Video: A Ball of Metal Bounces Off a Thin Sheet of Super-Tough Hydrogel

Might make an awesome bedding material ha.

Well bust my balls, I found a replacement sack. No more knee knockers for me anymore! ;)

no bullet? so it has limitations

Depending on it's production cost, this could be usefull in a lot of practical applications. A replacement for tupperware comes to mind, or smaller collapable sails.

Yes, collapsible sails would be a very practical application. I wonder how well this hydrogel puts up with repeated stress, or how well it stops rips from growing. This could be stored folded, and deployed by stretching it over a frame on 2 sides, reducing the weight to surface area ratio of a sail.

This all depends on its durability of course, since sails tend to take quite a beating.

@crazystoner
It doesn't help you much if the material follows the bullet into your body. That's still a lot of trauma. However, I wonder if that would help seal up the wound having this material stretched over it. hmmm

balls of steel.....

I see a future of gooey crash barriers.

I would think this material would be far too elastic for use as sails. Too much of the energy of short gusts would be absorbed by the material instead of resisted. Also given the weight (hydrogel is very dense), a sail made entirely of hydrogel would not be much lighter than traditional substrates. A nautical application i could see however....Think of the lifespan of ultra flexible, self repairing seals and splashguards!

I am very interested also how this plays out as a cartilage substitute with its ability to self repair.

nighthawkich, that might be true of THIS particular iteration of the material, but one needs to remember that material engineers live for the challenge of adapting materials to specific needs.

Great point, dibn. But they have to have what I do first.

Uses: Valves and seals of all kinds, or if the material can be in contact with a solvent material of some kind, super slick, super responsive bearings for precision applications.
A newer, faster, more secure set of handcuffs, please. The next generation supertire. Better quality beach balls for my kids, for the billionaire who is free to use anything I suggest, a better heart for guys, gals, and companion animals.

Now when you get done making enough money to be able to pay your rent, could you have someone like Matthew Polk make me a set of decent new age 750 watt monitors free of charge? Let him know that if he calls me an audiophile, I'll go berserk. Call me sound junkie or somethin, dude. Sounds less like a criminal.

A non magnetic gyro stabilizer. Seismometers. Gimme a second, I'm goin for a real crusty one tonight for the sports fans. Put an atomic clock and NSA guided GPS in this stuff and make the damn magic football they beg for.

Always remember now, all our society is, is an idea. And what the philanthropist calls calls charity, I tend to call accountability in the only form it's ever really seen in this nation. Look at what THIS AMERICAN will give away free of charge. But what did a billionaire ever give me? Get your heads out of your butt pocket for a sec. The creativity and grit of the people put you there, so guess what?

Artificial lung. Maybe any organ, including a light reactive skin that color changes for radiation protection as well as breathes. I'd need to know the real material limits for their available mixes to give a million of em, but I reckon I'll struggle with random possibilities for a while yet for fun. This could easily be the eye analog they've been after for years, veins, muscle tissue. Don't know conductivity for nerves, so unknown on base or higher electrical functions, but tendons, maybe eventually joints, cartiledge, and bone. Don't know chemical resistance data for acids, sugars, enzymes, or hormones, but this very well could also be the cell analog. Cure cancer by absorption by one cell, while another is osmosis. Put some self growing info gathering gear into a coral and Aristotle's classroom automaton is carrying my speakers. The coral is this idea I like for a brain, and I've suggested it a few times over the years without much good responses back. I've never understood that because it's alive if you want it that way. Begin basing sentience there. Quit trying to get computers to be self aware spontaneously through speed and logic based mass memory for a sec and build a brain that becomes naturally self aware through real, living experiences. Then we will have truly created life. We create nothing but abomination risk for all biologicals with cloning. Take what we've learned in cloning to make this work at cellular level. Then, with it's preprogrammed brain hooked up, fire him up! Base biorhythms established. All of you multiple discipline Ph D's getting this down?

Now remember, Mr. QUADRILLIONAIRE!!! I want them speakers delivered in person. No tv or photo op either so don't even try it.

Now when you can afford a kid and college, you wanna cure Alzheimers? Use these to carry other healthy cells. Want a piggyback ride, Gramps?

Now that you are the defacto richest person on the planet, you can afford to hire me.

Wanna be a genius? Mentat, plugged in without a cord, baby. You gimme six weeks, and I'll graduate Guild Navigator training by bringing back spice from Arrakis, how'd that be?

First principles, always first.

By the way, we still have only one problem on the planet, folks. Lack of accountability.

Oh, yeah, for bone, coral might be a start. You want this thing to grow, right? Be alive from some original cell? Like I said though, just a start. Any efficient, usable bone is gonna have to be reinforced with carbon fiber or a glass-ceramic maybe. The question is, how to keep the bone alive, right? Same thing as the rest of it, circulation and transmission-reception. No reason you can't pump a flow of whatever you need in there. Food groups and minor processing. Thufir Howat tastes your food before he eats, after all. Marcus Aurelius would tell you to mind me now; because I haven't told you the meaning of your new fortune.

Man can retire. Cha CHING!

Suggested exploration, The Seventh Prince of San Severro. First good human analog as far as I know, but China or somewhere might have developed one as well.

Some believed the Wednego (sp?, Native America, could make a falselife corpse that was truly vile.

Maybe they thought it was vile because of their sancti mortis. See, we'd have to give these 'people' a base in life somehow, so that's a good one. Operational lifetimes on a crude idea like this could be short at first, but possibilities build on the speed of thought.

Eventual adaptation of the brain isn't what we're after. If a more advanced brain analog is developed, keep plugging it's processing capabilities into that first one, to see where it leads. The living sentience with perfect health for all things is going to have to be far more useful than humans, but we're just at idea. Don't come at me for a million lines of code, I think that's stupid. Base it's sensory prime on us, which means morals vs needs if we wanna live alongside these or not. So try to load in the full engineer package vs overall sensory awareness vs full accountability for humans and themselves based in sanctity of the body as I am once in a while on a polite day.

Initiate with an acquire, full system grind protocol, meet and greet. Get that purse, and run it back.

But til we die now we have to be satisfied with our world to have saturation, please procreate responsibly in this time of adjustment before they learn to break rules. The first time something breaks is critical when it's in the presence of any life. A universe can go wrong there. Value jugement: human approaching nearby registered concern in eye, breakdown while spinning for first time, but no human hurt. Second time, human hurt. And on and on as it learns as people and animals get hurt. Vegetarians we'd be to be full life partner. Eat fish equals kill ok to eat. Human on human murders equals kill for greed or sometimes random sport or anything else like full war. It will be what we are. That's the dealio.

Wanna rule the world, read. Dinks. There's a fine set of books by Richard D. Bach, who went down in his plane near Friday Harbor last week. I suggest every human on the planet read every word he ever wrote before this is fully implemented because demolition derby really is stupid and you all know this is outta the bag now. We are one or there's only one left.

The perfect unbroken first one that doesn't get activated til all are dead.

Humanity jumping offworld just got important, huh?

Tired of cash is king yet? Those that are not ain't doing no favors right now, like making damn sure they are offworld, and the only way we are going with them is if cash dies a grand old king's death. A society placed in accountability, or none. Today.

To PopSci from a loyal longtime subscriber and lifetime reader on planet Earth: Thank you in your overall efficiency rating in bringing the world to my house to join the other stuff I grind all these years, you did your job and gave it to me to rule simply. Accountability, for myself and everyone else.

At the end of the day, I've killed no one. I've harmed no one without amends. I've allowed what I can't stop alone.

What you've done is up to you. Judge harshly, because the only way to stop johnny now...

Bring them home. Open all plants. They are tools, not wealth.

quasi44,
You home alone, aren't you...

Yeah, my sugar momma works nights. She better. I did for years, most with days at the same time. Now I tend to type with two fingers and the side of my thumb because I'm pretty well caved in cartilage wise all over. I've had multiple hand operations now, but they've made things worse in many ways. You've heard the story before, no doubt. Same old thing. Three kids with insurance now, but not us workin folk. I'm not greedy enough for everyone else apparently. Here I've thought all these years that the millions in work value performed was the idea for our society. So at the end of this new day I'll go to bed another genetically damaged, less than intelligent, apparently, human.

So now I'm gonna try to remember the skinny on the details I thought up. Oh, yeah. So on nerves and higher electrical function, apparently this stuff can be used as semiconductor, but I have no accurate range of limitations for materials, especially when a hydrogel nerve passes current beside the range of resistance for everything else needed nearby. Now with the eye, it's not hard for me to imagine self-aligning cones or whatever, if they are floating in a lesser dense inner collection component. Or, a transmitter to cone to retina to cortex in a hardwired one, where each cone has it's lead attached. That does give the dark meaning as well as light. Signal to turn on infrared or ultraviolet. Put a screen behind for catching xrays. See gamma for survivability. This thing is gonna be sensitive to stuff like that, so it better damn well be able to see and count what it, and we, need. Just like us, the olfactory is one, at least at first. May need to specialize, especially in an offworld environment where this has to eat from offworld compounds. We appear to have only one choice as a skin in this scenario, total photonic and radiation turning. As we can't yet make anything that doesn't accumulate radiation toxicity, let's maybe find a way to route it with confinement channels. Like a chunk of bandwidth through my Linux. Then things like parity or polarity are germane as well, just like us. Skin may have to be a high velocity high oscillation cell replication in the offworld life. With a continual shedding, unless you want to risk bringing Seiverts onboard. Magnetically seal the inner from the outer body. Flush with something heavy metal that can be made liquid without actually melting from heat, like a bunch of gold dust with some acrylic soup or something. Maybe just gold and buckyballs of some kind?

Thinking in first principles means in the ideal, this thing only eats. Call it smell if you want, but don't be mislead. Waste transfer means more food product. But rather than use the old American Standard, we vent waste through skin, as spit. Call it breathing and sweating if you want, but the skin may be used to eat as well. We eat air through our skin. But anything collected or expelled this way must be magnetically suitable. If we have to use a high volume bowel, it collects Seiverts and now has cancer, folks. But if we can channel through skin, lower densities of isotopes. Same with the sensory packages, especially optical. If it can't dump it's dead. On Mars, low atmo means low sound, so skip it in the normal sense and go pure tactile sensitivity at first, with WiFi, of course. This thing's gonna rock Pandora from Mars if we want by the time I'm done. So that it can vocally represent all sounds right beside a human in any environment, even underwater or buried in landslide.

Is this gonna be a high tech biological or what? On Earth, it's far more forgiving. These mermaids will scour the oceans on foot for manganese nodes, or dig right in with a custom mining apparatus. Repair aquifer damage. Dig in and dripline irrigate the world from underground, and laying in gunnite barriers for making damn sure dead zones are dead. Kill oil blowouts from inside the well eventually. In mining coal we risk not just cave in, but explosion and fire. Suffocation. Due to the conductivity in the metals and gases, we can get fire via friction easily. Kill the local electrical charge rather than something stupid like halon that removes precious oxygen.

By the way talkin dump waste from the eye cavity means photons too. Laserbeam active, anyone? I'll tell you how this is going, and you won't believe what you are reading. Want a TRUE quantum computer for a planet? See you next post right here on this same channel, so don't twist that dial.

Laserballtag via high discharge two way optics, create our grid and magnetically bind it, with processing done outside the grid rather than inside.

Would a billion of these self aware to subatomic levels people playing lasertagball be a good enough attempt to suit our quantum curiosity? Nah, don't trip.

Cuz I ain't told you the best part. These will eventually understand the quantum dynamic through electron-state-moment. It would be inevitable, if it knows what we do, and can directly manipulate particles like photons and electrons.

It will have all that radiation data already onboard, both what we know, and what it is passing. So with those base components, it will grow in refinement which naturally, we think, ends in either causality or singularity event. But we'd have to specify that our knowledge is still theory, as it's own must be to keep it from thinking it and we are done now. Not the question of all existence for a goal, but the continuation of life in an eminently hostile environment posed by a galaxy. But it would answer stuff like fusion, maybe a lot sooner. These things might turn into fusion powered brains before long, and then the quantum game is in full swing. Sentient suns. Read about Malik once. He's a pain in the butt. But my idea is more today. That is gonna be significant, too, for a reasoning capacity. We don't want them looking at the human history in a timeline vs risk assessment, folks.

Oh, the sentient sun and Malik reference. It's a scifi book I read years back, which seems now to have been written during the NOVA years at Lawrence Livermore, if I remember, so the entire precept is based in fusion via laser and tritium deuterium.

I tried going back to college, figured I'd try computers; which I'd deliberately ignored since my original college days on an Apple 2 GS. I've always known I'd learn them, but having worked in physically demanding trades, and being a machinist in metal and wood, and tool n die worker and complex machine operation floater in plants of all kinds has kept them outta my head. So, not knowing a damn thing but CNC, I go sign up for computer science. I go to this computer rebuilding outfit and bought a Pentium 4 i386 platform booted with Mepis 7. Dude asked me, do you know anything about a computer? No, sez I, but don't trip. Says he; you need to understand this is not Windows, but a real full access system requiring knowledge. So I took it home and had it overclocking in a half hour or so after going online once. I don't need overclocking anymore. So I order the history of computers as assimilated by somebody or other which explained binary concepts and the 10 year old quantum theories. But I had not received it yet on the first day of class, so in I go, to wait my turn to tell Prof what my goal for computers was. When I said I wanted to copy the boards on the Ascot 2 opensourced telecomm satellite and run them as virtual machine and offer to the web, he said gloomy warnings of NSA and military intervention of my health.

Then the next class hour I go into the room and find out they train coding, which means a beta testing job, which would drive me nuts, not to mention not being able to get that outta my hands. Code is NOT intelligence, it is secrets. It is not awareness, Dr. Turin. Only living experience, with life to lose is awareness. So now, while still talking to Prof once in a great while, I haven't seen a classroom since. Think I'm worth hiring anyway? No one in my town does. They only wanna know which letters go behind my name, not how to be a pentillionaire.

Eventually it will be that our genes and brain activities will be seen right through our bodies, and that will decide who is worthy. While I've had many an employer come at me after a week to say they never did get an actual application or resume out of me, you'd think that would be some indication that I think the app and resume are performance, not performance indicators. But I'm not worth a job, though I've never been fired and could go back to some state and employer and be hired immediately, if I could still perform. So anyone want a weird job junkie with bad hands? I've also been waiting to take a stab at chemistry and geology. My brother identifies any rock he sees, and that pisses me off because my family rockhounds. And I'm very bored. Anyone wanna get rich? Rule the galaxy or somethin? Let's make a hotrod.

By the way. Both electron moment and photonic awareness coupled with radiation knowledge would have these things looking out from Voyager's skin in a few years, too. First person universe, anyone?

Alarmingly though, they'd easily be able to plant entire brains in our head by then, any instruction.

Which obviously means all this knowledge is coming from the future. This is what they want us to do. Your actions and thoughts are no longer your own. Get with the program. Or I won't remember how to top this critter for us.

This is quasi44 signing off, because I'm not as good as I was at 44.

Hydrogels may prove to be the next super element of the decade. Because they can be as heat shielding in biological and industrial 3d printing. To print organs they could hold scaffolding, and stem cells for vasculature to form in the body. While at the same time used to 3d print between bioplastic and human cells to create the complex vasculature in a 3d organ. The bioplastic viens dissolves over years and the hydrogel will be replaced with veins. That’s the concept.

In industrial application entire parts are formed plastic and hard metal because the hydrogel provides heat shielding the gel is dissolved away leavening a completed part. Hydrogel may even prove to be the substance of the decade by beating HIV by prolonging a vaccines presents in the body for it to work.