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Scientists Develop Super-Slippery Material
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Anyone who is partial to ketchup with their food will know how difficult it is to get the final dregs from the bottle but now the Telegraph reports that scientists have created one of the most slippery materials ever that promises to result in new self-cleaning surfaces that never get dirty, could be used to coat the inside of bottles and jars to help consumers get all of the food inside, or in the energy industry for making oil flow more efficiently through pipes. Professor Joanna Aizenberg, a materials scientists at Harvard University, was inspired by the carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher plants, which has a highly slippery surface at the top of its flute-shaped leaves so that insects tumble down into the digestive juices contained inside. The new material, known as a Slippery Liquid Infused Porous Surface or SLIPS boasts a rare trait called "omniphobicity", which means it can repel both water and oily materials. "If we used substance like ours to coat the inside of bottles, it would be possible to get it all out," says Aizenberg. "The only problem may be that the sauce may come out a little too easily on to their food.""
Aperture Science Blue Repulsion Gel.
Contraceptive compatible?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044876/ -- We all know the ending.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
If it has good UV stability and doesn't block to much sun light; it would be great for use on solar panels that otherwise need to be cleaned in order achieve peak performance.
This opens a world of possibilities to the industry of underwear... First you don't need to iron, now you don't need to wash xD.
This was the first post
but it slipped down here.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
plenty of politicians are made of this stuff.
You can't handle the truth.
Think of the practical joke possibilities... floors, door handles... oh colleagues' coffee mugs.
I think the Health & Safety people are going to clamp down on this one.
no, it's the propulsion gel...for science!
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
bouncy != slippery
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
For ketchup, just put the bottle upside down. Gravity will place all the ketchup at the tip of the bottle. For bottles with nozzles, simply unscrew the top to get the very last spoonful.
Peanut butter on the other hand is more challenging. Natural peanut butter tends to flow easier so is not as much of a problem. But the generic peanut butter is quite sticky.
In other article covering same research project, they sadly say that said material is very temperature sensitive, thus unusable for cooking. Still nice curiosity.
Goatse
...what happens when this super slippery meets that super sticky gecko tape http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/07/1615221/gecko-inspired-tape-can-be-reused-thousands-of-times. Logic bomb?
FCKGW 09F9 42
Couldn't you use something like this to improve the efficiency of submarines, or perhaps aircraft?
Why re-invent the wheel, just skin a few politicians.
"SLIPS" sounds boring. Plus, it's the wrong word type - it look like a verb, but it's trying to be a noun. Not going to take off.
I propose the name "lawyerite", after the second-slipperiest material known to mankind.
Have a look at http://www.neverwet.com/ They also have some amazing case studies showing off what the material can do, and where some use cases are.
If you look at the top surface of an aircraft's wings(large airliners anyway) there are a variety of marked walkways with various messages to the effect of "ONLY WALK INSIDE THE LINES. NO, NOT THERE YOU MORON!" in large print, presumably to keep somebody from putting a foot through something delicate or falling off and cracking on the tarmac.
I assume that, in this use case, they'd coat the rest of the wing and either ignore or otherwise deal with the service walkways.
Not only does this extraordinarily slippery substance have a wide variety of possible uses, it can only be created by grinding and distilling PR flacks and advertising executives!
So... if this material is so slippery, how are they going to get it to stick to the surfaces they want to make more slippery?
This is sort of like "I've just invented an acid so strong it will eat through ANYTHING! It's right over there in that bottle... oh shit!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What about toilets, showers, sinks...
Be careful if you're thinking of applying this to your snow sled.
I found a video of one of the first tests of this material. They sprayed it on the bottom of a sled so they could measure how much faster it could get down the hill. The results are fairly impressive.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I put "rainX" on my cars' windshield and the visor of my motorcycle helmet. Maybe this material will be usable for that sort of application as well? Yes, UV light is bad, but I have to re-apply rainX every week or two as well, so it might be an improvement.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Remind me not to eat a meal that you've cooked.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
It's full of Santorum!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Specifically, one wonders about the environmental impact--how hard must this stuff be *to clean* when it gets stuck on something, for example? If we put it on a hundred million bottles a year, how will that impact the environment?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I'm tired of this bullshit articles. I mean, kudos to the guy who came up with this, and I'm sure it works great in a lab, but in real life it probably is just as good as teflon. And as someone who actually cooks, I can tell you that teflon is overrated.
You know what's a good non-stick surface? Take a good ol regular steel pan, the black ones. Rub it with cooking oil, and leave it to burn. You get a cloud of white smoke (man, a tiny bit of oil goes a long way!). When it's done, you have a layer of burnt oil that has penetrated every pore in the steel surface. BAM! Instant "teflon", wash your pan thoroughly with manual dishwashing detergent (don't use a dishwasher machine, it will take the layer off), and you're good to cook.
This is how pans and pots and everything has been "cured" for centuries, and works perfectly. It's how you treat a wok when you buy it, and it's what happens to your grill over time.
Wanna test it? Try frying an egg. On brand new, pristine condition Teflon, the egg won't stick. After a few uses the teflon surface gets microscopic scratches, and the egg starts sticking. On burnt oil? It never sticks. And every time you cook, some oil refills the new scratches so it auto-protects itself.
Forget all the condiments, what really needs different packaging is toothpaste. The current solution is wasteful and a major PITA. Toothpaste should be sold in big syringes (think caulk gun) that go into wall-mounted holders in the bathroom. Give it a crank, some toothpaste comes out. Then it's easy, no tube-rolling crap involved, and a toothpaste cylinder could last over a year - much more eco-friendly and easier to recycle than a shitload of dumb little tubes.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I distinctly recall that in the original Dune novel, , Paul Atreides is impressed by the frictionless containers used by the Freemen to hold water, and Dune was written in 1965. Nice to see reality catch up to science fiction.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
What about using this to line the inside of engine blocks to reduce the friction between the pistons/ piston rings and the block? Sort of an improved version of Fiber Reinforced Metal (FRM) lining that Honda has been using in most of their DOHC VTEC engines.
If they have anyone as cynical as that working there, they'll just make the bottle smaller, like they did with Innocent Smoothies, which are now down to 750mL cartons instead of 1L. Price is unaffected, of course.
Um ...
"and girl!"
I talk about stuff.
Silvio Berlusconi could have used this last week.
Have gnu, will travel.
Take a good ol regular steel pan,
Better yet, cast iron.
I hate Teflon pans, you have to cuddle them like a fragile little creature or they get scratched. In comparison you can scrub the cast iron ones with steel wool or even sand blaster them ( yes really ) and all it takes to get them back to pristine condition afterwards is a drop of veg oil.
Hmm, she didn't mention that to me.
They should just use politicians; you know, after grinding them up into a thin, tasteless paste.
Just a couple points I want to make:
- Nowhere in the paper is there anything about using this stuff in ketchup bottles. I'm sure the researchers seized on this when they got interviewed as a simple way to explain lyophobicity to a general audience, the effect of which was to make "getting all the ketchup out of the bottle" the only thing anyone remembers. Typical.
- As for the significance of the research, there has been a ton of work in the last, oh, say 10-20 years on superhydrophobic surfaces, which have texture on the scale of a few nm that prevents water or other high surface tension liquids from penetrating into these tiny cracks. The water drops energetically prefer to remain as spherical as possible and so the liquid is repelled. This doesn't work with low surface tension liquids like light oils because it would rather penetrate inside the texturing than stay in a roughly spherical drop. The neat advance in this work is the addition of a low surface tension liquid which is introduced into the textured Teflon or fluorinated silane surface and repels both water and oil. They can use lots of different chemicals for the liquid, so as they continue the research they will find that some resist high heat, others are bio-inert, etc etc. so there are many possible applications.
I remember the Moties in The Mote in God's Eye building a "toilet" that never needed cleaning.