Kevlar is nice and all, but the next bullet-proof vest might be made of sticky goo. Colorado researchers are using specialized gels to fix knee injuries (and pretty much the rest of the human body). But a chemical engineering company called d3O lab has created the mightiest gel of all—one so strong that when an external force, such as a fist or the ground, hits it, the gel turns into a shock-absorbing material that hardens and soaks up the entire impact.
While the company has been testing the gel in sports equipment for athletes, the Ministry of Defense thinks the new goo may be capable of stopping bullets, so they’ve forked over $150,000 for testing.
The secret to how the gel works rests in chemistry (not magic), as inventor Richard Palmer explained to the Telegraph: “When moved slowly, the molecules will slip past each other, but in a high-energy impact they will snag and lock together, becoming solid.” So in this case, when a bullet hits the gel’s molecules, they bond together to form an “impenetrable” wall against bullets or shrapnel. But the solid state is only temporary—after the molecules absorb the shock and the impact stops, the gel becomes a gel again.
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• Social networking can lead to increased isolation, health problems, and harmful immune responses. So does that mean we shouldn’t post this link to Facebook?
• They tried to make us go to virtual rehab but we said no, no, no.
• No bird is too extinct to show up on a dinner plate somewhere!
• New manually dexterous robots promise to save all the world’s problems. Well, not really, but they can play rock, paper, scissors.
• One nice thing about the economic collapse: The U.S. couldn’t afford to build massive space weapons, even if it wanted to!
The iCEphone, developed by a company unfortunately called The Medical Phone, is a strange mish-mash of features and one of the weirder items to be seen at this year’s CES. First, the thing has a unique three-part form factor, with three slabs attached side-to-side by funky hinges that let the slabs fold either way–like a Z or like an S–and are stiff enough to hold the phone in any of those configurations (see the video if this doesn’t make any sense). The phone is ruggedized (including rubber bumpers), fairly large and bulky, and comes in bright colors like fuchsia and orange. It has built-in medical monitoring, a touchscreen, a trackpad, gaming features like multiple “triggers,” and a full qwerty keyboard, including the bonus Windows keys that let you perform such feats as the famous ctrl-alt-delete.
What, you may wonder, the hell is going on here?
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