September 12, 2005
Bullets: armor-piercing shells, gluten, and transferred toxins
It’s time for another bullet roundup. Lots of cool stuff, but without enough substance to really create a real post about them. Nonetheless, they’re worth posting about.
- New shells that use a chemical reaction to burn through armor plating are on the horizon. Instead of using depleted uranium shells which are toxic to the environment, the new technique uses to chemicals, that, when mashed together, create tremendous heat almost instantly, burning through armor. I wonder what this hopes to accomplish, save burning a hole in something. Will there be some sort of anti-personnel round underneath, or will the reaction simply burn everyone to death instead?
- New advances when it comes to isolating the toxins that cause wheat gluten intolerance. One person out of 200 in the West is affected by gluten intolerance, which severely limits their diet. A person who is wheat gluten intolerant cannot eat pasta, cereal, bread, or many of the other staples that most people enjoy. By isolating the two aggravating types, this raises hopes that wheat products without these two toxins can be developed.
- Household toxins can be transferred across the placenta. This isn’t especially surprising, since most foreign substances cross the placenta but it’s worth mentioning in the light of Hurricane Katrina. Jonathan has a good writeup in this week’s Science.Ars that explains why toxins in battered New Orleans are as big a health issue as disease proliferation through dirty water. In the case of a fetus, these toxins, including plasticizers, can cause significant damage to a developing baby.
| 6:00 pm |
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
Re: armour-piercing
The way this sort of thing typically works is you have one conventional bullet for every 5 AP rounds on the ammo belt. Remember that this is being fired from a machine gun, so putting a hole in the armor meens the next bullet will go through.
Comment by me — September 18, 2005 @ 9:12 pm
[...] Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans has encouraged residents to return to their homes this week, despite warnings from Vice Admiral Allen, the officer in charge of the recovery effort. While some progress has been made in the destroyed city, most of the city’s infrastructure remains offline, or extremely flimsy. This includes hospitals, firehouses, and police stations. 40% of the city is still flooded, and many of the parts that have been drained still have mud-caked streets, which contain unknown levels of pathogens and other toxins. [...]
Pingback by polyscience.org » The dangers of repopulating too soon — September 19, 2005 @ 12:40 pm