Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019

But perhaps soldiers should be glad that the Army didn’t go with the infamous Heckler & Koch G11 or the futuristic XM29 OICW, or the ill-fated XM8 assault rifle.

Instead of a very conventional rifle firing the 5.56 NATO round, the Army is now rapidly progressing towards developing and field-testing a new weapon that can double the muzzle speeds of a bullet.

Continue reading “New research shows the Army could soon develop a rifle with hyper-velocity rounds” »

O„.o carbon nanotube suit.

Researchers announce new military funding in search for body armor skin that could be 300 percent stronger than anything we’ve seen before.

In Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, there’s a scene where inventor Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman, explains that Wayne Enterprises has created a prototype body armor for the U.S. infantry that’s as light as Kevlar but bullet- and knife-proof. Bruce Wayne asks why it never went into production. “The bean counters figured a soldier’s life wasn’t worth the 300 grand,” Fox replies.

Continue reading “One Step Closer to a Batsuit for Soldiers” »

A newly developed metallic foam can stop even the biggest of bullets, but as with steel, there’s still a margin for death.

Scientists have accidentally discovered a completely new form of matter that works in the same way as the lightsabers used in Star Wars.

A team of physicists were messing around with photons when they managed to get the particles to stick together and form a molecule.

The molecule behaves, they claim, just like a lightsaber by moving the light particles around in a solid mass and is unlike any matter seen before.

Circa 2019

How effective is it?

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) whistleblower Philip Haney was found dead in Amador County, Calif., on Friday, according to local authorities.

Haney, 66, “appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound,” the Amador County Sheriff’s Office said in a release. Sheriff and coroner Martin A. Ryan shared the initial details of the case.

“On February 21, 2020 at approximately 10¹² hours, deputies and detectives responded to the area of Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth to the report of a male subject on the ground with a gunshot wound,” the release read.

According to ancient lore, Genghis Khan instructed his horsemen to wear silk vests underneath their armor to better protect themselves against an onslaught of arrows during battle. Since the time of Khan, body armor has significantly evolved—silk has given way to ultra-hard materials that act like impenetrable walls against most ammunition. However, even this armor can fail, particularly if it is hit by high-speed ammunition or other fast-moving objects.

Researchers at Texas A&M University have formulated a new recipe that can prevent weaknesses in modern-day armor. By adding a tiny amount of the element silicon to boron carbide, a material commonly used for making body armor, they discovered that bullet-resistant gear could be made substantially more resilient to high-speed impacts.

Continue reading “Engineers develop recipe to dramatically strengthen body armor” »

The news could someday mean the difference between death and life for people who suffer dramatic blood loss because of a stab or gunshot wound.

New Scientist.

The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive.