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Boron carbide is one of the hardest materials on Earth, used by the military in body armor. Unfortunately it’s too heavy for daily wear. Until now. Chemists discovered how to turn cotton fibers to boron carbide, creating armor from t-shirts.

Though the process is still experimental, it could lead to extremely flexible, strong body armor that weighs far less than the current models.

A simple cotton T-shirt may one day be converted into tougher, more comfortable body armor for soldiers or police officers.

Researchers at the University of South Carolina, collaborating with others from China and Switzerland, drastically increased the toughness of a T-shirt by combining the carbon in the shirt’s cotton with boron – the third hardest material on earth. The result is a lightweight shirt reinforced with boron carbide, the same material used to protect tanks.

Dr. Xiaodong Li, USC College of Engineering and Computing Distinguished Professor in Mechanical Engineering, co-authored the recent article on the research in the journal, Advanced Materials.

“USC is playing a leading role in this area. This is a true breakthrough,” Li said, calling the research “a conceptual change in fabricating lightweight, fuel-efficient, super-strong and ultra-tough materials. This groundbreaking new study opens up unprecedented opportunities.”

The scientists started with plain, white T-shirts that were cut into thin strips and dipped into a boron solution. The strips were later removed from the solution and heated in an oven. The heat changes the cotton fibers into carbon fibers, which react with the boron solution and produce boron carbide.

The result is a fabric that’s lightweight but tougher and stiffer than the original T-shirt, yet flexible enough that it can be bent, said Li, who led the group from USC. That flexibility is an improvement over the heavy boron-carbide plates used in bulletproof vests and body armor.

“The currently used boron-carbide bulk material is brittle,” Li said. “The boron-carbide nanowires we synthesized keep the same strength and stiffness of the bulk boron carbide but have super-elasticity. They are not only lightweight but also flexible. We should be able to fabricate much tougher body armors using this new technique. It could even be used to produce lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts.”

The resulting boron-carbide fabric can also block almost all ultraviolet rays, Li said.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the ACS Petroleum Research Fund and the USC NanoCenter. The idea was first developed at USC, and the materials were synthesized and characterized in Columbia. Tests on individual boron-carbide nanowires were carried out in Zurich, Switzerland, and ultraviolet irradiation tests were performed in Zhejiang University of Technology in China.

Source: R & D Mag

There are no naked pre-cogs inside glowing jacuzzis yet, but the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights!

They will use this software on juvenile delinquents, using a series of variables to determine the potential for these people to commit another crime. Depending on this probability, they will put them under specific re-education programs. Deepak Advani—vice president of predictive analytics at IBM—says the system gives “reliable projections” so governments can take “action in real time” to “prevent criminal activities?”

Really? “Reliable projections”? “Action in real time”? “Preventing criminal activities”? I don’t know about how reliable your system is, IBM, but have you ever heard of the 5th, the 6th, and the 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution? What about article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? No? Let’s make this easy then: Didn’t you watch that scientology nutcase in Minority Report?

Sure. Some will argue that these juvenile delinquents were already convicted for other crimes, so hey, there’s no harm. This software will help prevent further crimes. It will make all of us safer? But would it? Where’s the guarantee of that? Why does the state have to assume that criminal behavior is a given? And why should the government decide who goes to an specific prevention program or who doesn’t based on what a computer says? The fact is that, even if the software was 99.99% accurate, there will be always an innocent person who will be fucked. And that is exactly why we have something called due process and the presumption of innocence. That’s why those things are not only in the United States Constitution, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights too.

Other people will say that government officials already makes these decisions based on reports and their own judgement. True. It seems that a computer program may be fairer than a human, right? Maybe. But at the end the interpretation of the data is always in the hands of humans (and the program itself is written by humans).

But what really worries me is that this is a first big step towards something larger and darker. Actually, it’s the second: IBM says that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom—which has an impeccable record on not pre-judging its citizens—already uses this system to prevent criminal activities. Actually, it may be the third big step, because there’s already software in place to blacklist people as potential terrorist, although most probably not as sophisticated as this.

IBM clearly wants this to go big. They have spent a whooping $12 billion beefing up its analytics division. Again, here’s the full quote from Deepak Advani:

Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.

If that sounds scary to you, that’s because it is. First it’s the convicted-but-potentially-recidivistic criminals. Then it’s the potential terrorists. Then it’s everyone of us, in a big database, getting flagged because some combination of factors—travel patterns, credit card activity, relationships, messaging, social activity and everything else—indicate that we may be thinking about doing something against the law. Potentially, a crime prediction system can avoid murder, robbery, or a terrorist act.

It actually sounds like a good idea. For example, there are certain patterns that can identify psychopaths and potential killers or child abusers or wife beaters. It only makes sense to put a future system in place that can prevent identify potential criminals, then put them under surveillance.

The reality is that it’s not such a good idea: While everything may seem driven by the desire to achieve better security, one single false positive would make the whole system unfair. And that’s not even getting into the potential abuse of such a system. Like the last time IBM got into a vaguely similar business for a good cause, during the 1930s. They shipped a lot of cataloguing machines to certain government in Europe, to put together an advanced census. That was good. Census can improve societies by identifying needs and problems that the government can solve. At the end, however, that didn’t end well for more than 11 million people.

And yes, this comparison is an extreme exaggeration. But one thing is clear: No matter how you look at it, cataloguing people—any kind of people—based on statistical predictive software, and then taking pre-empetive actions against them based on the results, is thewrong way to improve our society. Agreeing with this course of action will inevitably take us into a potentially fatal path.

Source: Gizmodo

Almost since computing began, scientists and technologists have been fascinated with the idea of a computer that works similarly to the human brain. In 2008, the first “memristor” was built, a device that is designed to behave in a manner that mimics the junctions betweens the neurons in the brain. However, until recently, the memristor was just a device. Now a group at the University of Michigan, led by Wei Lu, has demonstrated that the memristor can actually be used in computing. Their findings were published in Nano Letters: “Nanoscale Memristor Device as Synapse in Neuromorphic Systems.”

The Michigan team used the same sorts of materials that we have readily available when building computer chips: silicon and silver. The team joined two metal electrodes at their crossing using the silicon and silver mixture in order to reflect behavior of the synapses in the brain. This set-up is believed to provide a way to store memories as the memristor learns new firing patterns. New Scientist reports on the importance of this computing memristor:

In the brain the timing of electrical signals in two neurons affects the ease with which later messages can jump across the synapse between them. If the pair fire in close succession, the synapse becomes more likely to pass subsequent messages between the two. “Cells that fire together, wire together,” says Lu.

The Michigan device exhibits the same behaviour. When the gap between signals on the two electrodes was 20 milliseconds, the resistance to current flowing between the two was roughly half that after signals separated by 40 milliseconds. “The memristor mimics synaptic action,” says Lu, adding that the next step will be to build circuits with tens of thousands of memristor synapses.

However, it has yet to be proved that memories are being stored by this set-up, and stored information hasn’t been retrieved. But the fact that a team of scientists has managed to create a situation in which the brain is mimicked by human-developed technology means that a brain-like computer could be closer to realization.

Source: Brain-Like Computer Closer to Realization (PhysOrg)

A prototype “invisibility cloak”, similar to those worn by fictional wizard Harry Potter, has been developed by European scientists.

British and German researchers have created the three-dimensional cloak that can hide objects by bending light waves, which could pave the way for larger objects to be made invisible.

While the cloak of invisibility has played a major role in fiction and movies, it appears that scientists have taken a small, but important new step, toward making it reality.

In their study, researchers from the German Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Imperial College London used the cloak, made using photonic crystals with a structure resembling piles of wood, to conceal a small bump on a gold surface.

In their study, published Thursday in the American journal Science, they rendered almost entirely invisible the bump that measured 0.00004 inches high by 0.00005 inches across, by “cloaking” it in a new material.

Invisibility cloaks have already been developed but they only worked on two dimensions.

In other words, the objects that were supposed to be made invisible were immediately visible from the third dimension, the study said.

The “cloak” invented by the European team is the first to work on three dimensions.

It is composed of special lenses that bend light waves to suppress light as it scattered from the tiny bump the researchers were trying to make disappear, the study says.

“For now these … cloaking devices are just a beautiful and exciting benchmark to show what transformation optics can do,” said Tolga Ergin, who led the research.

“This is very exciting, because mankind has always thought about being invisible or having invisibility cloaks.

“This is the first proof of principle. It shows that the technique works.

He added: “The value of the finding is that we learn more about the concepts of transformation optics, and that we have made a first step in producing 3-D structures in that field.”

He cautioned that it likely be years before anything as large as a person, car or tank could be made to disappear with this technique.

“There have been proposals in the field of transformation optics for different devices like beam concentrators, beam shifters, super antennas which concentrate light into one point from all directions, and much, much more,” he said.

“It is really hard to say what the future will bring, but the field is definitely very broad and the possibilities are very large.”

Source: Harry Potter: ‘invisibility cloak’ prototype created by scientists (Telegraph UK)

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

“It’s the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. “If you say they can’t get a job when they come here, you’ll stop it.”

A person familiar with the legislative planning said the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand. It would be required of all workers, including teenagers, but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs, the person said.

The card requirement also would be phased in among employers, beginning with industries that typically rely on illegal-immigrant labor.

Mr. Schumer said employers would be able to buy a scanner to check the IDs for as much as $800. Small employers, he said, could take their applicants to a government office to like the Department of Motor Vehicles and have their hands scanned there.

Read the rest of the story at: ID Card for Workers Is at Center of Immigration Plan (Wall St. Journal)

A high-powered laser aboard a modified Boeing Co 747 jumbo jet shot down an in-flight ballistic missile for the first time, highlighting a new class of ray guns best known from science fiction.

The flying laser’s long-awaited test on Thursday showcased a potential to zap multiple targets at the speed of light and at a range of hundreds of kilometers, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency said in a statement.

“The Missile Defense Agency demonstrated the potential use of directed energy to defend against ballistic missiles when the Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) successfully destroyed a boosting ballistic missile,” the agency said.

“The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defense,” the statement added.

It cited among other things a low cost per intercept compared with other technologies used to defeat missiles that could be tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads.

Directed energy weapons use highly focused rays to attack a target rather than chemical-powered arms. Those in control can tweak the strength involved, unlike a bullet or a bomb, allowing for less-than-lethal uses.

Lasers are well known from science fiction as a type of ray gun. In the real world, they are used for sighting, ranging and targeting for guns.

The experiment marked both the first time a laser weapon has destroyed a ballistic missile and the first time any system has accomplished it in the missile’s boost phase of flight.

Read more at: Flying laser zaps missile in first for U.S. (Reuters)