With the newsroom clock about to strike 11.30am Natalia Ariede, a 26-year-old reporter from Brazil’s biggest TV network, was gearing up for another day’s work.

Minutes later she was 2,400 feet over one of the world’s largest cities, racing to the scene of a road-traffic accident in her floating office - Globo television’s specially adapted four-seater Squirrel helicopter better known as the Globocop.

“Even if something happens on the other side of the city we can be there in 15 minutes,” she said as the aircraft swept towards its target across a seemingly endless sea of concrete dotted with swimming pools, helipads, shantytowns and abandoned warehouses.

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.

It sounds like the stuff of Batman comics - but the superhero suit is here.

Identified as a major breakthrough that could impact on every sector from the military to motor sports, the revolutionary shock-absorbent material d3o is taking the world by storm. Blessed with the kind of properties your average costumed crime fighter would kill for, it is being hailed as an invention with the potential to change entire industries and save real lives.