Slashdot Mirror
Transparent Aluminum a Reality
TuballoyThunder writes "Many of us remember the scene from Star Trek IV where Scotty barters the formula for transparent aluminum for a small run. It now appears that we can now add transparent aluminum to the science fact column."
The ability to wrap your mother's sandwiches in transparent aluminum and loose your apetite before you even unwrap it!
Very appropriate to announce this discovery at the same time James Doohan's remains are being sent into space. One wonders if there is a closet Trekker in the military press office. :-)
Cheers,
jIyajbe
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Now if we could only arm our military vehicles with convential armor let alone the nifty new stuff..
- Gronk!
How quaint.
No pics :(
Double the strength by polishing? Seems a bit strange...maybe some early pork-barrelling or deficiencies in the manufacturing process.
Pity it wasn't around in time for Doohan's final journey into the undiscovered country.
when you read the article, you find out that the material is not aluminum metal. It is just a transparent corund-like substance. Al203 alone is pretty hard (and easy to make - including gem colored versions) and the mixed oxide-nitride is probably harder.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Perhaps with this technology we can have see-through cans and this will no longer be a problem :)
Sound just what Apple need to make some scratch resistant screens for the iPod Nano :)
seriously. give the nano a nice coat of this and i think apple's little scratching post will turn into something nice and...well...scratchless
I don't think that'll catch on.
Grr...
I can now order my Wonder Woman jet! Now's where's my Golden Lasso and Amazon Bangles? Soon I hope. Now, if only surgery took well, I'd be all set...
IIRC the windshield of a Humveee is about 72" x 23"... thats 1656 square inches. The article quotes $10 - $15 a sq. inch, so the windshield would be worth $16,560 to $24,840.... I guess they wont be protecting fleets of vehicles with them?
The Air Force Research Laboratory's materials and manufacturing directorate is testing aluminum oxynitride -- ALONtm
And look.. the trademark is built right in as well!
Has anyone seen a pointy eared hippy in San Fransisco. And are any sperm whales missing ?
The military is planning to test this new material on its nuclear wessels.
What'll be really nice is when prices get down to be viable for use in consumer-grade products. Say goodbye to broken windows from baseballs, cracked screens on dropped iPods, chipped windshields from rocks, and all sorts of other fun uses.
It should open up some cool architectural possibilities as well.
now i can wear my tinfoil hat without people looking at me weird. technology++
Dr. Nichols:
"Just use the keyboard."
Scotty:
"Keyboard. How quaint. "
It's an aluminum-based ceramic, not really aluminum...
2 3/1141217&tid=142 0/0358206&tid=126&tid=14
We covered this last year (and probably the year before that, but I can't find it):
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/
"Coke, now with added armor for these explosive fieldtrips."
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
transparent aluminium.
What is with that, anyway?
See also here for earlier developments in this area.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Perhaps in 20-30 years, this will be standard in all new vehicales and buildings as a safety feature, the begining of a total phase out of glass excepting where metal in any form would be bad (beakers for holding chemicals such as Acid for example)
Well, I can Dream at least.
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
Plastic bottles???
ALONtm is virtually scratch resistant,
Does that actually mean anything? It's almost harder to scratch, but not quite?
Hmmmm....Has anyone noticed a pair of humpback whales going missing recently?
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"In a June 2004demonstration, an ALONtm test pieces held up to both a .30 caliber Russian M-44 sniper rifle and a .50 caliber Browning Sniper Rifle with armor piercing bullets."
.50 armour piercing round from a browning pretty damn impressive. I wonder if the compound suffers from the same degradation due to exposure to sunlight as some types of bullet proof glass.
I don't care if it's see through or not. Stopping a
I want a pair of glasses made of this stuff!
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Transparant aluminium bottom in an airplane (-; (Only usefull if the airplane travels without cargo)
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Aluminium. Look it up, it's in all the science books.
Sapphire which is basically a crystal of aluminium oxide has been synthetised almost 100 years ago and is commonly used nowadays. Some non-scratch watches use that instead of glass.
A transparent case made of aluminium...Mmmmm, aluminium..
47 Meelion Dollars!?! I'm the cat!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Is aluminium pronounced:
/. poll, but everything I submit gets rejected... I wish there were _at the very least_, proforma reasons as why things get rejected so you know where you went wrong...)
a) AL-LEW-MIN-NEE-UM
or
b) AL-LUMIN-UM
Personally, I go with 'a' coz I'm a Brit, is it just U.S. peeps who pronounce it 'b' ?
(I'd submit this as a
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
I'm 40% aluminium! Bender
... and then they built the supercollider.
Finally, scrach-resistance for my Ipod Nano!
I have to wonder if this stuff isn't going to be pushed into fairly niche applications, even in the military. These days it seems far more likely that the military uses some variety of remote sensing. You put some cameras up, and you look at the picture on a screen. Even if you have to bring a lot of spare cameras -- because they keep getting shot off -- it could still be cheaper than trying to make a thoroughly bulletproof window through which to look with your own eyes.
And, of course, the camera plus display is not limited to human eyeball capabilities. It can easily show you the scene in infrared, or, soon, maybe, millimeter and submillimeter radar. Or it can be magnified, or presented fisheye wraparound, or your intelligence info can be nicely superimposed --- say, all your friends lightly shaded green, all your enemies in red, with a bright cross on your target, et cetera.
So will the future really belong to superduper armor? Maybe not. Maybe it will belong to, say, exceedingly small cameras that can be deployed all over the outside of your craft, or on tiny drones nearby.
"...loose your apetite before you even unwrap it!"
:)
I guess if you loosed your appetite on an unwrapped sandwich, you'd end up eating the whole thing wrapper and all! An amusing picture, even if you meant to type "lose" and suggest the opposite.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
For coatings, you want CVD diamond. Here's a little overview.
Scotty doesn't trade the formula for transparent aluminium for a small run of the stuff. He trades for a quantity of perspex.
Dr. Nichols says it'll take him "years to even calculate the matrix". Besides that, the stuff they delivered and installed was clearly perspex - it would have been much thinner had it been transparent aluminium.
The uses go way beyond windshields. How about full-length transparent SWAT shields? If it'll take a
What about airplanes? Make much of the body out of this, making maintenance that much easier.
How will the rest of the world recognize us if our tinfoils hats are transparent?
Scotty's been messing with the timeline again! What next, Mr. Scott? Warp drive in the Victorian era?
..for taking so long. Apparently the lack of good voice recognition technology held up the discovery significantly.
Now that explains why that guy was asking a few months back about "nuclear vessels". *slaps forehead*
how long will it take the mpaa to claim prior art and sue?
Oh yes, most definitely maybe able to possible resist scratches. Unlike glass, which only possibly could be able to resist scratches.
Did the midget mind who wrote this glowing pap even read their own article back before submitting it?
K.
Expect to see this to enter the consumer market for things like - IPod nano screens, watch faces, scratch reistant coverings on eyeglasses,etc. The expensive weapons grade version is supposedly not much diferent from the much cheaper non-weapons grade version, so expect the $10-$/sq inch!!! price to vastly drop. I give it one year before we start to commonly see this in the high cost items at first (Rolex and Tag watches, etc)
..........FULL STOP.
Unfortunately, from the article it seems ALONtm is noted for it's high compressive strength, whereas to build the sides of a whale-sized bath you need high tensile strength. Unless of course it's a particularly aggressive whale and keeps shooting armour-piercing rounds at the side of the bath, but then the bigger question would be "how did it pull the trigger"?
Then there's Helum, that noble gas. And Kurchatovum, that incredibly unstable element. And Lithum, of which batteries are made. Not forgetting Valum, for people too depressed to worry about spelling.
Yes, yes, I know, a whole continent of people can't spell that metal's name. It's just like the English who wrote "cocoa" when they should have written "cacao". Amazing how an illiterate in the wrong place at the wrong time can screw up a dictionary.
K.
Sounds like a hell of a nice screen protector for the nano
COW-BOY-NEAL-IUM
% mkdir
% ls -dF
Thinnish coating of aluminum oxide on glass/plastic multilayer laminate improves its strength and scratch resistance.
News for non chemical nerds, maybe. A bit ho hum for anybody familiar with the AMAZING see through properties of things like aluminumium oxide, aka rubies and saphires.
How will the rest of the world recognize us if our tinfoils hats are transparent?
That's just it! They won't recognize us! We'll finally be able to stop worrying about them reading our thoughts and knowing we're not with them! At last! We can now peak into the minds of our enemies... Oh no! How will we know who is one of us or not?!
You're at the 58th floor of a building.
There is a fire. You can't use the stairs or elevators.
A)You break the glass, jump out and fall to your death.
B)You don't break the glass and suffocated because of the smoke.
Either way, you're toast.
Wrong...
A) You're jam
B) You're toast
The difference isn't subtle.
Now we just need bombproof windshield wipers and we can ignore all the guys and gals with bombs strapped to their chests while we roll over their children in our super-Humvees.
1 - We already have plastic bottles, and those have screw-on caps.
2 - One of the reasons cans are popular is that they're not transparent - beverages in the dark generally last longer.
3 - How impressive would it really be to crush a see-through can on your forehead?
What about lead? It's been a while since I studied any chemistry but I seem to recall the official name as "plumbum".
Or am I being incredibly thick?
Google finds some pics as expected (Sorry, PDF) :
http://www.surmet.com/docs/Processing_ALON.pdf
I'm not 100% certain if they're genuine or mock ups though...
~Pev
Every good chem student should try to remember, the product of an acid and a base is a salt... and we don't want to be rubbing/injecting salt into a wound now do we ???
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
i would pay 10$-30$ more for a near scratch proof watch/ipod....
A wasp sting inside the lip sucks, but it's certainly not the end of the world.
BTW, no, my parents didn't warn me, now I'm scarred for life and never drink from cans...
because beer tastes better from a bottle mainly.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Isn't this the same thing from last year?
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/8/8/9
Heck, it's even in the title too: http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/08/23/11412 17.shtml?tid=14
Transparent Aluminum Is Here
Posted by Hemos on Mon Aug 23, '04 10:09 AM
We've been duped! Though I guess this might be different transparent aluminum.
Either way, we see through their ploy.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
I wonder thet the corrosion resistance is of this stuff. Most aluminum materials don't do well in the weather and I imagine even minor pitting would impact transparency.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"In a June 2004demonstration, an ALONtm test pieces held up to both a .30 caliber Russian M-44 sniper rifle [...]"
Never trust a journalist to get gun facts straight.
The M44 is a carbine version of the Mosin-Nagant, very short, easy to carry, but with nothing better than iron sights. It is about as far from a "sniper rifle" as anything you can see.
It has the coolest integral bayonet, though.
On the upside, the M-44 uses the same cartridge as the current Romanian "sniper" rifle, the PSL. The M44 has a short barrel so a steel-cored 7.62x54R projectile won't reach the same sort of velocities as it would out of a PSL rifle but it should be a pretty effective test against the sort of "armor piercing" light arms that any terrorist not carrying an RPG would be likely to have handy.
It's Aluminium. It's also not Nucular, but Nuclear.
This obviously prooves that Scotty *did* reveal the formula :-)
I remember reading an article about glass making, and they did mention it's technically possible (while difficult) to make a "glass" out of just about any substance as it's simply a way of coalescing the particles to form a liquid/solid hybrid. Although I don't recall if this would always form a transparent product, but certainly steel and aluminum "glass" has existed for some time. I presume this form of glass would be prohibitively expensive for non-military applications...
Scotty: Computer. Computer?
[Bones hands him a mouse and he speaks into it]
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.
I see a multitude of uses for transparent aluminum including semi-transparent road signs, reinforced windows and cool computer cases. Scotty lives!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Sounds like it's just what Apple needs.
No sig today...
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/8/8/9
Nice clickable picture of transparent aluminum here - dated August 2004.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
This stuff is transparent Aluminium, in the same way that "normal" glass is
transparent Silicon. Indeed, using this criteria, we already had transparent
Aluminium in the form of Saphire. Saphire is also rather hard and makes a good
optical material. While the invention of a suitably hard and tough transparent
material is obviously news-worthy it would be wise to steer clear of the same
mistakes that sci-fi writers make when they don't understand the "sci" bit.
However, going back to the Star Trek film in question, I always liked the way
that Scotty was able to create a new material and presumably the method for making
it on a tiny Apple Mac Plus! Was he using MacDraw I wonder?
return 0; }
Scotty didn't exchange the formula for a small run of transparent aluminum, it would have taken years for the plant to study the formula and tool up their factory to produce the stuff. He traded the formula for a large, thick sheet of plexiglass or similar that the company would have had on hand or actually be able to manufacture at that time.
University - a box of academia nuts.
the website of the TM and Patent holder
http://www.surmet.com/alon.html
the odds of surviving the fall are better than the odds of surviving the fire when things are that far gone... If you jump, you may get lucky and land on something soft... or indeed, you may even miss the ground altogether al la hitch-hikers guide flying stylee...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I give it one year before we start to commonly see this in the high cost items at first (Rolex and Tag watches, etc)
It's likely cheaper, but is it any more scratch resistant than the sapphire used now? Ten dollars per square inch is peanuts, though. Mobile phones and iPods could very well use it.
My mom could use a new kidney.
'Dialysis? What, are we in the Dark Ages?'
What about in 1986, when Scotty introduced the formula for it. Granted, it takes time to develop and market it, but 19 years?? Sheesh!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/2 3/1141217&tid=14
I wonder what the refractive index of this material is? For those of us who look through tank windshield all day (figuratively speaking), if this material can be reduced in price and has a refractive index significantly greater than 1.66, then it would make our lenses much thinner, as well as being much more scratch resistant than polycarbonate.
Given that sapphire has a refractive index over 1.75, this *could* be a great breakthrough - if Big Green starts to consume large quantities of this, then the amortized NRE will be greatly reduced.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I saw something similar (may be the same) to this in Popular Science maybe a year ago. Still cool though.
the sapphire crystal you refer to is used for watches, but is quite brittle and much more expensive than the material referred to in TFA. i recently broke my watch face by walking into a door handle - sapphire, flat crystal not the even more expensive curved stuff - and it was about 150 quid to replace. (90% of which was material cost.)
Seen here:
http://www.worldwidearmor.com/#transparentArmor
GE Advanced Materials also make some form of transparent armor.
~jennifer.k~
Most of those salts were quite nasty anyway, this has strayed offtopic now... but what salt would it be?
Not to be outdone by the Air Force, Steve Jobs just announced that the forthcoming PowerBook G5 will feature a bulletproof transparent aluminum case. This follows Apple's longstanding tradition of using expensive metals for G4 laptop cases: first titanium, now airplane aluminum, soon transparent aluminum. Apple designer Jonathan Ives expressed some disappointment that they had not yet been able to create a commercially viable uranium shell, but was optimistic that the transparent aluminum would still be sexy.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
dicky period key? or just love that exclamation point so much?
You can already buy a watch with a synthetic diamond face for $5 - the Rado V10K. Rado is the leader in scratch-proof watches.
I wear a watch with a sapphire face and a nitrogen-hardened titanium body. I don't know the physics, but the metal is as hard as sapphire - I can scratch glass with it! So far, five years old and not a single scratch. But I do have a small dent in it from an emergency landing in a hang glider... ah, good times.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I thought he bartered it for some plexiglass? What does "a small run" mean anyway?
They should use this on the iPod nano :-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
2002?
I wonder how the British are feeling today, as there was no mention of transparent aluminium...
And I lift my glass to the awful truth which you can't reveal to the ears of youth except to say it isn't worth a dime.
...come true, what with the ability to construct a transparent jet.
The only remaining obstacle is telling my wife of my plans.
IronChefMorimoto
http://www.rense.com/general20/transparentalum.htm
WBG Links
www.wbglinks.net
Does this mean that we'd better check up on the Humpback whale situation before the cylinder with the glowing phallic communication rod heads this way to destroy us all?
RFC2119
Few watches would need much more than a square inch of this material to make a watch crystal. Even $10/sq inch is reasonable for a highly scratch and break resistant watch crystal in a moderately priced (few hundred US dollars) watch.
Scotty didn't exchange the formula for a small run of transparent aluminum. The exchange was the formula for a run of plexiglass panels. You are hereby ordered to watch Star Trek IV three times before Sunday.
singing the ballad of bilbo baggins with a bunch of bimbos?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
One thing i never got, is why the tank holding the whale had to be transparent? Couldn't they have used normal aluminium?
I want this for my windshield.
Gorkman
These things have been available for years already and they aren't expensive to make. I've got a cheap fake watch that I've worn for 10 years, I'm always banging it into things, not a single scratch on the face. Consumers seem to be happy with disposable (easilly damaged) stuff, as are the companies that make it.
Apparently the front window of an A10 'Tank Killer' can survive a 23mm projectile (1" =25.4mm). Not sure here though, because many web pages are very confused about the projectile and the hit location (window, armour, cockpit bathtub). I think the bathtub can handle 37mm projectiles with AP or explosive payloads.
I read in an old Swedish military manual that in general (rule of thumb), armour penetration is (speed_in_meters_per_sec/300)*caliber. It seems sort of correct looking at older figures atleast. A 80mm tank projectile travelling at 600m/s would penetrate 160mm of (steel) armour. A 5mm FMJ going at 900m/s would penetrate 15mm armour.
Of course nowdays we have kevlar, explosive armour and self sharpening DU bullets. Hit angle means a lot too.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
Transparent aluminum isn't new. Infact, it was posted here over a year ago.2 3/1141217&tid=14
I guess having eidetic memory isn't a bad thing after all, huh.
ps. this has pics if anyone wants them
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/
Scotty may have bartered the forumula for transparent aluminum in Star Trek IV, but he bartered it for materials they had in stock. It was admitted in the movie that it would take years to develop. Just a minior nit pick with the headline.
I know somebody who has a hard time pronouncing the North American version of this (being from NA). It's always comes out 'A.lu.ni.um' on them. It's a real speech impediment which they don't like showcasing. So I encourage them to say it the British way because it's like saying an entirely different word which gets around the bad wiring that has burned A.lu.ni.um into their head.
So I don't see a great need to pick one pronunciation. It's not like we need to communicate to get along and not start wars or anything. Sometimes I'll watch Coronation Street just to laugh at the incomprehensible characters. Namely that chubby lady who sold the kid's dog to buy boots. Har! great stuff!
In the case of transparent alumin[...] I remember Scotty saying it the North American way despite being a Scotsman. So there's your proof right there. In the future the NA version wins out as the new standard. If you think I'm being silly to base knowledge of the future on STAR TREK just where do you think the formula for this stuff came from?
Due to the laws of physics, anything that is transparent isnt going to be very aluminum-like
- It won't conduct heat or electricity too well.
- It won't be very strong in tension.
- It will be more like glass than aluminum.
So it's quite misleading to claim it's "transparent aluminum".We have seen stories on transparent aluminum before:
Transparent Aluminum posted February 20th, 2002 by Hemos
Transparent Aluminum is Here posted August 23rd, 2004 by Hemos
It's around. We get it. It's not news anymore.
We really don't need this material you know. The pentagon on 9/11/01 was hit by a comercial jetliner and the windows all around the impact point were still intact. The Pentagon said they were blast resistant. If they can withstand the impact of a plane, it will be simply amazing how strong this material is. See for yourself:
p
http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2005/04/770706.ph
This stuff is not Aluminium but a compound containing Aluminium. It is widely known that Corundum (a mineral that is esssentially Al2O3) is second only to diamond in hardness.
This looks more like serendipity to me (to add an N atom and get something that is hard AND transparent).
Ok I don't get the joke.. Double the strength by Polishing? Is it also doubled by Italianing? (It's probably made happier by Frenching, but that's a different issue altogether).
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Really---the IUPAC says "Aluminium". "Aluminum" is the deviant mangled spelling/pronunciation.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Available: here and here
Sigs are for the weak.
Your link says the Rado V10K is $5000.
ALON
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
"ALONtm is a ceramic compound with a high compressive strength and durability"
Now, a ceramic compound (whether or not it contains aluminum) is a pretty far cry from aluminum. This isn't just a semantic difference. For example, ceramics tend to have vastly different properties than metals. Conductivity for example. Geez.
TFA mentioned ground vehicles and low flying aircraft, but bullets aren't the only battlefield hazard to an aircraft.
When I was in teh USAF a problem was bird strikes. One bloody C-5 came in one evening with a headless co-pilot. The aircraft had a head on collision with a duck, which went right through the windshield and took the man's head completely off!
If the windshield had been made of this material, would the duck have penetrated it? Would the airman have survived?
Hey - maybe we should use this new material to create nuclear warheads that withstand anti-nuclear warhead weapons. Only one flaw - on arrival at the destination where it should explode, it just gets real bright and hot and sits in the field like an abandoned soccer ball! At least we give the enemy a sun tan. :)
At last, we can make her invisible jet! All we need is the magic lasso and a milf in red white and blue spandex and we can all live happily ever after.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
If it weighs as much as conventional "level I" armor, it's going to slow down the hmmmvs. At which point, a new fast unarmored jeep-like vehicle will be needed to fill certain roles. When the public finds out they'll want to armor the new vehicle, ad infinitum.
Some Hmmvs should be armored. All of them is rediculous.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Transparent Aluminum has been around for quite some time now. The public knew about it even before the military published a report about it.
A link to a press report showing an image of ALONtm.
_ August%202003.pdf
http://www.surmet.com/docs/ALON%20Press%20Release
-Rob
As in losing your lunch on purpose.
I blame Mozilla; "caution - you may loose data"
"ALONtm is virtually scratch resistant"
So, it isn't scratch resistant?
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
Toughness!!! doesn't equal Scratchproofing!!!! See recent /.!!! on iPod Nano screens http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163335&c id=13643920
http://liquidben.com - Aspiring to an 'under construction' gif
Soylent cola.
Seriously, it's funny to watch all these people try to find a practical application for this invention that cannot already be done better and cheaper with pre-existing technology, in order to justify the research expense (probably paid by you and me out of our wages). And that's before you even divide the research cost by the success rate!
What will they think of next?
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Soylent green!
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html#Engl ish
Written English is essentially a variety of Old French invented by somebody who spoke only Saxon and read only Latin.
--Basilius
English is essentially an imprecise dialect of Java, without the object orientation.
--Julian Morrison
English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary.
--Eugene Holman
English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.
--Benct Philip Jonsson
English is essentially a bizarre dialect of Chinese, pronounced entirely in the first tone.
--John Cowan
English is essentially Low German plus even lower French minus any sense of culture.
--Danny Weir
English is essentially Anglo-Saxon with all the cool bits taken out.
--Thomas Leigh
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Now, all they need to do is invent duranium for the structure and plating on the solid vehicle parts, and we'd be all set!
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
"We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
> Unfortunately, from the article it seems ALONtm
What I think is weird is that the journalist keeps writing ALONtm as the name.
It should obviously be ALON, as AlON is the chemical formula. The tm is just a misunderstood Trademark..
1) http://www.xoxide.com/clearacatxca.html
2) Eyeglasses.
3) Pipes.
4) Soda cans. (Pepsi could have used this during their Crystal Pepsi phase.)
5) Windshields.
6) Engines.
7) Bicycles. (Used with carbon-fiber, Lance Armstrong would be deliriously happy.)
8) Hurricane windows.
9) Decorative and durable lawn furniture.
10) Utensils.
I have a feeling someone might find a way to swirl dyed mixtures into the clear part to make some sort of swirlie colored "glass" for vases that won't break. Eh... I'm bored...
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Actually, no. Current ceramic rifle plate technology for human-worn body armor does not shatter when hit with a single round. See here.
For the record... It's not really "transparent aluminum" any more than glass is transparent silicon. "AlON" is aluminum oxide-nitride, an aluminum salt, just as glass is (roughly) a silicon salt. But it's still amazingly tough looking material.
It's already oxidized. That would be like asking if rust was going to corrode or if water was going to burn. Aluminum metal corrodes because it bonds easily to oxygen (just like iron and hydrogen).
Maybe we can build Wonder Woman's invisible plane now!
I hope James Doohan knew about this stuff in the works.
This is not transparent aluminum... it is just another transparent aluminum oxide. We've been through this before with transparent alumina (another oxide of aluminum).
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
From the article: "The substance itself is light years ahead of glass," Guess we have to travel pretty far to mine it then.
I posted this in the article thread dedicated to his send off, it seems to fit here as well. James Doohan had an autobiography, which I found to be quite interesting. Mine was hardcover, and I hope that local libraries for those interested have a copy. Here is an Amazon link to the thing.
1 520563/qid=1129645719/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2949 821-4630339?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/067
Dammit, you had me all excited thinking I could get one for 5 bucks! :-P
It's amazing to me how many in the Slashdot crowd will jump up and down screaming about standards compliance until it comes to written English, whereupon the rules (i.e. - standards) are apparently taken as meaningless.
Funny, I thought it was the other way around. If you jump you have to shed 53 stories worth of kinetic energy without dying. Guess the building owner should have invested in an escape system.
I find your lack of pants... disturbing
Whoops, wrong universe.
"In 1808, Humphry Davy originally proposed the name alumium while trying to isolate the new metal electrolytically from the mineral alumina. In 1812 he changed the name to aluminum to match its Latin root. The same year, an anonymous contributor to the Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, objected to aluminum, and proposed the name aluminium."
So aluminum was the first spelling, which was later change by language nazis because it didn't sound right.
Don't blame us Americans for trying to be historically accurate.
TFA: "ALONtm is virtually scratch resistant"
Really? Virtually resistant to scratches? Is that like saying WMDs in Iraq are a virtual probability?
Kevin Fox
The material is aluminium oxynitride, a ceramic compound as it says clearly in the text. It is not a transparent metal we are talking about here!
Metals commonly make compounds with non-metals creating ceramics, such as for example porcelain (aluminium oxide) or table salt (sodium chloride), not to forget almost every pebble benetah your shoe. Some are transparent, some are opaque.
That aluminium oxynitrate is transparent doesn't in itself make it more exotic than the vast array of other ceramics out there. It's about as fantastic as stating that silicon componds can be transparent.
Sorry for unmaking your day.
Might be, but the real issue is if God considers jumping out of a burning building to be suicide. This may be a serious legal issue to start your afterlife with.
Transparent aluminium is also called sapphire or ruby since these materials are Aluminium Oxide with other materials mixed in to produce the color. It is not all that difficult to grow them in the laboratory and they remain flawless.
Since the AMC division is one of the manufacturers of armoured vehicles, and a Armoured Personnel carrier can not stop a .50 cal ap round, does this mean that with this new armour, AMC will bring back the pacer as a armoured vehicle? Look ma, no blind spots???
From the country where life is "TRUE BLUE" and tech support reigns..
Actually, you only have to shed about 120 mph (200 kph) worth of kinetic energy, given that the terminal velocity of a human in freefall is roughly 120 mph.
;)
There's some math you could do to figure out how high up you would have to be to reach terminal velocity. I'll leave that at an exercise for the student.
Incidently, from terminal velocity, an impact that is spread evenly across the body and that took place over about a metre is completely survivable. Falling into powder snow would result in a metre deep crater and a live subject. If you can land on something that would crush with the impact, you might get away with it.
I'd also suspect that the single injury most likly to be immediately fatal would be a head impact. The broken bones and other internal trama on the rest of your body is going to be non-trivial, but I suspect that you could survive that if immediate medical attention could be had. That suggests that putting on a motorcycle helmet before jumping might significantly increase your probability of survival.
It's not the fall - it's the sudden stop at the end.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
They have a pic on their photo page at http://www.af.mil/photos/index.asp:
.30 caliber armor-piercing bullet fired from 25 yards away using a Russian M-44 sniper rifle. Shown is the test piece, which demonstrates the armor's ability to stop penetration from armor-piercing threats. (U.S. Air Force photo)
Low-res and high-res.
Cutline:
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- This ground-finish transparent armor test piece withstood the impact of a
Any material an be made Transparent as long as you can control the cooling process. The trick is over all rate of cooling.
Glass is the easiest material to make Transparent. I have heard of attempts to make steel transparent but the cooling process of the molten steel is extermly difficult and next to impossible to do, at this time, at any economical level. My memory is a bit rusty but I seem to recall to make steel Transparent you need to very slowly cool the entire molten piece of steel down over the course of a few weeks (changes in temperature with in the molten steel will cause 'darking' of the transparent steel).
There is no economical gain to spend weeks to make transparent aluminum when you can do the same with glass at most likely 1/1000th the cost. Luckly cost does not appear to be a factor in the US military where they can spend $250 on a hammer or $200 on an ash try. Now it will be $1000 for a 10X10 inch peice of glass (transparent aluminum).
"ALONtm is virtually scratch resistant, offers substantial impact resistance, and provides better durability and protection against armor piercing threats"
OK, how soon can we get optical media made with it?
If this is a problem for god, then fuck 'im.
Wow, it's almost like in that Star Trek movie! You can take your transparent aluminum and go back in time to either 2004 or even 2002! It's funny how time travel always makes that "dupdupdup" sound.
Quite right! I agree the engineering of appropriate coatings is a complex and demanding art -- I did not mean to imply otherwise! Nor is CVD diamond much more than, at this point, a fascinating research-worthy possibility, so far as I know. I thought it would be interesting to the OP, that's all.
My high school chemistry teacher who was from Nigeria pronounced aluminum but wrote aluminium.
Transparent Aliminum has been around for all our lifetimes: Sapphire = Aluminum Oxide. My watch has a sapphire crystal... Yours might too.
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Aha thats a nice hat can i see it
sure
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Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Right on your table, in your shaker: sodium chloride!
Granted, it sounds like this new stuff may actually be transparent, but please don't take the title away from Aluminum oxide ceramics, which were written about over 3 years ago.
m
http://www.rense.com/general20/transparentalum.ht
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Duh.
I'd guess you're thinking about Orbitz, manufactured by Coca-Cola for a couple years in the 90s, but that came in bottles rather than cans.
So... no idea.
transparent "aluminum" really isn't metal. it's aluminum oxide. it's also known as ruby, sapphire, or corundum(some of the hardest materials on earth short of a diamond). the reason why aluminum is so durable is that a coating of this forms on the surface of aluminum (anodising is basically making the coating thicker).
one thing you don't want to do is break a thermometer on this stuff. mercury will wipe out aluminum oxide (which leads to the fun effect of making aluminum corrode mysteriously)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Expect to see this to enter the consumer market for things like - IPod nano screens, watch faces, scratch reistant coverings on eyeglasses,etc.
If I read TFA correctly, I would expect to see many more applications than this. One application I would expect to see, as soon as the price drops, is automotive glass. Traditional 'bulletproof' glass has little value in a consumer vehicle, but this material is allegedly lighter, stronger and more scratch resistant (and I would assume chip resistant) than glass. Glass makes up a significant portion of the weight in an automobile. A lighter alternative would decrease the weight and potentially increase fuel efficiency. On top of that durability and safety factors would probably also help adoption of this technology into the automotive industry. The only problem I see is that traditional glass manufacturers will cry foul.
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And make iPod nano's out of it-
Here is a 1987 report on this material. Man, this is news?
Might want to take a look at these (Transparent Ceramic)
http://www.murata.com/opt/lumicera.html
They have refractive index of 2.08 and is for optical applications.
Now we can build Wonder Woman's jet. Then we can clone Linda Carter and make her clone fly it in the nude. Imagine the possibilities.
"only" is a big word here. :-) Falling from great heights is notorious for its unsurvivability.
I think your odds are better if you can find a bunch of water (which you then soak in), punch a hole in that window, and breath whatever is outside (which hopefully isn't as smoky).
Your search - "transparent aluminum" - did not match any documents
I think we've been misled.
well in all reality if this stuff becomes even close to "reasonable" priced I can think of some nice applications:
Doors, building matterials, bones, maybe as a leapfrog to something else. TechReview had a short 'primer' blurb on this stuff.
Hey all,
I heard a while back that a thin film of selenium, when exposed to hydrogen gas, would become transparent.
Would it be possible to make a transparent photovoltaic cell? You know, like a window that could filter out ultraviolet light and turn it into electricity, yet transmit visible light?
For that matter, would it be possible to add optical brighteners to greenhouse glass to increase the quantity of light that plants can use while reducing the risk of heat damage from noonday sun?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I can just see Steve introducing the new 6G iPods and talking about how its made of stuff they use to armour tanks.
of course the next day some manufacturer of screen protectors will complain how Apple's putting them out of business and comparing them to M$.
This has been covered before (way back in aught-2). I'd just like to make one point (which was also covered in the comments on the previous article): it's not really transparent aluminum. It's a compound that happens to have aluminum as one of its component elements, and it happens to be transparent. That isn't actually anything new. Ever heard of ruby? Sapphire? They're both crystaline aluminum oxide.
Why not just use Nanophase aluminum? You could make it any color you'd like..., it's hard as a bitch, ....
Neato!
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
If it wasn't for people who say "Aluminum", you people would all be speaking German!
Aluminum fits with more elements - Sodium, Lithium, Magnesium etc. The extra i comes from nowhere as the ore is Alumina, so Aluminum is more correct. Although here in the UK I don't think we'll see any changes just yet. A Chemistry Teacher
Sadly, the credits for discovery of transparent aluminum goes to Mother Nature. It's common name is white Sapphire. Been around for bilions and billions of years. Recently it was rediscovered in the 1950s or so as a synthetic. Also, more recently it has been rediscovered multiple times by /. readers. About once a year for the past several years. I remember I was there.
It would be pretty hard to use transparent aluminum as a sandwich wrap though, it's quite brittle and extremely dense and hard. Hence it would actually work for Scotty's space aquariums. It's just too darned expensive to make. But it'd sure be great to be the only guy on the block to own a sapphire aquarium!
Since it's ultra scratch-resistant, why don't we make CDs and DVDs out of this stuff? I hate losing all of my data due to some scratch on the disc or the reflective backing gets damaged by accident.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
But staying in the building would be suicide too. Surely trying your best to survive is the "righteous" thing to do, even if it means jumping.
The post is grossly misleading. Aluminum is a metal, aluminum oxy-nitride isn't. Iron ore isn't steel, either. Aluminum oxide (Al2O3) has also been used as a transparent bullet proof material, and it also isn't aluminum.
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence, is indistinguishable from malice." Grey's Law
I learned to work metals in a forge. Two of my close friends are professional blacksmiths.
:^)
You stated "work hardening, you're wrong about how often it happens. Quite frankly, it doesn't unless you're either extremely stupid or even more so insane.". I guess I'm either extremely stupid or insane, then, but I guess I'd be better off believing a slashdot post than my lyin' eyes, right?
I use a lot of found and recycled metals. Nearly everything experiences changes in hardness in real-world use. Nearly all fabrication processes (except stock removal by low-temperature grinding) will noticeably change the hardness of a piece. There are plenty of polishing, burnishing and stropping techniques which will also work-harden various metals.
A really good smith can hit a couple of auto rocker-arms with a hammer and tell you the difference between one fresh out of the factory and one that's been used in a real engine. A great smith can tell you simply by the sound they make when struck.
Maybe you're working with extremely powerful equipment, so you can't distinguish any changes in hardness unless they are very extreme? That's what it sounds like. If you use a hand shear on thick metal, you will notice that the edges of a cut are harder than the uncut metal, for instance, but if you are using a power nibbler you'd never be able to tell.
The first time I read about transparent aluminum being used as armor (face shields) was in popular science, back in the early 1990's. I specifically remembered it being "aluminum oxy nitride". What too them so long?
consumers woudl push for it with only a little bit of motivation. Any one else ever have to pay $400 to replace a windshield thanks to spreading cracks caused by a flying rock? or $250 for a broken passenger side window when some one decided to break in? (plus havign to make sure every last bit of glass was vacummed up).
Insurance companies woudl likely offer theft insurance breaks for people who had all windows made out of this stuff.
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
I had a machinist swear to me that brass and bronze are functionally identical. I've even seen a guy come back from a supplier with brass stock that was sold to them as "bronze".
Be careful with your ventilation when working brasses or bronze. One of my friends hot-forged bronze for years without a fume hood. When he lost his mind, the examining doctors found arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury in near-lethal concentrations all through his system.
actually, the water's nto a good idea if you can't get a continous supply of it. Sure, for a few moment's it's absorb the heat, but it'll then steam-cook you..
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
Erm, on the other side of the equation, think of all the accidents where someone goes through a windshield (yes, mostly idiots with no seatbelts). If your windshield could stop a bullet, it could probably stop you too, which means that the your kinetic energy of the accident will be dissipated by your head impacting the windshield. As opposed to current safety-glass where the glass absorbs some energy and the person keeps going straight on through.
Might not be the best thing. Then again, it could also stop deer going through your windshield, if it could stop you. One would have to look at statistics to determine if it would be a safety boon in non-combat environments.
They're always driving Poles into the ground.
Why did Scotty even need transparent aluminum? Plate steel makes a fine whale aquarium.
I am the inventor of the hilarious refrigerator alarm.
Here is a link to the datasheet! http://www.surmet.com/docs/Product_sheet_ALON.pdf
Just think of the number of microwave ovens this invention is going to destroy when people start using it as a food storage container!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Virtually scratch resistant? It *ALMOST* resists scratching! WOW! Now that is astounding.
In Soviet Russia, us are belong to all your base.
You're incorrigible! And amazingly, the mods haven't decided to incorrige you with +1, Funny yet...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"ALONtm is virtually scratch resistant"
Erm, on the other side of the equation, think of all the accidents where someone goes through a windshield
You bring up a good point. Any accident with enough force to throw someone through a windshield generally results in serious injuries. There are rare occasions when occupants are thrown from the car and clear of additional danger, but often if you hit that hard you are screwed no matter what.
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What took them so long is the whole "getting it working" part. Popular Science has the luxury of reporting on ideas. Engineers actually have to actually figure out how to manufacture it efficiently and cheaply before putting it into production.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
http://www.surmet.com/alon.html
From site:
What is ALON(TM) Optical Ceramic?
ALON is a patented optical, polycrystalline ceramic with a grain size of 80 m to 250 m.
ALON has optical, mechanical and physical properties very similar to sapphire.
ALON can be made in more complex shapes, larger sizes, and at lower costs than sapphire
Chemical Name: Aluminum Oxynitride
This is similar to Aluminum Oxide also known as Sapphire (Al2O3) and Alumina which is also Al2O3
I would imagine a Diamond like Carbon crystal would have an even higher thermal conductivity and at the same time be even more durable and harder.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Quite frankly, it doesn't unless you're either extremely stupid or even more so insane. Even soft magnetics like Cast Iron don't work harden until extremely high temperatures are reached.
Okay, so you work in a metal shop, and I'm working as a developer - it's been ten years since my materials engineering courses in college. Point taken. But I refuse to believe my memory of materials class is as bad as all that. Heating is not the only known method to achieve hardening. Cold work can also harden.
I clearly remember that applying deformation will cause hardening to most metals, even (especially) at cold temperatures, because crystalline irregularities drop to lower-energy states during deformation. This is the principle behind shot peening, for example, which hardens the surface of an object by repeatedly blasting it with high-velocity ball bearings, causing zillions of little dents.
I remember cutting a pen cap longitudinally with a diamond say and using a hardness tester to demonstrate that the metal had been hardened by cold work near where the thread had been cut.
See Shot peening and
Cold work.
Now I agree that polishing probably does not harder a surface significantly because it primarily abrades a material rather than deforms it.
This process only works on materials with metallic properties. You can't peen-harden wood or glass, for example. So I'm very skeptical about it working on this aluminum material, which is an oxide described as a ceramic.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
WE LANDED ON THE MOON!
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
The man made sapphire face is probably made from crystalized aluminium oxide which is very hard but brittle.
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According to a quick Google, ALONtm or Aluminum Oxynitride (which is obviously NOT Aluminum Oxide) was first developed by Raytheon pre 1987 Ref. Army Material Tech Lab . That was when the report was made public. Since Star Trek IV was filmed in 1985 and released in 1986 it is reasonable to presume that one of the marvellous Trek writers or Tech consultants was actually aware of the existence of this material and wrote it in expecting it to become a popular material in the future. What has happened here is that Surmet Corp in conjunction with Raytheon has developed a superior method of manufacturing the material which finally seems to make it a viable material for mass production. Since this material is technically a ceramic it's not hard to understand why its so much stronger and harder than glass, which at the molecular level is a liquid. It would also have vastly superior heat resistance which will be a good thing for it's applications in the aerospace industry.
...transparent aluminium actually exists? I won't believe it till I see it!
The reason why English is such a widely used language is because it evolves with each generation and new words can be created (like "googling") which could not happen in Latin, and with the current generation speaking in "messenger speak"/"sms speak" it won't be long until spelling is about as important as if you use "who" or "whom" - so as you get older you will notice more and more changes happening, you can either resist them or you can evolve as well...
If this is transparent aluminum then quartz is transparent silicon.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Believing in god is a serious issue all by itself.
Lexan is a plastic that is used in place of glass in applications that require being shatterproof (baseball, baseball bat, bullet, etcetera). As a plastic, it can be scratched, as well as can melt if heated enough. While ALONtm sounds like it has far greater scratch resistance, it is also way bloody more expensive (if not unavailable for civilian use.)
Unfortunately, bullet-proof Lexan is not an upgrade option for "Pela" or "Anderson" replacement windows where I live, so I have been forced to fabricate my own storm windows with this plastic.
Like many others posters have pointed it out, there has been several other stories on slashdot similar to this one. Like the others, it says "transparent aluminium" and like the others, it's not pure aluminium nor an aluminium alloy, it is an aluminium oxyde, which has a different molecular structure, so it is not aluminium anymore. So, in essence, it may be news to materials engineer or chemists, but not news for Start Trek lovers.
There are already too many vegetation fires caused by idiots with lawn mowers. (Here is a hint: if it is 110 degrees and 10% humidity, don't go mowing your field.)
Anyway can you imagine the havoc they could cause with a lawn mower that works by burning the grass? I will pay you not to invent this. :)
There are really two types of standards:
Implementation Standards (which say that everyone should do things the exact same way)
Interoperability Standards (which say that everyone should do things such that others can understand them)
Most of the slashdot crowd are probably against the former (which creates a monoculture) and in favor of the latter.
Ok, trekkies, a challenge: Why in God's name did the storage for the whales need to be transparent?
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As another poster has pointed out, this is not a metal, but a ceramic that happens to contain aluminum. Which means it is not suitable for use in structural applications like airplane fuselages, or in foil. Also, metal's opaqueness to light and radio waves bears a direct relationship to its conductivity to electricity; in effect, metal "shorts out" an oncoming electromagnetic wave. There might be some exotic metals that are transparent. Since gold is so soft, it is relatively easy to hammer into sheets of only several atoms thick. It then becomes translucent. This of course was the reason why gold leaves were used to in the famous "plum pudding" experiment that proved the existence of a nucleus in atoms, but that is beside the point.
Well, maybe you won't get enough heat to get steamcooked. As I said, the odds are better.
Main Entry: caudal /-&l-E/ adverb
Pronunciation: 'kod-&l
Function: adjective
1 : of, relating to, or being a tail
2 : situated in or directed toward the hind part of the body --caudally
Source: Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.
Yep, it is a single crystal of Aluminium oxide, which is pretty much the definition of sapphire. It's grown the same way the semiconductor industry grows silicon crystals - more info.
It is brittle and will shatter -- because of this, it is not used on many of the "real" military watches. They would rather have a scratched face than shards all over the place (and a broken watch!).
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For some reason, they always laughed at me when I went to the local disco
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But NOW, no one will even know!
Maybe I'll finally pick up a chick after all these years!
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F U
These military writers aren't too bright. Along with all the other "it's not aluminum" and "virtually scratch proof". here's my found flubs:
.50 caliber rounds and improvised explosive devices are in the works. "
"The new armor combines the transparent ALONtm piece as a strike plate, a middle section of glass and a polymer backing. Each layer is visibly thinner than the traditional layers. "
If the layers are transparent then how exactly are they visibly thinner?
"While the bullets pierced the glass samples, the armor withstood the impact with no penetration."
Definitions:
pierce: go into or through something
penetrate: making a way into or through something
**boggle**
"Tests focusing on multiple hits from
Um... stand up a piece of the stuff. Fire large rounds at the stuff perpendicular to its face. Test for penetration. This isn't rocket science. Just pick the largest machine gun anyone makes (one that puts the most energy down range per second) and use it.
Any the Army is LOWERING its intelligence standards?!?!
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
What actually happens when you go through the windsheild is that the plastic in the safety glass holds it together. If only your head or torso goes through your weight and the rebound tries to pull you back through but the hole in the glass gets smaller and you wind up decapitated or eviscerated. You want to remain inside the vehicle in all but the most exceptional circumstances.
In a water crash your best bet is usually to get out as soon as possible as the airspaces in a submerged car get purged in less than what it takes to submerge 20-30 feet. Any deeper and the pressure never equalizes anyways until the car stops moving. If you've managed to hold your breath long enough you have to hope you landed wheels down and can make it to the surface before your breath runs out. Punching out the windows is a fools hope. Ever tried to swing a hammer under water?
It's only a story (n/t)
Hmm, transparent ALONtm is highly scratchproof. iPod nano in both black and white is easily scratched. Transparent nano, Apple?
Gee, it's so tough to find a place to park around here!
or do you have the hostess do a cost benefit analysis of the bean, cheese and ranch dips? And berate her in front of everyone if she hasn't? Look, the article wasn't a spec requirement, nor a doctoral thesis, nor a request for more funding. It was a public relations, "Hey, this is what cool things we are working on, and we think it will be good for the following reasons. . ." I'm sure that the real decision makers will ask for more information, like a cost benefit analysis. They already said in the article, "just adding more thickness doesn't always help." Remember, while armor protects, speed kills. Or other people in the government or aerospace who may frequent the website have similar interests may read that and think, "hmm, we might be able use that here. . ."
Settle down Beavis.
It's too bad he died and couldn't witness this. I'm sure he would have been proud to see it.
My Gawd WTF...
Um, that's $5,000.
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