Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have demonstrated that vehicle armor using composite metal foam (CMF) can stop ball and armor-piercing .50 caliber rounds as well as conventional steel armor, even though it weighs less than half as much. The finding means that vehicle designers will be able to develop lighter military vehicles without sacrificing safety, or can improve protection without making vehicles heavier.

CMF is a foam that consists of hollow, metallic spheres—made of materials such as stainless steel or titanium—embedded in a metallic matrix made of steel, titanium, aluminum or other metallic alloys. In this study, the researchers used steel-steel CMF, meaning that both the spheres and the matrix were made of steel.

Continue reading “Metal foam stops .50 caliber rounds as well as steel – at less than half the weight” »

Researchers at Amsterdam’s UMC have identified a rare gene that halves people’s chances of developing dementia in old age.

People with the genetic variant, which occurs in around 1% of the population, are also more likely to live longer. The researchers studied 16 different sample populations in Europe and North America, including a number of people over the age of 100, for the study published in the journal Acta Neuropathologica.

The discovery could potentially be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative illnesses such as frontotemporal and Lewy body dementia.

Continue reading “Scientists identify gene that helps people live to a ripe old age” »

Spot the robot will go on sale later this year.

A swarm of ladybugs moving through San Diego County was so large it registered on the National Weather Service’s (NWS) weather radar Tuesday night, CBS Los Angeles reports. The NWS office in San Diego tweeted out a video of the radar that looked to be showing precipitation but was in fact what they called a ladybug “bloom.”

“The large echo showing up on SoCal radar this evening is not precipitation, but actually a cloud of ladybugs termed a ‘bloom,’” the tweet read.

CMU becomes space-faring university with payloads aboard Astrobotic lander.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A huge blob that appeared on the National Weather Service’s radar wasn’t a rain cloud, but a massive swarm of ladybugs over Southern California.

Meteorologist Joe Dandrea says the array of bugs appeared to be about 80 miles (129 kilometers) wide as it flew over San Diego Tuesday.

But Dandrea tells the Los Angeles Times that the ladybugs are actually spread throughout the sky, flying at between 5,000 and 9,000 feet (1,525 and 2,745 meters), with the most concentrated group about 10 miles (16 kilometers) wide.

Continue reading “Massive ladybug swarm over California shows up on radar” »

An international team has constructed the most detailed, highest resolution simulation of a black hole to date. The simulation proves theoretical predictions about the nature of accretion disks—the matter that orbits and eventually falls into a black hole—that have never before been seen.

New results from the Large Hadron Collider have confirmed it. The mysterious five-quark subatomic particle — the pentaquark, only discovered a few years ago — really is composed of two sets of quarks.

One is a meson, a type of particle that contains a quark and antiquark pair; the other is a three-quark baryon: the subatomic particle that makes up most of the normal matter in the Universe, including protons and electrons.

This confirms that quarks aren’t just chucked together like a loose bag of marbles, but instead are structured more similarly to the way protons and neutrons are bound in an atomic nucleus — what the researchers call a ‘molecular’ state.

Continue reading “Official LHC Results Have Finally Confirmed The Structure of Mysterious Pentaquarks” »

Those padded walls will help in low gravity, no doubt, and in the crew capsule, all six people get a window seat. “You’ll listen to the countdown and then feel the engine ignite and rumble under you as you climb through the atmosphere,” reads a description from Blue Origin. The capsule is 530 cubic feet.

The first crewed Blue Origin flight will simply reach the edge of space — a landmark called the Kármán Line — and then return. This the company’s reusable suborbital flight system, will launch the crew capsule to its destination before it descends to Earth, landing softly in the Texas dirt, thanks to parachutes. Blue Origin is also working on a heavy-lift launch vehicle designed to reach Earth orbit, called New Glenn, but that’s unlikely to fly before 2020.

The video — seen above — was shot by an Amazon representative and sent to Inverse. There’s no denying, it looks remarkably comfortable.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos’ Space Firm Debuts Video of Cushy Space Tourist Capsule” »