ApNano has tested armor said to be five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as any impact-resistant material used in protective gear.

Last year, a sample of the ApNano material was subjected to tests in which a steel projectile traveling at a speed of up to 1.5 kilometers per second slammed into the material.

Executives said the impact was the equivalent to dropping four diesel locomotives onto an area the size of a human fingernail.

They said the nano-based armor, which stemmed from a new carbon form called Inorganic Fullerenes, withstood the impact.

The company’s chief executive officer, Menachem Genut, said the company would launch initial production within the next six months. Genut said this would mean the production of between 100 and 200 kilograms of the nano-material per day.

Ka-BOOM!

This scenario — from a National Cancer Institute video — is just one possibility offered by the burgeoning field of cancer nanotechnology, where miniscule molecules are designed with literally atomic precision to combat a disease that kills half a million Americans every year.

“It’s 21st-century medicine,” said Vicki Colvin of Rice University’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. “It sits at the intersection of some of the greatest achievements in many different areas of science, from material science to cell biology to physics and advances in imaging.”

Indeed, the National Cancer Institute, which recently announced two waves of funding for nanotech training and research, sees nanotechnology as vital to its stated goal of “eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015.”