Liquid

Besides having to remove our shoes, the volume limitations regarding liquids and gels in carry-on baggage has become a major hassle in the world of post 9-11 airport security. Hopefully, however, we may soon be able to once again bring our big bottles of water and tubes of toothpaste aboard airliners in our overnight bags. Britain’s Cobalt Light Systems has developed a scanner called the INSIGHT100, that uses laser light to assess the liquid contents of containers, even if those containers are opaque.  Read More

Cat litter might not seem like a particularly exotic substance, but it contains a mineral known as sepiolite, which is actually rather remarkable. Mined from only a few sources worldwide, sepiolite is a type of clay that absorbs 2.5 times its weight in water - that's more absorbent than any other known mineral, or any manmade material. This is made possible by its crystalline structure, that maximizes the amount of internal surface area available for soaking up liquids ... such as cat pee. Recently, an international team of scientists have obtained X-ray diffraction microscope images of sepiolite for the first time. Using the information provided by those images, a cheaper, easier-to-source synthetic version of the mineral could be created, and used in everything from batteries to food.  Read More

If you’re into camping but miss your creature comforts, you’re going to love Arzum’s Termotwin, which was on display at IFA 2010. It’s a vacuum flask that consists of two separate reservoirs that keep liquids at the same temperature for up to four hours – so milk and coffee or brewed tea and hot water (or I’m thinking maybe rum and cola!) are ready when you are. Now that’s good thinking.  Read More

One of the downsides of the lithium-ion battery systems used in electric vehicles is that their performance, reliability, safety and durability can be negatively affected by extreme temperatures. When the all-new Ford Focus Electric debuts later this year in the U.S. it will be powered by a lithium-ion battery – no news there. What is interesting, however, is that the battery system will use cooled and heated liquid to regulate battery temperature, which should extend battery life and maximize driving range.  Read More

By creating specific kinds of tiny structures on a material’s surface MIT researchers have made a liquid spread only in a single direction. While this may not appear to be a momentous breakthrough it has important implications for a wide variety of technologies, including micro-arrays for medical research, inkjet printers and digital lab-on-a-chip systems. Up until now the designers of such devices could only control how much the liquid would spread out over a surface, not which way it would go. This new system changes that.  Read More

Yep, you read it right, spray-on glass. It could revolutionize the fields of agriculture, medicine, fashion, transportation - really, it would be easier to list where it might not be applicable. The remarkable product, called Liquid Glass, was developed by the German nano-tech firm Nanopool GmbH. Their patented process, known as “SiO2 ultra thin layering” involves extracting silica molecules from quartz sand, adding them to water or ethanol, and then... well, they won’t tell us what they do next, but the end result is a 100 nanometer-thick, clear, flexible, breathable coating that can be applied to almost any surface. We’re told that there are no added nano-particles, resins or additives - the coating is formed using quantum forces. The possible uses are endless.  Read More

Spica is the brightest star in the constellation of Virgo and also the inspiration for this visual loudspeaker lamp system where sound vibrations force illuminated liquid within a transparent tube to dance to the music and makes the spectrum analyzer on my hi-fi appear somewhat dull by comparison.  Read More

Researchers from the Center for Future Chemistry at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, have been exploring a new kind of organic light-emitting diodes that use a generated liquid to transfer electrical charge, addressing problems such as flexibility and quick degradation in standard OLED technology.  Read More