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Army castrates heraldic lion
Published: 13 Dec 07 12:34 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/9398/

Protests from female soldiers have led to the Swedish military removing the penis of a heraldic lion depicted on the Nordic Battlegroup's coat of arms.

The armed forces agreed to emasculate the lion after a group of women from the rapid reaction force lodged a complaint to the European Court of Justice, Göteborgs-Posten reports.

But although the army was eventually happy to make the changes in the interests of gender equality, the artist who designed the insignia was less than pleased.

"A heraldic lion is a powerful and stately figure with its genitalia intact and I cannot approve an edited image," Vladimir A Sagerlund from the National Archives told Göteborgs-Posten.

Sagerlund blasted the army for making changes to the coat of arms without his permission.

"The army lacks knowledge about heraldry. Once upon a time coats of arms containing lions without genitalia were given to those who betrayed the Crown," said Sagerlund.

But the castrated lion has already won the day and is now worn on the arms of all soldiers in the battle group's Swedish battalions.

"We were given the task of making sure the willy disappeared," Christian Braunstein from the army's 'tradition commission' told Göteborgs-Posten.

"We were forced to cut the lion's willy off with the aid of a computer," he added.

The Nordic Battlegroup is one of eighteen such military groups in the European Union. Some 2,000 of its 2,400 soldiers come from Sweden, with the rest coming from Finland, Norway, Ireland and Estonia.

Paul O'Mahony (paul.omahony@thelocal.se/08 656 6513)

(...can forgive Briney because he has a jigawatt of storage capacity.)

Cloaking Device a Reality? Only if You're Very Small


Cloaking devices and technology have long been the fodder of science fiction, but researchers at the University of Maryland's James Clark School of Engineering have created a material that seems to fit the bill – at least in 2D. The device uses the properties of plasmons in its functionality.

Plasmons are electron waves which are generated when light strikes a metallic surface under controlled conditions. Plasmonics is a relatively new field though it promises to provide many beneficial scientific achievements.

The cloak itself is quite small, a mere 10 micrometers in width (PDF). The structure of the device is a simple thin layer of acrylic plastic with a pattern of concentric, two-dimensional rings atop a gold film. The ring pattern creates a negative refraction effect on visible light striking it, bending the plasmons around the object. While the light appears to have passed straight through the material, it has in fact gone around it.

Far from a usable cloaking system, the device only functions under specialized conditions and only in two dimensions. It is also not perfect invisibility as it only works on a limited range of the visual spectrum and suffers energy loss in the gold film. Three dimensional use of the material would be difficult because visible light would need to be controlled both magnetically and electronically.

Of a more practical purpose, the team has also used the unique properties of plasmons to develop a superlens microscopy technology which could augment existing conventional microscopes. The light bending techniques could allow a real view into nanoscale objects like DNA, viruses and proteins. The group believes they can still improve the superlens technology, bringing the resolution to an impressive 10 nanometers.

Plasmons could one day be employed in a variety of technology due to their unique properties. Since plasmons have very short wavelengths, they can be controlled with impressively small guide structures, much smaller than systems currently in use. As the waves are generated at optical frequencies, they could be used to carry impressive amounts of data in future computing systems.

Not surprisingly, the research has garnered attention from not only the scientific community, but government agencies and industries. One can only dream of the possible applications the military could have in mind for such a technology, less long advances that could be made on the optical computing frontier.