Plants that eat metal sound like a biological impossibility. But these hungry little guys exist, sucking tiny bits of toxic metal from the soil. They don’t just clean the Earth, either—they can actually mine bits of gold and nickel for use by humans.
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We’ve heard about plenty of promising electronic applications for miracle material graphene from headphones
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When you drop a burning ball of nickel onto the world’s largest gummy bear, the synthetic gummy bear surprisingly wins
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After seeing the beautiful massive destruction that a hot ball of nickel can cause to honey
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Unlike the slow simmer, bubble and pop of running through honey, the hot ball of nickel just bursts into flames when it touches a chocolate bunny. After burning a hole into the bunny (sorry Easter), the goopy chocolate transforms the hot nickel into a burning ball of chocolate. I never wanted to eat chocolate more than seeing it burn, smoke and melt. [Cars and Water] More »
Because dropping super freaking hot balls of nickel is always fun to do, seeing it get dropped in various substances never gets old. This time, honey gets the hot nickel treatment. It starts pulsating like a geyser while getting all bubbly and foamy until it squashes the plastic container holding down the steam. At the very end, the honey turns into some kaleidoscopic goop. The video takes a while to get started but you can spend that time wondering what other things you can drop the ball in. [Cars and Water] More »
Nobody thinks about batteries—until they’ve run out of juice, of course. But this humble and surprisingly ancient technology has done far more for human civilization than most people realize. More »
Self-healing surfaces are theoretically the perfect solutions to easily worn-out gadgets, but our dreams come crashing down as soon as deliberate contact is involved; as existing materials don’t conduct electricity, they can’t be used in capacitive touchscreens and other very logical places. If Stanford University’s research into a new plastic polymer bears fruit, though, our scratched-up phones and tablets are more likely to become distant memories. The material can heal within minutes of cuts through fast-forming hydrogen bonds, rivaling some of its peers, but also includes nanoscopic nickel particles that keep a current flowing and even respond to flexing or pressure. The material is uniquely built for the real world, too, with resilience against multiple wounds and normal temperatures. While the polymer’s most obvious use would be for mobile devices whose entire surface areas can survive the keys in our pockets, Stanford also imagines wires that fix themselves and prosthetic limbs whose skin detects when it’s bent out of shape. As long as we can accept that possible commercialization is years away, there’s hope that we eventually won’t have to handle our technology with kid gloves to keep it looking pretty.
Stanford self-healing plastic responds to touch, keeps prosthetics and touchscreens in one piece originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Nov 2012 01:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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