Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts

The new body-armour in town: turns bullets into dust

The 13 seconds clip you are about to see is not a cut-scene from a super-hero movie, but it is actually a test for the new armor plating developed by scientists in North Carolina State University.
 

The material used is so strong that it could literally turn an Armour-piercing bullet into dust on impact.
Afsaneh Rabiei, a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University, who has spent several years working on Composite metal foams(CMFs) said the bullet could be stopped by the armour at a thickness less than an inch, while the indentation caused by impact was less than 8 millimeters.
The armour plating which is a breed of CMFs and traditional metal plating is said to hold potentials that could make it useful in other fields like space traveling and transportation of nuclear waste. This is as a result of earlier research which has shown that CMFs could withstand extremely high temperatures, ward of x-rays, gamma rays and even neutron radiation.
Now that's what I call a body armour!   

oh...by the way, the bullet used in the video presentation(for those concerned about figures) is a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armour-piercing projectile, and it was fired in standard testing procedures for armour testing.

Leap second added to day


The last minute of this month- June, would have 61 seconds.

We all believe the length of a day is 24 hours (which is 86,400 seconds) but an approximate time for a complete rotation by the earth on its axis is 86,400.002, this is because earth's rotation is slowing down, thanks to the combined forces of the sun and moon's gravitation on our planet.
So to keep the world time in synchronization with the mean solar time, a second is usually added to a day at irregular intervals by the world time-keepers.
In practical, instead of clocks moving from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00 , it would now be 23:59:60.
This practice began in 1972 and this is going to make it the 27th adjustment of time since then.
Many complications arise from these adjustments in time as software glitches were recorded in times past, it even leads to a shutdown of computers during that period because leap seconds are not programmed into them, they have to be imputed manually.
This issue would be addressed at the World Radio communication Conference in Geneva, November this year as timekeepers would meet to decide whether to put an end to such adjustments in time.