1. Liquidmetal
Smartphone firms including Apple are very keen to use Liquidmetal, and you can see why: it’s twice as strong as titanium, exceptionally scratch- and wear-resistant and can be moulded into incredibly intricate shapes.
This week’s Apple rumours suggest it’s being considered for the iWatchcase and future iPads, but for now Apple’s Liquidmetal adventures haven’t extended beyond the SIM card ejector tool for the iPhone 3GS.
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2. Willow Glass
We’re all familiar with Corning’s Gorilla Glass, the super-tough glass used in smartphone screens. Willow Glass is its successor, and its incredible thinness – it’s roughly the same thickness as a standard sheet of copy paper – and flexibility – it can be bent into curved shapes – mean that the touch-screen devices of the future needn’t be thick or flat.
It can be produced in much the same way newsprint is made, and according to Corning “there’s no known limit on how thin the glass can go.”
3. Starlite
Starlite is a plastic that’s able to withstand incredible amounts of heat – nuclear explosion levels of heat – and can be moulded into any form, and while we’ve know about it for two decades it’s never been used in any commercial product.
That’s because creator Maurice Ward, a hairdresser from Yorkshire, was so paranoid about somebody stealing his invention that he refused to licence it. Ward died in 2011, and it’s unclear what happened to his formula: some say that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax, while others say it’s real and that Ward’s family still have it.
If they do, they’re sitting on a goldmine: as James Rivington explains, “the applications for it are near infinite” – but “no scientific mind has ever been able to work out how it works”.
4. Metal Foam
As the name suggests, metal foam is metal with a lot of holes it in: it’s a metallic structure containing huge numbers of gas-filled pores. It’s very strong, but as more than three quarters of it is empty space it’s also exceptionally light.
That makes it particularly well suited for applications including prosthetic bones and joints, construction, soundproofing and heat insulation. It’s particularly interesting to car manufacturers: it’s a very effective shock absorber that adds strength without also adding weight.
5. E-skin
Engineers at UC Berkeley have created what they call e-skin, a plastic film containing a transistor, organic LED and pressure sensor in each pixel.
It’s flexible and can be laminated onto almost anything, with possible applications including touch-sensitive controls in cars, wallpapers that work as touch screens or robots with a very delicate sense of touch.
TECH+GADGET NEWS by geekdonsignals 