  By comparing the response to external strains in metallic glasses and in
Lenard-Jones glasses we find a quantitative universality of the fundamental
plastic instabilities in the athermal, quasistatic limit. Microscopically these
two types of glasses are as different as one can imagine, the latter being
determined by binary interactions, whereas the former by multiple interactions
due to the effect of the electron gas that cannot be disregarded. In spite of
this enormous difference the plastic instability is the same saddle-node
bifurcation. As a result the statistics of stress and energy drops in the
elasto-plastic steady state are universal, sharing the same system-size
exponents.
