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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.

About 17 years ago, Keven Walgamott lost his left hand and part of his forearm in an electrical accident. Now, Walgamott can use his thoughts to tell the fingers of his bionic hand to pick up eggs and grapes. The prosthetic arm he tested also allowed Walgamott to feel the objects he grasped.

A biomedical engineering team at the University of Utah created the “LUKE Arm,” named in honor of the robotic hand Luke Skywalker obtains in “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” after Darth Vader slices off his hand with a lightsaber.

A new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics explained how the arm revived the sensation of touch for Walgamott. The University of Chicago and the Cleveland Clinic were also involved in the study.

If you’ve been a grunt, then you probably have a love-hate relationship with body armor. You love having it in a firefight — it can save your life by stopping or slowing bullets and fragments — but you hate how heavy it is — it’s often around 25 pounds for the armor and outer tactical vest (more if you add the plate inserts to stop up to 7.62 mm rounds).

It’s bulky — and you really can’t move as well in it. In fact, in one firefight, a medic removed his body armor to reach wounded allies, earning a Distinguished Service Cross.

Imagine if the body armor were just another part of your clothes, like a light jacket. Imagine not having to haul around those extra 30 pounds. Well, troops may not have to imagine much longer. According to a release from the Advanced Science Research Center at the City University of New York, body armor could soon have the thickness of just two atoms. This is due to how graphene acts under certain conditions.

Photons — those fundamental particles of light — have a slew of interesting properties, including the fact they don’t tend to crash into one another. That hasn’t stopped physicists from trying, though.

University of Chicago physicists have now come up with a new, highly flexible way to make photons behave more like the particles that make up matter. It might not give us lightsabers, but making photons collide could still lead to some fantastic technologies.

The trick to getting particles of light — which have no mass — to acknowledge one another’s existence is to have them meet in the quiet confines of an atom, and combine their properties with those of an electron.

If we could trap light it could be used as a force field or even a lightsaber in future developments :3.


Quantum computers, which use light particles (photons) instead of electrons to transmit and process data, hold the promise of a new era of research in which the time needed to realize lifesaving drugs and new technologies will be significantly shortened. Photons are promising candidates for quantum computation because they can propagate across long distances without losing information, but when they are stored in matter they become fragile and susceptible to decoherence. Now researchers with the Photonics Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY have developed a new protocol for storing and releasing a single photon in an embedded eigenstate—a quantum state that is virtually unaffected by loss and decoherence. The novel protocol, detailed in the current issue of Optica, aims to advance the development of quantum computers.

“The goal is to store and release single photons on demand by simultaneously ensuring the stability of data,” said Andrea Alù, founding director of the ASRC Photonics Initiative and Einstein Professor of Physics at The Graduate Center. “Our work demonstrates that is possible to confine and preserve a single photon in an and have it remain there until it’s prompted by another photon to continue propagating.”

The research team used electrodynamics techniques to develop their theory. They investigate a system composed of an atom and a cavity—the latter of which is partially open and therefore would normally allow light trapped in the system to leak out and be quickly lost. The research team showed, however, that under certain conditions destructive interference phenomena can prevent leakage and allow a single photon to be hosted in the system indefinitely. This embedded eigenstate could be very helpful for storing information without degradation, but the closed nature of this protected state also creates a barrier to exterior stimuli, so that also cannot be injected into the system. The research team was able to overcome this limitation by exciting the system at the same time with two or more photons.

Adam Savage has made bullet-proof Iron Man Armor using 3D printed titanium and a flying jet suit from Gravity.

It is more precisely a real-life Titanium Man (comic book enemy of Iron Man).

The US military (Special Ops) recently canceled an attempt to make real-life iron man exoskeleton armor with strength enhancement. They are looking to use components of the system to help boost the strength of joints and to increase light-weight armor protection for many soldiers.

In this video I show you an awesome laser lightsaber and then I talk about lightsabers and the possibility of using photonic molecules to build a real lightsaber. This thing is awesome! If the force is with us (and some quantum mechanics) we will some day have a true lightsaber…These are very dangerous lasers. NOT A TOY. Will cause instant blindness:

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As even casual Star Wars fans will know, lightsabers are probably the coolest weapon ever to make an appearance on the big screen. Lightsaber fights are so elegant that they are almost hypnotic and, even though not all of us might have a strong enough flow of Force running through our veins, a lightsaber in the right hand is by far the deadliest weapon to be found in the universe.

The idea behind a lightsaber is simple genius: a light-weight and immensely powerful tool that uses a blade of energy to not only slice up disciples of the Dark Side in a single blow but also act as an effective shield against laser blasts. So why don’t we have working lightsabers in real life? Surely physicists must be smart enough (and big enough Star Wars fans) to be able to produce one of these incredible objects.

The obvious way of building a lightsaber would be to use a laser, which can be seen as a particularly bright and directional burst of light. But even though laser technology is continuously striding towards more efficient and practical machines, we are still miles away from a working lightsaber. Let’s see why.

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It’s basically a lightsaber. Except smaller. And with an invisible blade. And cold to the touch. But other than that, this homebrew cold plasma torch (YouTube, embedded below) is just like the Jedi’s choice in elegant weaponry.

Perhaps we shouldn’t kid [Justin] given how hard he worked on this project – seventeen prototypes before hitting on the version seen in the video below – but he himself notes the underwhelming appearance of the torch without the benefit of long-exposure photography. That doesn’t detract from how cool this build is, pun intended. As [Justin] explains, cold plasma or non-equilibrium plasma is an ionized stream of gas where the electron temperature is much hotter than the temperature of the heavier, more thermally conductive species in the stream. It’s pretty common stuff, seen commercially in everything from mercury vapor lamps to microbial sterilization.

It’s the latter use that piqued [Justin]’s interest and resulted in a solid year of prototyping before dialing in a design using a flyback transformer to delivery the high voltage to a stream of argon flowing inside a capillary tube. The quartz tube acts as a dielectric that keeps electrons from escaping and allows argon to be ionized and wafted gently from the tube before it can reach thermal equilibrium. The result is a faint blue glowing flame that’s barely above room temperature but still has all the reactive properties of a plasma. The video shows all the details of construction and shows the torch in action.

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In the world of Halo, Master Chief is a super soldier outfitted with one of the most advanced sets of body armor ever produced by mankind. So how bullet proof if Master Chief? Master Chief Doesn’t Want to Die.

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It all starts with John 117. Basically he was kidnaped as a kid and pumped with performance altering drugs and growth hormones. The success rate for transforming a small child into a giant fighting machine is apparently pretty low. So yeah, it’s pretty amazing this guy can even mentally function let alone save the planet. Anyway, as a full grown man, John is 287 pounds (131 kilograms) and stands 6 feet 7 inches tall (about 2 meters). To put it into perspective, Andre the Giant was a 7 foot 4 inches tall (2.24 meters) wrestler from France. Coming in at at 550 lb (255 kg), not only was he tall, but he was massive. So although John is big, he isn’t’ that big. What makes Chief so powerful is of course his set of armor. According to lore, The MJOLNIR powered assault armor is a technologically-advanced combat exoskeleton system designed to vastly improve the strength, speed, agility, and reflexes of a spartan super soldier. This suit then brings John up to 7 feet tall and about 1,000 lb (453 kg), or twice the weight as Andre the giant, but still a little shorter.