Leeds University's School of Civil Engineering has received a £100,000 grant to work on a bullet-proof vest that is made out of cement.

The vest uses ultra-strong cement mixed with recycled carbon fibres and could work out to be up to 90% cheaper to manufacture than the current alumina-based vests.

The British army has been widely criticised for not providing the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan enough armour and protection.

Dr Philip Purnell, who is leading the research team said: "Cement-based body armour would not only create a whole new market but it would also take some of the pressure off the demand for hi-spec alumina models so that people like soldiers, who really need this kit, can get it."

I'm glad I'm not in the army. I wouldn't fancy lugging a cement vest around in the desert.

(via The Yorkshire Evening Post)

Really tricky one, this. Yes, the claws are a mighty impressive piece of work. Yes, the quick release action is almost as good as the real thing and, if it weren't for the whole retracting inside his body part, they'd be perfect. The trouble is that this guy comes across as a bit of a psycho.

Not quite sure what he has against cardboard boxes and I'm a little concerned as to what his plans are beyond destroying paper-based goods. Full marks for construction but perhaps it's time to flog them once the novelty wears off, as in, now.

(via CrunchGear)

The University of California is undertaking research, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that will allow the creation of remote-controlled beetles. The beetles remain alive, but unable to control their bodies as the chips take control of their wing muscles via their optic nerve.

I don't know what it is about this story that terrifies me most. It could be the fact that beetles are so easy to mind-control that you can just stick a chip on them and they'll do your bidding. It could be that it would be incredibly cheap and easy to build a vast cloud of evil cyborg beetles and send them at your foes.

It might even be that there's these poor beetles in California, alive, and unable to do anything but passively observe the remainder of their pitiful existence as their muscles spasm upon commands from military generals. I think it's a combination of all three, so how about we end this post right about now, before I start shivering helplessly.

Remote Controlled Beetles (via Hackaday)

More beetle news: Forest fire fighting beetle-like robots in development | Scientists invent human gills after studying beetles

Not content with owning the fastest computer in the world, the USA wants to keep its title, so it's ordered one fifteen times faster. The current fastest, IBM's Roadrunner, is designed for 1.7 Petaflops, whereas the new one should be able to crank out 20 - that's 20,000 trillion floating point operations per second. Impressive.

It'll be packing 1.6 million processor cores, putting my quad-core to shame, and will be based on IBM's Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. What are they going to use it for? Managing their nuclear weapons stockpile. Yes, they've still got that many. It'll occupy 96 server racks over an area the size of a tennis court, and use 6 megawatts of power.

While they're building it, they're building a smaller supercomputer to build the applications that'll run on the big one. "Dawn" will run at 500 teraflops. The only thing unspecified? How much the whole project's going to cost. I suspect it won't be cheap.

(via PC World)

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Landmine clearance is a dangerous, time-consuming job. It used to involve tools like flail trucks, plows and the simple metal detector, but none are good enough to hit the 99.6% standard set by the United Nations for humanitarian demining.

A Canadian company, Mine Clearing Corp, is trying to change all that. It's got a helicopter-mounted detection system that uses a ground-penetrating radar and metal detection system to detect buried objects from as high as 200ft up in the air. The location can then be pinpointed to as close as 20cm.

Once that's accomplished, minesweepers on the ground can use a tool called the Fig8 to locate the mine. Quite niftily, the swinging back-and-forth motion generates kinetic energy which powers the device, so it doesn't need batteries - useful in the third world. Considering that the UN estimates that someone dies every 20 minutes from a landmine, this should help step up the de-mining procedure.

(via CNET)

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This was a candidate for YouTube video of the week tomorrow, but it was so awesome that I just had to post it today. A man's built a TREBUCHET and it throws FIREBALLS. Oh, and it's called "Mongo". That's all you really need to know. Skip to 2:55 for the best bit. Have you built a siege weapon in your back garden? Take some photos and send them to us, and leave a comment below.

Geeks are Sexy (via CrunchGear)

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It's not all work, work, work when you travel to Las Vegas for CES and if the show floor disappointed in any way, shooting my first sawn-off pump action shotgun certainly didn't. It may not be a big deal if you're from the US but, as an Englishman, the first time I cocked that sucker and heard the echo of the empty cartridge against the shooting range floor, I took one step closer to Hollywood heaven.

Unsurprisingly, Nevada state laws are fairly liberal on the subject of firearms and The Gun Store is a place where tourists like me can go and have a blast with anything from a pea shooter to an assault rifle, and if you're a local, hell, you can even take one home.

Photos a plenty over the jump...

We've seen deadly iPod accessories before, but this is the first iPod accessory I've seen for killing people that aren't you. It's a handy iPod Touch mount for your sniper rifle. What do you mean you don't have a sniper rifle?

On the App Store, there's some matching ballistics software, called Bullet Flight. Though if you live in Washington DC, I wouldn't recommend buying it until tomorrow, unless you want a visit from the FBI. You can choose to correct for distance, wind direction, elevation and temperature. No coriolis effect, sadly.

In the meantime, it gets boring on a rooftop for hours on end - so what would be on a sniper's playlist? I've started making a Spotify playlist here. Let me know your suggestions in the comments.

(via the Firearm Blog)

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The other day, CrunchGear wrote up a useful, in-depth analysis of the Pirates vs Ninjas debate. They concluded the latter, but I think they forgot about the fact that Pirates are constantly drunk, so don't really feel any pain.

However, if a Ninja needed to leave you a note (saying you were 'next' or reminding you to buy some milk, perhaps), this is how he (or she) would do it. They'd sneak into your kitchen in the dead of night, silencing your dog with a poison dart, and then use one of these throwing star magnets to affix the note (written in blood, obviously) to the fridge door, or any other convenient metal surface.

Sadly the site that sells these BRILLIANT items is out of stock until January. We've known about these for a couple of weeks, but didn't want to get your hopes up about a sneaky Christmas present before now. Still, if you fancy pre-ordering for when they're restocked, then they cost just £12.80, plus shipping.

Epaulet (via OhGizmo!)

Do you like radio control toys? Have you ever wanted to own a World War II German killing machine? Do you have £6,600 lying around? If the answer to these three questions is "yes", then the 1/4 size RC King Tiger tank from Mark 1 Tanks is the perfect gadget for you.

It comes with two fully functioning treads powered by twin 500-watt, 24-volt engines and a pivoting turret with 2' gun. No mention of whether or not you can blow up your neighbours shed with it but there is a realistic recoil action.

You've got to love insane Americans living in the woods. This one has managed to combine a chainsaw and a gun in a real-life approximation of Gears of War's "Lancer" assault rifle. He claims it's a "Firearm Mounted Anti Zombie Device". We've got a video of it tearing up pumpkins right after the jump, and there's plenty more on the AR15 forum post, too.

Italian police have discovered the Mafia's latest tech weapon in an early morning raid on a hideout in Naples. This a mobile phone gun and it was confiscated along with a pile of bullet proof vests, drugs and other munitions. The .22 calibre device can hold four rounds, each one fired out of the fake phone's aerial.

For a minute I was going to suggest that it was a ridiculous disguise, far too basic to fool even the most stupid of bystander, but thinking about it, I'm sure Doro make one just like that (bullets not included). If you want to see a video of how it works, then do like the button says and continue reading.

Well, we thought we'd get a little more savory today after last week's celebration of World Toilet Day here on TD Tips and instead we've chosen to take another serious issue and make is as silly as possible.

With all the media hoo-har over the possibility of handing potentially lethal taser weapons over to non-specialist trained police officers, who may or may not suffer inferiority complexes and large chips on their shoulders, we thought we'd take our pick of the best non-lethal self defence gadgets that money can buy.

The rules are that it must not kill and, as always on TD Tips, it must be available to buy now. Click on the dangerous image below to begin.

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News just in from the "scary shit" department is that the American army are looking into developing a number of technologies that wouldn't look out of place in Star Trek. Holograms, virtual people, and controlling peoples memories are all on the agenda.

The world is on alert tonight after intelligence reports have suggested that the Vikings may be coming back and launching a new wave of attacks. Unlike the only partially successful invasion 1300 years ago, this time it looks as though the hoards may have a new trick up their sleeves. From the country that brought us IKEA comes a new high-concept bedside table that can transform in moments to a battle ready club and shield (some assembly required).

A traffic jam caused by a runaway sheep in North Wales was solved by police using a Taser. The police offer in question, when faced with the problem of how to move a sheep out of the road, decided the best course of action was to pull out his "non-lethal" electricity stun gun, zap the poor beast, and carry it to the side of the road, still twitching. One eyewitness observed:

"We came across a traffic jam and we saw there was a sheep in the road. Everyone had stopped their cars and a few people had got out and were trying to herd the sheep away from the carriageway. The police then arrived and they went towards the sheep but it moved away from them."

Military developer Northrop Grumman has a dream. A dream to create proper rayguns. A dream we would happily fund by paying extra tax and posting it off to the American government should it be able to pull it off.

But that's not necessary - it has already done it. Northrop will soon start testing a 100 kilowatt model of its Joint High Power Solid State Laser, which chains together eight smaller 15kW models. It has already successfully tested a chain of two. We're not sure what effect 100kW of focused energy has on an enemy, although we would suspect - and indeed hope - it can make heads explode.

Here's a terrifying quote from Northrop Grumman's chief harbinger of doom:

"Our march towards providing compact, electrically powered, operationally scalable and affordable laser weapons for U.S. military services continues to produce world-leading results."

Which is pretty much just a nicer way of saying "YOU WILL ALL KNEEL BEFORE NORTHROP'S MIGHTY DEATH CANON OR YOU WILL BE OBLITERATED."

(Via Old Reg)

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Why am I so excited by these tyres? I was going to ask you/me/the ether that very question but I've answered it even before I managed to tap it out into Movable Type. I'm excited by these tyres because they're completely brilliant. They're cool. I hate to use that word but they are. They're cool.

These tyres are cool because they're a game changer - another phrase I can't stand. Unfortunately, the game in this case happens to be military warfare but it seems some good can come out of the practise of killing people.

The NPT has been developed by Resilient Technologies as part of their $18m grant from the Pentagon (I wonder if they'd give me one of them?) and it's made of a honeycomb structure that's enough to hold up the weight of a Humvee with enough give for a little cushioning. Oh, and if you don't believe how tough honeycombs are, just go and pick a fight with a bee. They is from the streets I tell you.

It may be a niche market but it seems there's now a gadget out there for the amateur bomb disposal enthusiast. It's called "The Bomb Defuser".

Now for my money, if I buy something called "The Bomb Defuser", I'd like it to do most of the work, you know, like defusing the bomb, but that's not how "The Bomb Defuser" works. Instead, what they offer is basically a Leatherman-style pen-knife with all the instruments you could possibly need to make a really bad job of saving the world should you find a tactical nuclear device under your bed.

Meet the Wasp Knife. Wasp Knife's creators had a problem. It seemed that boring old traditional knives weren't quite deadly enough, so they decided to evolve the long-standing design and put a compressed gas cylinder and firing mechanism into the handle.

The Wasp Knife is designed to fend off marauding sharks and hungry bears, and mainly aimed at divers, downed pilots, lost hikers, etc.

This is how it works: after taking all necessary precautions to avoid unwarranted animal protection groups haranguing you at a later stage - possibly by first letting the predators have a nibble on your least favourite limb - you can then insert the blade into your attacker. Next you depress a conveniently placed button delivering a frozen ball of compressed gas through the blade which inflates to the size of a basketball (!) and freezes your target's organs.

Hit the turn for a video showing what stabbing a harmless watermelon with a compressed gas empowered knife does for you.