Ad: Manage updates with the Download App
  • CNET
  • All hrl posts

hrl

Breakthrough material is barely more than air

Call them a bunch of intellectual lightweights.

Researchers at HRL Laboratories, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Irvine have created what they say is the lowest-density material, a lattice of hollow tubes of the metal nickel.

Its volume is 99.99 percent air, and its density is 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter--not including the air in or between its tubes. That density is less than one-thousandth that of water.

The metallic microlattice, as the researchers call it, could be useful for absorbing sound, vibration, and shock. Other possibilities, according to HRL: electrodes that could … Read more

"Novel" receiver to protect electronics against electromagnetic pulse attack

A Malibu, CA company is developing a new system to protect military communication gear from high-power microwave weapons, nuclear blast generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and the mythic, directed-energy "e-bomb".

One nuclear airburst can unleash the EMP equivalent to 100,000 volts per square centimeter, frying computer, radar and communication equipment within hundreds of miles. It's possible to protect electronic circuitry from EMP with something called a Faraday cage, or covering it up with 1 inch mesh, grounded, copper chicken wire as they've done with FEMA headquarters; problem is-nothing gets out either, which defeats the purpose when … Read more