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