The villain of the movie might have the right idea, though, when it comes to how future warfare will actually be waged. One might imagine there are incredibly strong cushions inside the suits, and in fact researchers have made foams made of carbon nanotubes, or pipes just nanometers or billionths of a meter wide, that are exceptionally springy and strong, perhaps just what Iron Man needs to prevent every bone in his body from being broken during fights. The armors shown in the movie show the mind-boggling ability to protect their wearers from blows that might otherwise liquefy them. Army and researchers also manufacturing exoskeletons in Japan.
Scientists are actually creating exoskeletons that can amplify strength, with two companies developing prototypes for the U.S. Stark's most outstanding invention of the movie is, of course, the Iron Man suit that brings all these technologies together. Although it seems unlikely that disk-shaped engines small enough to fit into boots or gloves could fly a man around at supersonic speeds, there are inventors who are say they are developing aircraft - flying saucers, no less - that fly around using plasma, electrically generating plasma on their surfaces and electromagnetically manipulating it for propulsion. Iron Man also flies around with plasma thrusters.
Researchers have recently even created what appears to be ball lightning in microwave ovens, which Iron Man's "repulsor blasts" resemble. Scientists actually are developing weapons based on plasma, such as the StunStrike, which essentially fires a bolt of lightning, creating an electrical charge through a stream of plasma. Iron Man fires pulses of the stuff, while Varko, who resembles the Marvel super-villain "Whiplash," uses what the novelizations say are plasma whips made of tungsten carbide wrapped in copper wire, with the tungsten carbide supposedly remaining magnetic even at extraordinarily high temperatures, thus holding the copper in place when it gets transformed into plasma at nearly 4,900 degrees Fahrenheit. Real scientists would probably not build cyclotrons in their basements as Stark did, however, and would probably want a lot more shielding to avoid death from radiation. The fictional vibranium and the real ununseptium were both created using cyclotrons, or circular particle accelerators that can smash atoms together to generate heavier elements. Still, physicists do conjecture the existence of an " island of stability" of super-heavy elements that don't break down immediately, which the vibranium in the film might belong to.
Unlike the vibranium Stark manufactures, the new elements scientists have actually created so far are all unstable, with only six atoms of ununseptium detected before they decayed into lighter elements. Scientists are in fact endeavoring to create new elements, with the most recent announcement coming in April of element 117, which bears the temporary name ununseptium. The novelizations that the movie is based upon notes this new element is "vibranium," a fictional energy-absorbing substance that pops up regularly in the Marvel Universe, notably in Captain America's shield. To avoid death from palladium, Stark instead creates an entirely new element to use in the arc reactor.
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