invisible Objects

China is outpacing the world in robotics production, building safer alternatives to uranium reactors, and flooding the globe with high-tech electric vehicles — to name just a few of the rising superpower's achievements.

But the country is also innovating on the military front — a domain usually thought to be dominated by the United States.

Researchers at the 38th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation recently announced the successful development of a handheld device they say can detect cloaked stealth fighters.

The new bit of kit blends civilian telecoms tech with military-grade radar sensitivities according to the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based newspaper. The researchers claim that it can detect stealth signals at a rate of "100 percent."

Here's how it works: US stealth vehicles use a system called low-probability-of-intercept radar (LPIR) to operate virtually undetected. LPIR makes military hardware nearly untraceable by employing several methods, including spamming a bevvy of super-weak radio signals across a wide range of frequencies, modulating rapidly.

This device, the researchers claim, can crack these quickly-changing signals with "ultra sensitivity, extremely fast speed," and across a wide range of frequencies from "5kHz to 44 GHz," per the SCMP. Even through electronic jamming — when a detection device is bombarded with noisy, high-power signals — the tablet can locate LPIR devices with an error margin of 0.4 to 0.5 inches, according to the researchers.

If it's as effective in real life as it was in testing, it could signal a pivotal point in the US-China arms race. The US uses LPIR on a huge range of equipment, from stealth bombers and unmanned drones to nuclear submarines.

As essentially a repurposed tablet you could buy from a wholesaler, the gadget is blisteringly cheap compared to highly specialized military hardware.

The handheld device used to build the stealth-detector rings in at less than $68,600 online, meaning the Chinese military could very easily roll these out to its troops en masse, potentially lowering the threat of a first strike. Meanwhile, the hardware it's meant to detect — like the B-2 stealth bomber — can cost as much as $2 billion to produce.

However, that's presupposing that it actually works and lives up to the researchers' claims. There's also the chance that the US military, or one of its many tech contractors, could find a new solution to avoid being detected.

Though the device seemingly has no offensive application, it could be a major defensive tool as the US military under Trump maintains a large presence around China.

More on military tech: Pentagon Signs Deal to "Deploy AI Agents for Military Use"

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