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A liquid armour has been shown to stop bullets in tests carried out by UK scientists at BAE systems in Bristol.

The researchers have combined this “shear-thickening” liquid with Kevlar to create a new bullet-proof material.

The company is keeping the chemical formula of the liquid a secret, but it works by absorbing the force of the bullet strike and responding to it by becoming much thicker and more sticky.

The BAE scientists describe it as “bullet-proof custard”.

“It’s very similar to custard in the sense that the molecules lock together when it’s struck,” explained Stewart Penny, business development manager in charge of materials development at the company.

. . . . .

In the tests, scientists used a large gas gun to fire ball bearing-shaped metal bullets at over 300 metres per second into two test materials – 31 layers of untreated kevlar (pictured left) and 10 layers of kevlar (pictured right) combined with the shear-thickening liquid.

“The Kevlar with the liquid works much faster and the impact isn’t anything like as deep,” he explained.

Liquid armour ‘can stop bullets’ [BBC News]

AquaLux 3D, a new projection technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, can target light onto and between individual water droplets, enabling text, video and other moving or still images to be displayed on multiple layers of falling water.

In contrast to existing technologies for projecting images onto water surfaces, AquaLux 3D makes it possible to create three-dimensional images in water by using multiple layers of precisely controlled water droplets, said Srinivasa Narasimhan, associate professor of robotics. By combining the droplets with clouds of mist, it would be possible to create unique 3-D effects for theme parks, exhibitions and interactive games that don’t require special eyeglasses to view, he added.

“The beauty of water drops is that they refract most incident light, so they serve as excellent wide-angle lenses that can be among the brightest elements of an environment,” said Narasimhan, who developed the display with Takeo Kanade, professor of computer science and robotics, and Peter Barnum, a Ph.D. student in robotics. “By carefully generating several layers of drops so that no two drops occupy the same line-of-sight from the projector, we can use each drop as a voxel that can be illuminated to create a 3-D image.”

Check out the video below, be sure to watch the 3D tetris game that starts at 4:07.

Multi-Layered Images Projected Onto Water Droplets With New Technology [ScienceDaily]

It is one of the most exquisite views we have ever had of the Earth.

This colourful new map traces the subtle but all pervasive influence the pull of gravity has across the globe.

Known as a geoid, it essentially defines where the level surface is on our planet; it tells us which way is “up” and which way is “down”.

It is drawn from delicate measurements made by Europe’s Goce satellite, which flies so low it comes perilously close to falling out of the sky.

Scientists say the data gathered by the spacecraft will have numerous applications.

. . . . .

Launched in 2009, the sleek satellite flies pole to pole at an altitude of just 254.9km – the lowest orbit of any research satellite in operation today.

The spacecraft carries three pairs of precision-built platinum blocks inside its gradiometer instrument that sense accelerations which are as small as 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000 of the gravity experienced on Earth.

The ‘standard’ acceleration due to gravity at the Earth’s surface is 9.8m per second squared.

In reality the figure varies from 9.78 (minimum) at the equator to 9.83 (maximum) at the poles.

This has allowed it to map the almost imperceptible differences in the pull exerted by the mass of the planet from one place to the next – from the great mountain ranges to the deepest ocean trenches.

Two months of observations have now been fashioned into what scientists call the geoid.

Goce satellite views Earth’s gravity in high definition [BBC News]

Manta’s revolution in saddle design changes the whole feel of being seated on a bicycle – after riding on a Manta your backside does not feel like you have been on a bike.

Cycling on traditional saddles is the only exercise activity which actually lowers bloodflow to important parts of the body; with a Manta you will enjoy positive effects of better ventilation and an increase in bloodflow.

Manta Saddle – Revolutionary Bicycle Saddle Comfort

The next time you reach for a piece of paper and a pen – Don’t! Grab a Boogie Board instead, the tree-friendly alternative to memo pads, sketchbooks, sticky notes, dry erase boards and other writing/drawing mediums that can be re-used over 50,000 times!

The Boogie Board tablet’s pressure-sensitive LCD writing surface creates lines of different thickness based on how hard you push – just like paper and pen!

Erase your image with the touch of a button – and a friendly flash from the liquid crystal display.

Boogie Board Paperless LCD Writing Tablet

Version 1.0 of the STIX Fonts was released May 24, 2010.  The initial set of 23 OpenType fonts is now available for download.

Version 1.1, which will include fonts packaged for use with Microsoft Office applications, is scheduled for release by the end of 2010. Version 1.2, which will include Type 1 fonts for use with LaTeX, will follow in 2011.

The mission of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats. Toward this purpose, the STIX fonts will be made available, under royalty-free license, to anyone, including publishers, software developers, scientists, students, and the general public.

The STIX mission will be fully realized when:

• Fully hinted PostScript Type 1 and TrueType font sets have been created
• All characters/glyphs have been incorporated into Unicode representation or comparable representation and browsers include program logic to fully utilize the STIX font set in the electronic representation of scholarly scientific documents

By making the fonts freely available, the STIX project hopes to encourage the development of applications that make use of these fonts. In particular, the STIX project will create a TeX implementation that TeX users can install and configure with minimal effort.

STIX Fonts Project Website

At the University of Oklahoma, researchers captured unprecedented high-resolution radar data during the May 10, 2010, tornadoes using one of the most advanced weather radars in the world.

“This unique polarimetric data set is likely to reveal new discoveries about tornado genesis and severe storms for years to come,” said the Director of OU’s Atmospheric Radar Research Center, Robert D. Palmer.

Palmer’s team is currently processing the data using advanced techniques developed at OU and preparing it for distribution.

“The close proximity of the tornadoes to the OU radar has produced data with fine details of the storms never seen before with any radar.”

Located on the OU Research Campus within walking distance of the National Weather Center, the C-band, polarimetric, research weather radar known as OU-PRIME (Polarimetric Radar for Innovations in Meteorology and Engineering) was built to provide OU students and faculty with a platform for research and education in the field of radar meteorology.

University of Oklahoma Researchers Capture Impressive Tornadic Data and Images Using Most Advanced Weather Radar in United States [The University of Oklahoma Public Affairs]

Scientists in China have succeeded in teleporting information between photons further than ever before. They transported quantum information over a free space distance of 16 km (10 miles), much further than the few hundred meters previously achieved, which brings us closer to transmitting information over long distances without the need for a traditional signal.

Quantum teleportation is not the same as the teleportation most of us know from science fiction, where an object (or person) in one place is “beamed up” to another place where a perfect copy is replicated. In quantum teleportation two photons or ions (for example) are entangled in such a way that when the quantum state of one is changed the state of the other also changes, as if the two were still connected. This enables quantum information to be teleported if one of the photons/ions is sent some distance away.

In previous experiments the photons were confined to fiber channels a few hundred meters long to ensure their state remained unchanged, but in the new experiments pairs of photons were entangled and then the higher-energy photon of the pair was sent through a free space channel 16 km long. The researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University in Beijing, found that even at this distance the photon at the receiving end still responded to changes in state of the photon remaining behind. The average fidelity of the teleportation achieved was 89 percent.

Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km [PhysOrg.com]

BBC published an interview with a video game developer named Lazlow, who offered these interesting comments:

Our games are not designed for young people. If you’re a parent and buy one of our games for your child you’re a terrible parent. We design games for adults because we’re adults. There’s a lot of kids games out there that we’re not interested in playing. Just like you enjoy watching movies and TV shows with adult themes and language and violence that’s the kind of thing we seek to produce.

Later he continues:

If you tell a gritty crime drama with violence and profanity and call it The Sopranos you’re handed a load of awards to put up on the shelf. You do the same and call it a video game and you’ll have certain organizations up in arms.

Makes sense to me. What do you think?

Red Dead Redemption hoping for ‘emotional response’ [BBC]

Shooting lasers at the sky can make the germ of a raincloud, a new study shows. In an experiment that smacks of science fiction, scientists used a high-powered laser to squeeze water from air, both indoors and out.

. . . . .

“This is the first time that a laser was used to condense water from both laboratory experiments and from the atmosphere,” says Jérôme Kasparian of the University of Geneva, a coauthor of the study. The work appeared in the May 2 Nature Photonics.

. . . . .

“It’s just like when you take a shower with hot water — it’s very humid in your bathroom, but it’s not raining,” Kasparian says. Water droplets need a surface to condense on, like a mirror in a bathroom or a speck of dust or pollen in the atmosphere.

. . . . .

Kasparian and his colleagues tested this idea by shooting a high-powered infrared laser into a cloud chamber. The laser shot extremely short pulses of intense light, which each carrying several terawatts — or a trillion watts — of energy.

The view fogged up immediately. Droplets about 50 micrometers in diameter formed first, and grew to about 80 micrometers in diameter over the next three seconds. “The effect in the cloud chamber was very spectacular and visible by bare eye,” Kasparian says. “We expected an effect, definitely. But that magnitude was pretty much a surprise.”

Next, the researchers took the laser out in the backyard to try it on the sky. They rolled the laser, called “Teramobile” for its terawatt power and its mobility, onto the lawn behind the physics building at the Free University of Berlin on several nights in the fall of 2008. The clouds, if they formed, would be too distant to see with the naked eye, so the team used a second laser to confirm the cloudy view.

“It also worked quite well in the free atmosphere,” Kasparian says. “That was quite surprising, and a very good surprise.”

Making clouds with lasers [Science News]