Word: kevlar
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...fusillade increased, the Rangers ripped up the bulletproof Kevlar mats from the floor of Wolcott's Black Hawk to fashion a makeshift bunker. The shield, however, provided only the barest protection, as Master Sergeant Scott Fales, 36, swiftly discovered. An Army special-forces medic who has saved 88 lives during his career, Fales was working on several wounded men when he felt himself slammed to the street. A bullet had ripped through his leg. Hunkering down next to the wreckage, he quickly bandaged the wound and then resumed tending his comrades...
...ANYONE KNOW WHAT CARbon fiber is? Modulus graphite? Boron? They used to put boron into gasoline, or at least into gasoline ads. Now it goes into wildly technological golf clubs and tennis racquets. Or is that argon? Or titanium? Neither of which is to be confused with something called Kevlar -- the stuff they make bullet-proof vests from. Kevlar these days is a very hot item. There are bulletproof Kevlar canoes, for example. And water skis. And bicycle tights. (A lie: the Kevlar bike tights, for the moment, are imaginary. But remember, you saw them here first.) The rest...
...them a daily diet of flies and, every now and then, flipping them on their backs to unravel yards of gossamer thread. The ambitious goal of all this effort: to unravel the secrets of spider silk, a family of materials stronger than steel, stretchier than nylon and tougher than Kevlar, the stuff used to make bulletproof vests...
Fine-tuned by 4 billion years of evolution, protein chemistry has a lot to recommend it. To produce Kevlar, for instance, requires vats of concentrated sulfuric acid that must be maintained at high pressure. But spiders produce silk in the open air using water as a solvent. "I am absolutely fascinated," says University of Washington materials scientist Christopher Viney, "that such an incredible material starts out as a solution in water, and all the spider does is squirt it out through a small hole. In the process, proteins that were soluble turn into insoluble fibers. Now, isn't that amazing...
...better in all directions, making the sail more able to adjust to wind changes. America 3's technical director, Heiner Meldner, a physicist who once designed nuclear weapons, says his sails are a composite of fibers, including carbon and liquid-crystal polymers. The Italians use a woven carbon-and-Kevlar fiber glued to a Mylar backing...