Army wants uniform to repel invisible threats

Whether soldiers want to avoid infection during the theoretical zombie apocalypse or just keep clean on modern battlefields, the U.S. Army has their backs. Military researchers have begun sniffing around the idea of specially treated clothing that could not only repel dirt, rain and snow, but also invisible threats from chemicals, bacteria and viruses.

The Army wants to take a closer look at "omniphobic" coatings that have proved capable of repelling all sorts of liquids and dirt in lab tests, according to its solicitation notice issued on Wednesday. Such technology could protect soldiers from almost every imaginable biological or environmental contaminant ? but only if the Army can figure out how to make the coatings more resistant to daily wear and tear.

"It is envisioned that omniphobic treated protective clothing will help to protect the skin from contact with solid and liquid toxic industrial chemicals, petroleum, oil, and lubricants, chemical warfare agents, and bacteria and viruses, thus effectively providing enhanced chemical/biological (CB) protection," according to the Army solicitation notice.

Past lab tests by MIT and other universities have shown how specially engineered textures of omniphobic coatings can cause liquids to bead up rather than cling to the surface. Some researchers have experimented with natural surfaces ? such as those of lotus leaves or spider hair ? that can repel water and represent self-cleaning functions.

But current omniphobic surfaces don't meet "Army strong" standards just yet, because they can be easily scratched or worn away. The Army's Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center wants scientists to fix such material weakness before considering omniphobic technology for "potential applications in military clothing."

The Army also wants to ensure the omniphobic coating is thin and conforms well to clothing fibers without increasing fabric stiffness or affecting uniform color. Any treated clothes must also allow for air flow and moisture evaporation.

Regardless of whatever chemical or biological weapons appear on tomorrow's battlefields, soldiers may enjoy doing their laundry less frequently someday.

Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.

johnny knox johnny knox monday night football monday night football bonjovi bonjovi antonio brown

WORD BUDGETS: Writing vs Speaking, and the Male vs Female ...

I can?t quite tell if there is any data to support the commonly quoted difference between men and women?s speaking budgets. It?s one of those things that?s so commonly bandied about that you?d think you could easily find data on it. But you can?t. And what you can, is pretty specious. In fact, it looks pretty much ?just plain wrong? when I read it.

But there is another explanation; it certainly does appear that men and women speak more in different **contexts**.

One thing we know that helps us understand those contexts, is that men have more friends than women, but women have closer relationships than do men. Men tolerate greater diversity of value judgements in their friends. Women tolerate less diversity of value judgments in their friends. Or perhaps better stated, men and women view the source of loyalty that defines friendship as coming from different behaviors: cooperation in pursuit of opportunities for shared gain, versus care-taking which requires bearing costs on behalf of the other.

For this reason fear of ostracization is lower in men, and higher in women. Add onto that the men not only feel more comfortable taking risks, but enjoy and seek taking them ? albiet the level of risk varies substantially. But conversational risk is very low among men. We think it?s better to hear a bad idea than fail to hear all the ideas. Women are more cautious because they are more sensitive to variation in opinion.

In my anecdotal experience, in business meetings and debates, men speak far more words than women. In social settings, and in personal conversations, women speak more words than men. Men seem to enjoy participating in competitive conversations. They even artificially create nonsense-conflicts just to have something to debate: they talk about sports teams, companies, politics, technologies, cars and tools etc. Each as a vehicle for debate. They prefer the abstract to the experiential, and a limited number of contextual changes. Women seem to prefer gradual subtle conversations across multiple contexts where they can build consensus and thoroughly understand one another?s viewpoints in the process.

The result of these different preferences is more of a difference in velocity than anything else. Women tend to ?get there? using their conversational style just like men do, but more slowly. Like everything else, men are built for speed. The extraneous is removed by evolution.

It certainly seems like most woman I?ve been in a relationship with has greater capacity for speech than I do ? and I?m pretty talkative. But I suspect that it?s a difference in the content and circumstance not the number of words. I?m not the only man who thinks it?s odd that his mate must revisit her dreams in the morning, and her daily conversations at night. It?s common knowledge among men that we must learn that skill.

But it?s good for a relationship when men learn how to feign interest in these things that we lack the emotional bandwidth to appreciate and comprehend. Listening is an exercise in providing what the other person needs, and what she needs is not comprehension and problem solving ? it?s to ensure we?re committed to one another, and for her to organize her emotions by way of speaking them in the same way that men organize our ideas by visualizing them. Chatter after all, is negatively correlated with successful hunting. Communication during hunts and war is visual, not verbal. Besides, that female revisitation of emotions is why women help us with our emotional problems when we have them: they?re more experienced at dealing with them. Our compensation for lacking those tools, is that mechanical devices, consumer electronics, and politics are not opaque to our comprehension. But I?m not sure which gender gets the better deal.

We forget that we all start out female, and that the template for human beings is female, and that males are highly specialized versions of females. Testosterone shuts all that ?unnecessary? emotional processing off for males in the womb so that we can worry about doing dangerous things and making tools, and inventing pretty much everything, without worrying about the needs of children or the danger that other women might ostracize us in a time of weakness, when we and our children need communal support to survive.

Applying that word budget to writing: I?m writing about 8K words a day on average now, with an average low of 5K, an average high of 10K, and a max of 25K on rare occasions. I?m not sure what that means. I know that if I dont talk to people all day, I write more, and vice versa. I also know that if I am writing for a competitive argument I write more than if I write in the explanatory neutral voice. But I also need to chat more than does my spouse.

We are the product of our genes. The universe is fascinating. Life is a miraculous luxury. And every breath of it is worth savoring.

khalid sheikh mohammed masters par 3 gwen stefani overeem laron landry mary j blige burger king islands

Parents get crash course in adoption - WREX.com ? Rockford's ...

Parents looking to adopt get a crash course in what it takes to grow their family.

The Children's Home and Aid Society of Illinois held an informational meeting at United Methodist Church in Belvidere today.

Case Manager Jennifer Mitchell says there's lots of different reasons families want to adopt children and today they got to learn about domestic, international, and foster care adoption.

"There's a lot of ways to build a family and families don't always know what the steps are and what the costs are what all is involved some of them have thought it's a bigger and scarier process than what it is," said Mitchell.

Mitchell says there's plenty of opportunity to learn more about adoption.

Visit www.childrenshomeandaid.org for more information.

young guns concord safe and sound botticelli x factor winner footlocker julia gillard

Baseball's big hit may be wind, solar

19 hrs.

Move over steroids, Major League Baseball is getting more power the natural way.

Solar panels and wind turbines are popping up at ballparks across the country as part of a bid to make it easier for fans to embrace renewable energy on and off the field.

Most systems will provide between 30,000 and 40,000 kilowatt hours of electricity on an annual basis, enough to power the retail stores at Busch Stadium, for example, where the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals play.

The team noted that the 106 panels that were installed on a ticket booth and a concession canopy will amount to a ?modest? energy savings and should ?serve as an educational tool for renewable energy.?

Same goes for Safeco Field, home of the Seattle Mariners, where a 168-solar panel system was installed this year that will feed about 40,000 kilowatt hours into the stadium?s grid. Monitors inside the ballpark allow fans to track the amount of power generated.

"By making fans aware of how solar energy generation, even in places like Seattle, can make a difference for any site, perhaps more people will consider adopting solar power for their own energy needs," Jim Doyle, president of Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Company, which installed the system, said in a statement.

The Kansas City Royals, too, are showing off a shiny new solar array with the ability to produce approximately 36,000 kilowatt hours each year.

Solar panels are old news for Cleveland Indians fans. Progressive Field has had them since 2007. New this year is a prototype of a helix-shaped wind turbine designed by Cleveland State University professor Majid Rashidi.

The turbine will be installed for a year of testing, and is expected to generate 40,000 kilowatt hours. CNET has more details:

The wind turbine uses five off-the-shelf small wind turbines placed inside the grooves of the corkscrew. It's the helix shape, made of hard plastic, that boosts the power, Rashidi explained.

"Because you are creating an obstacle, you are directly funneling more wind into each turbine with the structure," he said.

While all this green energy tinkering at a ballpark near you might seem a tad gimmicky, consider this: baseball was the first sport to break the color barrier?and the first to broadcast live games on TV.?

--Via Scientific American

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website?and follow him on Twitter. For more of our Future of Technology?series, watch the featured video below.

neville new hampshire primary hue jackson alabama football coachella 2012 line up lsu crimson tide

Which came last, the dinosaur or the egg?

Scientists unearthed remains of a new kind of dinosaur and its eggs in Patagonia recently. The fossil find provides fresh clues to the past.

New evidence suggests that mama dinosaur likely perished at the same time as her eggs.

Skip to next paragraph

Researchers in Patagonia recently found skeletal remains of a newly designated genus of dinosaur ? Bonapartenykus ??near two broken eggshells. Examinations of the bones and eggs suggest that they may have been inside the creature at the time of her death.?

"So it looks like we have indirect evidence for keeping two eggs in two oviducts," Kundr?t told LiveScience. "They were close to being laid, but the female didn't make it."

Or maybe not. Other information gathered from shards of eggshells discovered later indicates that some of the eggs had been incubated, and therefore contained embryos at an advanced stage of development. In other words, some of the eggs may have been in the nest, not in the dinosaur.

Though the location of the eggs at the time of the mother's death remains uncertain, the 70-million-year-old fossils hold several more clues to the past.

The remains are from the birdlike dino which belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as the Alvarezsauridae. It's known as Bonapartenykus ultimus, named in honor of Jos? Bonaparte, discoverer of the first alvarezsaurid in Patagonia in 1991.

Measuring eight and a half feet long, it was one of the largest members of the family.?The feathered bipeds possessed birdlike skulls, small jaws with teeth, and strong but short arms that ended with a?sizable claw.

The eggs found with the mother's remains are unique, so researchers designated a new type of dinosaur egg?called Arraigadoolithidae,?named for Alberto Arraigada?the owner of the site where the specimen was discovered.

When Kundr?t, a dinosaur expert from Uppsala University in Sweden, examined the eggshells, he noticed what "turned out to be the first evidence of fungal contamination of dinosaur eggs."

Kundr?t told LiveScience of his discovery, "It looks like at the very late stage the eggs could suffer from the same contamination as in common birds."

These findings will be published in the June 2012 edition of the journal Cretaceous Research. The article is available online now.

hugo hugo nfl combine kevin durant 84th annual academy awards beginners 2012 oscars

Here's How Robots Will Save Our Lives in the Future [Video]

At the Navy's brand, new multi-million dollar LASR complex, researchers are creating problem-solving Siri times a million. It'll understand us! It'll be friendly! And it'll put out our fires by being just as smart as a human. We hope. More »


nj plane crash plane crash new jersey beef o bradys bowl the hobbit the hobbit an unexpected journey dark knight rises trailer dark knight rises trailer

Court Rules Software Not Protected By Fed Crime Laws, Overturns Conviction of Goldman Engineer

High frequency trading-thumb-225x149Before leaving Goldman Sachs to earn a millionaire?s salary with Chicago High Frequency Trading (HFT) startup Teza Technologies, Sergey Aleynikov made one last transaction. At 5:20pm on his last day, just before his going-away party, Aleynikov uploaded 500,000 lines of encrypted source code from the Wall Street firm's proprietary HFT system to a server located in Germany. Following the clandestine upload, Aleynikov deleted the encryption program, wiped his command history, and headed to the party. Although Aleynikov later managed to download the source code to his home computer in New Jersy before flying to Chicago, he was apprehended by the FBI while returning through Newark Liberty International Airport. But after his conviction at trial and imprisonment during the appeals process (his dual US-Russian citizenship presented a flight risk), Aleynikov is now a free man. The reasons why touch the entire software industry.

dallas clark litter marinol flight attendant robert griffin iii pau gasol trade michael madsen

Full Feeds Service Discontinued

Unfortunatly the time has come for this scraper to come down (seemingly it may come as a shock to some that this is not provided by the BBC). I wrote this back in 2005 and have modified it a couple of times since mainly so that I could more easily consume RSS on the move. In short, I no longer use it, I find consuming live news is not actually something an RSS reader does very well and I face a constant battle against sites trying to use these feeds to monetize BBC content and failing to pay any attention to etag or last modified headers (hello palin-pedia.com et al). Please update your RSS subscription as the last remenants of this will be removed soon , the official BBC RSS feed you are looking for is: http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml

packers vikings bob costas jerry sandusky chelsea clinton kat von d tiki barber minnesota vikings packers vs vikings

Reader Rants: Cagereaders take on the Olympics, Jon Jones/Muhammad Ali comparisons and advice for Rashad Evans

After you had plenty to say about Brock Lesnar, Brock Lesnar and Brock Lesnar last week, Cagereaders were a bit quieter this week. However, you still had plenty of opinions to share. Read on for the latest Reader Rants. If you want to join in, like Cagewriter on Facebook and comment on stories. Also, we still are looking for your picks on the UFC 145 main card, so go like the page and tell us who you're picking and why.

MMA fans look at the idea of the sport in the Olympics with a bit of skepticism.

That would be very cool, but the Olympics is very heavy on safety. Probably it would be like combat sambo with the headgear and shin guards, and maybe an elbow pad. -- Gab'bo Hofile?a Delgado

I can't see it happening. If all the title holders decided to fight in the Olympics that would mean 3-4 months with no title fights. It's hard to sell PPVs without title fights. -- Kevin Dailey

The UFC made another Jon Jones/Muhammad Ali comparison in a video posted on Cagewriter's Facebook page. Readers felt the comparison was a bit too early in Bones' career.

Purely fighting, okay, the comparison is fine. Young, talented, seemingly unstoppable. But Ali was culturally so much more than a boxer, and I like Jones but I don't see him as a cultural icon forty years after he stops fighting. -- John Wilcox

No offense to Bones, but that comparison doesn't fit as much to me as Ali to Anderson Silva. Same attitude, same long-term domination, not nearly the same cultural impact... but I think Silva would be the closest MMA fighter to compare to Ali. -- Jason Zachary

After hearing advice from Rashad Evans' mother on how to handle Jones, several Cagereaders offered their advice to Evans. Much of it is not very nice.

Fake an injury before the fight cuz jones is going to crush him. -- Doug Martin

The night before the fight, you pull a Tonya Harding! -- William Corral

Use plenty of ice for the swelling and lots of Kleenex to wipe your tears. -- Jimbo Thompson

jon bon jovi kim jong il died warren hellman survivor south pacific survivor south pacific house of wax patrick willis