There are two places where bomb-proof wallpaper would come in really, really handy: war zones, and college. I guess college is less deadly most of the time, but you also don’t have the US Government offering to step in and pay for replacement drywall after your roommate decides that it would be fun to try and kick his way through to the adjoining room by swinging from your bunk bed. Thanks, Logan.
X-Flex wallpaper is made from a “Kevlar-like material” (Kevlar itself being a trademark of DuPont, in case you were wondering) sandwiched between an elastic polymer wrap. It’s lightweight, portable, and a cinch to install relative to the protection it offers: you just peel off the back, stick it to the wall, and bolt it to the ceiling and floor and you’re done. You can even wallpaper or paint over it if you don’t like the color. Popular Science put X-Flex to the test with a wrecking ball as you’ll see in the video below, but to forestall any objections, you can also see X-Flex withstanding an actual bomb blast on their website.
For those of you who are especially paranoid, it’s certainly worth mentioning that X-Flex is not actually intended to protect against ballistics, like bullets or shrapnel, just blasts and blunt impacts like bombs and drunken roommates. A commercial version of the military grade wallpaper is due out next year.
Looking for a badass new yacht for free? Sea Shadow, commissioned by DARPA and now a US Navy castoff, is about as badass as it gets. You may be familiar with Sea Shadow from the Bond move Tomorrow Never Dies, but it’s a real ship, and it’s really stealthy. It’s 160 feet long, and comes with 12 bunks, a table, a microwave, a fridge, and a gigantic covered mining barge that the CIA used to keep Sea Shadow protected from satellite surveillance. The catch is that you have to take the barge too, and getting anything for free from the Navy is apparently “a bloodthirsty, paperwork ridden, permit-infested, money-sucking hole…” Why does that not surprise me.
If nobody comes up with an offer, Sea Shadow (which originally cost nearly $200 million) is going to be scrapped at the end of this year.
There are some obvious downsides to being in the military, like say being shot at, but they also get to play with some of the coolest toys on Earth. Tanks and fighter jets aside, the U.S. military has apparently been using these binoculars that feature LightSpeed technology developed by a company called Torrey Pines Logic. They work just like regular binoculars, but using an infrared beam they can actually pass data (like sounds and images) back and forth between another set. Here’s a rudimentary breakdown of the technology from the Torrey Pines Logic site:
LightSpeed™ technology is based upon IR LED free-space optics (FSO) concepts. By using eye-safe LEDs for data transmission along with innovative optics, it can be incorporated into any binocular system permitting simultaneous data/voice communication and visual contact. The LightSpeed™ LED transmit beam covers the entire binocular field-of-view (FOV) so that precise pointing is unnecessary – as long as both operators can ‘see’ each other using their respective binoculars, reliable 1Mpbs data communication between two LightSpeed™ devices is supported at distances exceeding 5km. The data channel can accommodate various modes including Ethernet, video streaming and multi-channel audio data. Optical communications are the most secure means of data transmission and suffer no RF limitations; optional data encryption provides additional security.
But the president of Torrey Pines Logic feels that the technology has a use outside of the defense industry. For example, it could be used by ground crews at airports who have a hard time using radios because of interference from the aircraft. And I suppose it’s just a matter of time before this technology eventually trickles down to even regular eyeglasses.
One way to protect tanks from rocket propelled grenades is passively, by giving them more armor. A more effective way is actively, but shooting down incoming rounds before they even make it to the vehicle. It would be great if it were possible to do that with lasers, but it’s not yet (although we’re getting closer), so in the meantime the army’s Future Combat System will use a Quick Kill interceptor, a tiny little missile which pops up, locates the incoming round, orients itself, and fires, detonating the incoming round before it has a chance to strike the vehicle. Good thing the Russians haven’t already come up with a decoy system…
It’s not sexy, but here it is: a real live commercially produced laser cannon. The FIRESTRIKE system, by Northrop Grumman, is a 15 kW electric laser capable of firing continuously as long as it gets power and coolant. It’s even got en Ethernet connection, so you can zap people and surf the internet at the same time! If you’re really ambitious, you can couple up to seven of them together to make a 100 kW laser, which is just about the minimum you’d need for an effective combat system.
The downside is that each module is about 400 pounds, which unfortunately puts it well out of the handheld class. And I assume you can’t just pop a couple Duracells in there, nor does it appear to have a wall plug. But the worst part is that it’s just not evil looking. I mean, it’s a mostly featureless totally boring gray box. It really should be put inside a case that looks like something from Star Wars (the third one, with the stupidly high SFX budget), with some skull and crossbones decals on it and an absurdly gigantic barrel with lots of blinky LED lights and smoke machines and sound effects.
Oh well, I can’t find a price, and if I were Northrop Grumman, I definitely wouldn’t sell a tactical laser system to someone like me.
Oh sure, an all-metal chassis carved from a single piece of aluminum might look sleek, but I have my doubts that the latest MacBooks will survive the beating the General Dynamics (yep, the people who make tanks) Itronix GoBook MR-1 is designed to take. At just 2 pounds and 6.6 inches wide it might look like another run-of-the-mill netbook, but it’s actually engineered to meet or exceed the US Military’s MIL-STD-810F standard for drop, shock, vibration and temperature endurance. That and the $5,649 price tag definitely remove the GoBook MR-1 from the netbook category.
The GoBook MR-1’s 5.6 inch touchscreen display has a native resolution of 1024×768 and thanks to Itronix’s DynaVue screen technology it’s as viewable in direct sunlight as it is indoors. The MR-1 also features a full QWERTY keyboard that’s sealed to repel water and dust, a touchpad and a small joystick for controlling the cursor and a built-in GPS receiver, but only a single USB port on the back. However, more ports can be added via a small collection of customized docks designed for office or in-vehicle usage. While Laptop Magazine wasn’t really impressed by the performance of the MR-1’s 1.2-GHz Ultra Low Voltage Intel Core Solo U1400 processor, I guess durability is the real reason why anyone would pick one up.
Ice bullets that kill someone and then melt inside their body, destroying the evidence, may have been myth busted, but that doesn’t have to stop you from using ice bullets to chill down your favorite tasty beverage. For about $15 you can get your very own banana clip of twelve 7.62 x 39mm ice bullet molds, suitable, apparently, for making an AK-47, which you can do by combining:
1/3 oz. Bourbon Whiskey
1/3 oz. Brandy
1/3 oz. Cointreau
1/3 oz. Gin
1/3 oz. Fresh Lime Juice
1/3 oz. Rum
1/3 oz. Vodka
1/3 oz. Whiskey
Pour into a highball glass, add soda water and ice bullets to taste. Then shoot it, of course.
The University of Michigan was recently awarded a $10 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Army to develop a six inch robotic spy plane that bears a striking resemblance to a bat. In fact, the grant helped establish the U-M Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology, or COM-BAT for short, re-etablishing the U.S. Army as a world leader in clever acronyms.
The COM-BAT is designed to provide short-term but real-time surveillance and feedback to soldiers in urban combat zones using a collection of sight, sound and smell sensors. One of the biggest hurdles is finding a way to give the COM-BAT a usable amount of battery life between charges, and the Army is hoping that the spy plane could scavenge power from vibrations, wind and of course the sun, which the University of Michigan has a particular expertise in. The COM-BAT project will also be used to vastly improve other existing technologies like solar cells and navigation and communication systems, which the team already feels can be dramatically reduced in size. The University of Michigan is actually one of four centers chosen by the Army for the project (the University of California at Berkeley and the University of New Mexico were also chosen) and while each school will be responsible for developing a different system on the spy plane, they’ll all be working as part of a collaborative effort.
Although you can’t buy one, the F-117A Night Hawk stealth fighter is perhaps one of the coolest gadgets to be produced in the last few decades. The entire fleet of 52 planes was informally retired on Tuesday in order to free up money for F-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightning IIs. They’re not going to be sold off to museums or scrapped or anything like that; they’ve proven their combat effectiveness and will be held in reserve in case they’re needed again at some point in the future, which is the same thing that happened to the battleship Missouri. Anyway, after the jump, I just thought I’d post some pics of this excitingly chunky, totally badass airplane. Read the rest of this entry »
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