Engineers have created a new material with an unusual chemical structure that makes it incredibly hard and yet elastic. The material can withstand heavy impacts without deforming - even when pushed beyond its elastic limits, it doesn't fracture, instead retaining most of its original strength.Dubbed SAM2X5-630, the new material has the highest impact resistance of any "bulk metallic glass" - a class of artificially generated materials first discovered in the 1960s that possess disproportionate strength, resilience, and elasticity due to their unusual chemical structure. That makes it potentially useful in a variety of applications from drill bits to body armor for soldiers to meteor-resistant casings for satellites. http://phys.org/news/2016-04-metallic-glass-secret-almostbut-quiteunstructured.html Paper: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep22568
At least your link admits metalic glass has been around for 5+ decades. It is usually made in thin ribbons as you must flash cool it (stream of water or oil, hitting the red hot ribbon sides) to prevent the normal tiny crystallization. Metglass is ideal for making low hysteresis cores of transformers but not much used due to the higher cost than sheet steel, which works quite well. (Thin sheets of either with non-conduction oxide surface keep the "eddy" current loses low too.) The Nature article is focused on shock waves in metglass. Are they suggesting it might be a better body armor, multiple thin layers?
