What new materials are there?

How does it behave against repeated hits? This kind of material can see a drastic decrease in their ballistic property after the first impact.
Funny thing is, this is just the v0.1 version. Something that some people threw together to see if it works and oh boy does it work. Remember, modern ceramic inserts only work once (or, at best, twice) anyway.

Remember, everyone thought Battletech armor was impossible, once upon a time, and it looks like it isn't impossible now with this.

Remember, Battletech armor is fluffed to be a sandwich of perfect-crystal steel, Cubic Boron Nitride ceramic, what sounds suspiciously like titanium foam, and a backplate with what sounds like a CNT weave woven throughout the composite. There is a metal foam that is great against neutrons, surprisingly enough (read up on High-Z Steel Metal Foams, basically balls of tungsten in the air pockets of a steel foam).
 
Funny thing is, this is just the v0.1 version. Something that some people threw together to see if it works and oh boy does it work. Remember, modern ceramic inserts only work once (or, at best, twice) anyway.

Remember, everyone thought Battletech armor was impossible, once upon a time

Yes, I'm sure the dozens of people who've pondered BattleTech armor thought it was impossible. As written it's pretty nonsensical.

Composite metal foams are older than BattleTech, and Afsaneh Rabiei herself has been working on them for at least 15 years, so I'm not sure this is something "some people threw together to see if it works."
 
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Funny thing is, this is just the v0.1 version. Something that some people threw together to see if it works and oh boy does it work. Remember, modern ceramic inserts only work once (or, at best, twice) anyway.

Remember, everyone thought Battletech armor was impossible, once upon a time

Yes, I'm sure the dozens of people who've pondered BattleTech armor thought it was impossible. As written it's pretty nonsensical.

Composite metal foams are older than BattleTech, and Afsaneh Rabiei herself has been working on them for at least 15 years, so I'm not sure this is something "some people threw together to see if it works."
Battletech started out in the 1980s, mind you, well before the idea of metal foams became a thing. Metal foams, as far as I can tell, are fairly recent in terms of discovery.

Now we're seeing something right out of the books working similarly to how it was described, which has some major implications on material science.
 
The idea of metal foams "became a thing" in the 1920s, and they were produced at scale starting in the 1950s.

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Syntactic (or composite) metal foams like in the video were experimented with in the early 1980s. Dr. Rabiei has certainly made some innovations, but it's hardly a super-material. As armor her foam has an MER of about 1.5, similar to titanium or AR500 and about half that of a typical ceramic plate, so it's not going to revolutionize personal armor. It may be good for certain types of vehicle armor, but it has low compressive strength so it would be a remarkably bad choice for a giant robot skeleton.

Endosteel doesn't make much sense and generic BattleTech armor seems to be a garbled futuristic hodgepodge of metal matrix composites and honeycomb sandwiches, both of which were well-known at the time.

Note that saying something is stronger or better than steel is fairly meaningless since there are thousands of steels out there. For example this metal foam is better at stopping bullets than RHA, but equal to or worse than contemporary ballistic steels depending on the threat.
 
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I remember a styrofoam looking metal I got some thought to insert in steel tubing. There is wood like metal…from phys.org and an article on a new “shock absorber”…now don’t think tube. Think of something that can break but be reset . AM III carbon looks good IIRC

I wonder if people put car type shocks as part of ship frames to deal with wave action and preserve hull life by being a mechanical fuse box as it were.
 
I don't think that would help. The hull itself is subjected to bending and torsion stresses. To relieve those, you'd have to divide the hull into sections and have flexible links between them.
 
Maine’s ban on ‘forever chemicals’ marks a big win for some scientists


”Last month, a group of scientists scored an unexpected win in chemical regulation: The state of Maine became the world’s first jurisdiction to ban the sale of products containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs). The controversial chemicals are common in consumer goods such as nonstick cookware. By 2030, Maine will forbid selling products that use PFASs unless regulators determine their use is “currently unavoidable.”
 
Via Slashdot:
 
Phys.org had a blurb recently: "Unbreakable glass inspired by seashells." Nextbigfuture has a new piece on LED quantum dot surfaces that fold like paper.
 
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It would be useful, then, to be able to control, limit or shape magnetic fields from a distance. Useful, but apparently impossible.
...

By choosing the right combination of currents the researchers found they were able to create a field pattern which emanated from a virtual version of the 21st wire that ran not through the middle of the cylinder but, rather, 2cm outside it. In other words, if the apparatus doing the generating were to be shielded from an observer, Wizard of Oz-style, by a curtain, it would look to that observer as if this field was appearing from nowhere.
...

Remotely cast fields of this sort might be used to steer medical nanobots through someone’s bloodstream to deliver drugs to a particular tissue, or else to guide them towards a malignant tumour and remotely raise their temperature once they have arrived, in order to cook it to death. There are also likely to be applications in quantum computing. Many designs for quantum computers rely on trapping atoms at precise locations in space—a difficult feat which this sleight of hand could simplify.
...



Another technique for controlling plasmas too, I'd guess.
 
Phys.org has an article on terahertz control via “two dimensional hybrid metal halide.”

Now with a pattern of nanites…maybe generate a standing wave that affects only the tumor…not using the blunderbuss approach? Current radiation therapy amounts to getting a mouse out of a wall using grapeshot. My poor Mom was nuked in the 1970’s with 5,000 rads of cobalt.

Optics/sensors
 
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Being denser equates to an increased depletion of natural ressources if the target is to benefits for the better mechanical properties. I wonder why it hasn't struck the inventors.
Aside of very specific applications (replacing high quality logging that target trees that need considerable times to growth), I can't see how this would be applied as a structural component when Aluminum is already there and recyclable for example...
 

From the standpoint of the defense and firearms industries, if such a material can be built to a sufficient thickness, matching the claimed characteristics and at a reasonable cost, it may allow developing a wide variety of revolutionary new products: body and vehicle armor, exoskeletons, small arms, projectiles, unmanned vehicles, fighter jets, submarines … you name it.
 
Print your infrastructure or knit it? Who would have thought we'd be asking that question a decade ago?

Interesting that this 'knitted roads' concept has its origins in an art projects at ETH Zurich.

A few links without paywalls:



 
Using recycled cathodes makes better lithium batteries, study finds

"Cells using recycled cathodes were then put through an array of tests, where they performed almost identically to cells using fresh cathode materials. There was only one notable exception: The cells using recycled cathode materials lasted up to 53 percent longer."

 
Well well, wooden nails - sounds like a joke, but isn't.


 
Also, phys.org had a blurb on moldable wood…and wood-like metal.
That site has an article on 3D prints using sneaker design for structures to resist 60 km/hr impacts.

The best article in recent days is “SHAPE-SHIFTING MATERIALS WITH INFINITE POSSIBILITIES.”

The word for today: Totimorphic.
 
Just in: "Ammonia synthesis by mechnocatalysis in a ball mill." No great heat needed...shades of alchemy!
 

 
That dovetails perfectly with a new phys.org article called "New Ultrahard Diamond Glass Synthesized." Scroll down to where they say that perhaps large panes are doable.
 

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