When they become available, that is.

Its rock-hard surface can take a full-on assault from a baseball bat, yet remains flexible enough to allow you to kick, leap and roll with perfect ease. Crafted from cutting-edge science, its unique molecular structure means that while providing armoured protection against crude concrete and even barbed wire, it remains light enough to allow you to run at high speed.

This story in the Sunday Herald is about Richard Palmer, who invented something truly marvelous and was ignored by polymer industry bigwigs because what he did was impossible.

And yet it wasn't.

In 1999 Palmer sold his house and car, moved into a friend's spare bedroom and did it himself. Providing funding out of his own pocket, he kick-started the process in a garage lab, calling in academic help from friends where needed and pushing d3o to the point where it was ready for production.

Today the material they said couldn't happen is fast becoming a common component of cutting-edge protective equipment, with the d3o brand beginning to feature in a range of winter and motor sports products worldwide. It has been adopted enthusiastically by the likes of US Olympic ski team, the four-times Everest climber Kenton Cool and Olympic cyclist Craig McClean. Industry observers predict the miracle cloth could be earning annual global revenues of $2 billion within five years.

Since you are reading this blog, I can guess what you might be pondering.  I was pondering it, too.

While he intends to continue developing and enhancing his revolutionary new material, Palmer's Brighton-based development lab team has already produced a range of other products. They include a rigid Frisbee that folds like a soft handkerchief when you catch it, and the world's first bullet-proof wallpaper, a lightweight protective covering that absorbs and contains the deadly shrapnel generated when a projectile pierces most buildings.

At last, my dreams of a folding frisbee are answered.  But seriously, this brief article is a story of an outsider who almost didn't make it because he wasn't part of an industrial establishment.

And a Batman suit is no longer fiction.  Imagine that.

Or so I thought.  There is a place on the farm road near my house where the forest is quite dense on both sides of the road, and the creek is not too far away.  Consequently, wild animals use this area to cross the road quite frequently.  It is there that wild hogs cause plenty of night-time car collisions.  It's also not at all unusual to see deer, turkeys, and coyotes dash across the road.  Yesterday on the way home from work something that looked like a large cat without much of a tail bounded across the road in front of me.


"What the...???"  I thought.  "That was a bobcat!"

Today I mentioned it to my dad.  His ear is closer to the ground than mine, at least locally, and when I told him about it he was not surprised at all.  Turns out there have been lots of bobcat sightings in this area.  He even predicted that they are going to get "as bad as the wild hogs" if people don't start hunting them.

So I had my first real live bobcat sighting.  Cool.