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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-vampires-are-made-of dept.

Spies and soldiers might soon be able to go behind enemy lines using a parachute or glider made from a polymer that vanishes on exposure to sunlight.

“This started off with building small sensors for the government — microphones, cameras, things that detect metal,” says Paul Kohl at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who presented the work at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in California this week.

The idea was that these sensors could be spread across a battlefield, say, and used to collect information for the army. “But you don’t want anyone to discover it and take it apart and see how it works,” says Kohl.

[...] They based their polymer on a chemical called an aldehyde and mixed in other chemical additives that can either make it rigid for use in a glider or sensor, or flexible to make a fabric for a parachute.

Sunlight or artificial light can trigger the material to go poof. Or, in true spy style, a small light emitting diode can be placed inside a device to trigger the self-destruct process on demand. All that’s left behind is a residue and a faint smell, which Kohl says are from the additives that control the rigidity of the material.

Kohl says he and his team have already made a glider with a six-foot wingspan from the material. It can only carry objects weighing about 1 kilogram, so it could only be used to covertly transport objects, not people, for the moment. The glider would have to travel under cover of darkness to avoid disintegrating in flight.


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  • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday August 27 2019, @07:40PM

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Tuesday August 27 2019, @07:40PM (#886326) Journal

    I would feel a lot more comfortable if the paranoid bunker dwellers did not seem to want to dissect my brain while I'm still living in order to make me a more accurate stick figure in their war game, or outright control the future of my country by playing miltary spy games on unsuspecting civilians while pretending to be under civilian control.

    Then handing all that data on me over to epstein and co so they can covertly ruin my life and get away with all crimes.

    Yeah, you can see my usa usa usa chant is growing feint...

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