Indeed in the last few years, I've seen amazing gizmos being created and very sophisticated software as well. All of which have been created with fairly standard materials.
Sure we've seen some use of carbon-based materials and plastics showing great promise, including most recently some developments regarding graphene, a conductive material made out of carbon that is hundreds of times stronger than steel, almost transparent and conducts electricity.
While this is amazing stuff, other materials with even more direct practical properties have been coming our of the labs recently and we can only imagine how they could be used in a wide variety of applications, demonstrating properties that are even more amazing.
The video below talks a bit more about some of these particular materials with amazing properties:
There are of course many teams working on these super materials and there are many more than just those listed here but here goes just to give you a glimpse.
Self-healing
Without going into materials composed of living cells, one wouldn't believe that a non-living product would actually be able to repair itself. And even less something that has other interesting properties like being an ionic conductor.
Well, researchers from the University of California were able to make this stretchable material that can be designed to change shape when charged, due to it's ionic conductivity property, but also mend itself at room temperature, without further external help if cut, scratched or ripped. Bonus is it self-heals without losing any of it's other properties or effectiveness in function.
While anyone can think this can be used for any kind of surface, to keep it nice and scratch-free forever, these guys are thinking cooler: use this materials to make robot muscles that contract using electrical charge, in a similar way to organic muscles.
Touch power
Another great material that can see great use in a great many products is one that, when touched, generates electricity. While this is not that unusual these days, this one is also flexible and will generate more electricity if folded. The more folds, the more electricity it generates.
Because it is a transparent, flexible film, one can imagine applying this to just about any device operating by electricity and that requires touch contact to work with or activate. Set up this, way, you now have a device that can operate from the electricity generated by its very use. If the device is working, it is consuming electricity, but at the same time the operator is also feeding it with energy through inputs, swipes, taps etc.... A smartphone could potentially keep working without recharge for about a week with a thin film such as this on the screen (according to the team that has created the material).
Undesired molecule removal
Heavy metals in nature and especially in the water supply is definitively a water hazard. Scientists and engineers have had significant success finding innovative ways to capture and eliminate heavy metals for a long time, but now researchers in this field have gone a couple steps further.
At the University of Berkeley, they were able to engineer 3D molecules called LMOFs that can be used for different purposes. Some of them are engineered to selectively capture heavy metals as well as detect their presence using phosphorescence (a sort of light emission). These LMOFs can even be reused a few times before their effectiveness start to diminish.
And the bonus is, the structures doing all this are made from organic atoms that make them biodegradable and entirely harmless in nature.
Since these are specifically engineered, the process of making them can be used to help cleanup all sorts of molecular messes, toxic materials, poisons or even purify liquids by selectively detecting and removing specific molecules within others. We can even imagine applications in medicine where these LMOFs can be used to save lives.
We should all keep watch on developments in materials in the near future. Combining many of them into the next generation of consumer products can revolutionize how we live, most definitively.
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