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The Military

Scientists Turn T-Shirts Into Body Armor 213

Posted by timothy from the will-stick-with-the-regular-kind-for-now dept.
separsons writes "Scientists at the University of South Carolina recently transformed ordinary T-shirts into bulletproof armor. By splicing cotton with boron, the third hardest material on the planet, scientists created a shirt that was super elastic but also strong enough to deflect bullets. Xiaodong Li, lead researcher on the project, says the same tech may eventually be used to create lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts."
Government

Submission + - Military enlists open source community (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
jmwci1
jmwci1 writes: "The U.S. Defense Department is enlisting an open source approach to software development — an about-face for such a historically top-down organization.

In recent weeks, the military has launched a collaborative platform called Forge.mil for its developers to share software, systems components and network services. The agency also signed an agreement with the Open Source Software Institute to allow 50 internally developed workforce management applications to be licensed to other government agencies, universities and companies."
Earth

Submission + - Powerful Sonar Causes Deafness in Dolphins 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Mass strandings could be caused because dolphins are rendered temporarily deaf by military sonar, experiments have shown. Tests on a captive dolphin have demonstrated that hearing can be lost for up to 40 minutes on exposure to sonar and may explain several strandings of dolphins and whales in the past decade. Most strandings are still thought to be natural events, but the tests strengthen fears that exercises by naval vessels equipped with sonar are responsible for at least some of them. For example, in the Bahamas in March 2000, 16 Cuvier's beaked whales and Blainville's beaked whales and a spotted dolphin beached during a US navy exercise in which sonar was used intensively for 16 hours (pdf). "The big question is what causes them to strand," says Dr. Aran Mooney, of the University of Hawaii. "What we are looking at are animals whose primary sense is hearing, like ours is seeing. Their ears are the most sensitive organ they have." In the experiment scientists fitted a harmless suction cup to the dolphin's head, with a sensor attached that monitored the animal's brainwaves and when the pings reached 203 decibels and were repeated, the neurological data showed the mammal had become deaf, for its brain no longer responded to sound. "We definitely showed that there are physiological and some behavioral effects [from repeated, loud sonar], but to extrapolate that into the wild, we don't really know," said Mooney."
Idle

Submission + - Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
the_therapist
the_therapist writes: "A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast and discovered that chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex.

Among the findings are that "male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts". They also found this to be "a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are"."

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