Super Stretchy Material is Also Super Strong.

Looking for a new material that was tough, scientists developed one that also can stretch up to 20 times its original length without breaking. The new compound, a hydrogel, could someday be used as artificial cartilage, the researchers say.
A typical hydrogel (a gel whose particles are dispersed in water) can stretch only a few times its length, if that. Even natural rubber can stretch only five to six times its length.
But the new compound, made of alginate, polyacrylamide and water, proved to be far more stretchable and fracture-proof in tests. Harvard mechanical engineer Zhigang Suo said the scientists clamped it in a stretching machine and also dropped a stainless-steel ball on it.
Lab-made hydrogels are used in soft contact lenses, tissue engineering scaffolds, and drug delivery. Natural hydrogels include tofu (which can be nearly 90 percent water) and "many of our body parts," Suo said. "Cartilage, your heart, your brain can be characterized as hydrogels."
Incredibly enough, the stretchiness was just a side effect of the team's research, Suo said. "We are mainly studying this as a tough material. It happened to be very stretchable, but it really is tough."
A typical hydrogel requires only 10 joules per square meter of force to break. Current contact lenses, made of a hydrogel developed in the 1960s, will break after a few hundred joules per square meter of force. Human cartilage won't tear until it's subjected to 1,000 joules per square meter.

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"Our material, the fracture energy goes to about 10,000," Suo said. Since the two polymers that make up the solid part of the gel are "well-known biocompatible materials," the final product may make a suitable cartilage replacement, he said.
The material can recover from being over-stretched, Suo added. If it loses elasticity after being stretched too far, heating it to 176 degrees Fahrenheit (80 degrees Celsius) will restore its stretchiness and firmness.

Mysterious Material Remembers Its Shape.

A strange new substance acts like a liquid when exposed to air, but takes a solid shape when it's dunked in water.
The new stuff is a metamaterial, scientists' word for a lab-made material that has properties uncommon in nature. Even among metamaterials, however, this material is unusual -- it's composed of artificial DNA, while most metamaterials are composed of nonbiological chemicals such as silicon or copper. Its creators are calling it a "meta-hydrogel."
In the future, metamaterials made of biological stuff could go into soft, flexible circuits, according to a statement from Cornell University, where the meta-hydrogel was made. Because they have pores in which drug molecules could fit, meta-hydrogels could help release medicines slowly inside the body, the statement said.
Adding to its unusual properties, the new meta-hydrogel remembers its original shape. If it's made in a mold, it will return to its original, molded shape every time it's doused in water, even after researchers expose it to air -- and force it into its liquidlike state -- several times. The researchers made a video that shows the meta-hydrogel firming up into letters when a researcher adds water to it.
To get the meta-hydrogel to take on a new solid shape, the gel’s creators heat it to 185 degrees Fahrenheit (85 degrees Celsius) and set it in new molds.
When a team of Cornell engineers first mixed the chemicals to make their meta-hydrogel, they didn't know it would act so strangely. "This was not by design," Dan Luo, the lead scientist in the research, said. Luo and his colleagues have used synthetic DNA to make hydrogels, or gels composed mostly of water, before. This time, they wanted to make a DNA hydrogel with a different microscopic structure. It was only after they created their meta-hydrogel that they discovered its unique abilities, the researchers wrote in a paper they published Dec. 2 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Retina Display.

Retina Display is a brand name used by Apple for liquid crystal displays which they claim have a high enough pixel density that the human eye is unable to notice pixelation at a typical viewing distance. The term is used for several Apple products, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and MacBook Pro. As the typical viewing distance would be different depending on each device's usage, the pixels per inch claimed as retina quality can be different for the smallest devices (326, iPhone and iPod Touch): greater than the mid-sized devices (264, iPad) and greater than the larger devices (220, MacBook Pro). When an Apple product has retina display, each user interface widget is doubled in width and height to compensate for the smaller pixels. This mode is referred to as HiDPI mode by Apple.
Apple has applied to register the term "Retina" as a trademark in regard to computers and mobile devices with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Canadian Intellectual Property Office, and in Jamaica. On November 27, 2012 the US Patent and Trademark office approved Apple's application and Retina® is now a registered trademark.

Technical definition

When introducing the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs said the magic number for a retina display is about 300 PPI for a device held 10 to 12 inches from the eye. One way of expressing this as a unit is Pixels Per Degree (PPD) which takes into account both the screen resolution and the distance from which the device is viewed. Based on Jobs' magic number of 300, the threshold for a Retina Display starts at a PPD value of 53. 53 PPD means that a tall skinny triangle with a height equal to the viewing distance and a top angle of one degree will have a base on the device's screen that covers 53 pixels. Any display's viewing quality (from phone displays to huge projectors) can be described with this size-independent universal parameter. Note that the PPD parameter is not an intrinsic parameter of the display itself, unlike absolute pixel resolution (e.g. 1024 x 800 pixels) or relative pixel density (e.g. 72 PPI), but is dependent on the distance between the display and the eye of the person (or lens of the device) viewing the display; moving the eye closer to the display reduces the PPD, and moving away from it increases the PPD in proportion to the distance. It can be calculated by multiplying the distance to the screen times the PPI resolution of the screen times π divided by 180 degrees

Boost Creativity with Electric Brain Stimulation.

Cases of savant syndrome have inspired an electrical brain stimulation technique for boosting creative insight.

A great idea comes all of a sudden. In the depths of the mind, networks of brain cells perform a sublime symphony, and a twinkle of insight pops into consciousness. Unexpected as they are, these lightbulb moments seem impossible to orchestrate. Recent studies suggest otherwise. By freeing the mind of some of its inhibitions, we might improve creative problem solving.
The human brain constantly filters thoughts and feelings. Only a small fraction of the stimuli impressed on us by our environment ascends to the level of conscious awareness. Prior learning enforces mental shortcuts that determine which sensations are deemed worthy of our attention. Our laboratory is investigating whether we can weaken these biases and boost openness to new ideas by temporarily diminishing the neural activity in specific brain areas.

In Brief

• People with savant syndrome, who possess great skill in specific areas, seem to have a more literal, less filtered cognitive style than most people.
• A savant may have dysfunction in the normally dominant left hemisphere of the brain, which the right hemisphere compensates for.
• Using noninvasive brain stimulation, scientists are attempting to induce this pattern of brain activity, so as to produce a less filtered cognitive style and to access a different way of looking at a given problem.

5 Breakthroughs For Gadgets In 2012.

Innovation in the gadget business rarely comes in great leaps forward. Most of the time, somebody will take an existing idea and implement it at a cheaper cost, at a larger scale or in a new context, and that change is enough to shake up our sense of what technology can do.
And that's exactly what these five breakthroughs have done for me this year.
1. "Retina displays" grow up, and out. Two years after Apple's iPhone 4 introduced a display so sharp that you could no longer distinguish its constituent pixels, "Retina displays" started showing up in the Cupertino company's other gadgets (and many competing smartphones). On this spring's iPad, the results were amazing, instantly making the old model's screen look bad.
But on Apple's laptops, Retina displays have jacked up prices substantially. And on flat-panel TVs, ultra-high-resolution "4K" and "8K" resolution suffers from the fact that at typical couch-viewing distance, even mere HD resolution can exceed our visual acuity.
2. Cheaper smartphone service. This year, the cost of keeping a new smartphone finally started ratcheting down in a big way. The prepaid carrier Cricket Wireless slashed the monthly bill for an iPhone to $55, then its competitor Virgin Mobile beat even that with a $30 deal.
Among the four major carriers, Verizon Wireless may have hiked its rates but T-Mobile has gone in the other direction with "value" plans that subtract the usual subsidy of a cheaper phone price, meaning you save more over time. And next year, that carrier will make that its standard.
3. Affordable gigabit broadband. While most Americans are stuck with the same one or two broadband Internet providers as ever, a lucky few can now sign up for breathtakingly faster connections at prices no higher than a low-end cable bill: Sonic.net charges just $70 for gigabit (1 billion bits per second) service in parts of the Bay Area, a price matched by Google's gigabit-fiber service in Kansas City.
Sure, most of us can't use those speeds. But imagine what the arrival of gigabit access for under $100 would do to your own ISP's pricing... or don't, if you'd rather not depress yourself.
4. Smarter shared transportation. Near-ubiquitous wireless-data service and cheap GPS sensors are making it easier and cheaper to get around cities without having to own your own ride. Among the most interesting such options: car2go, which broke out of its Austin test market this year with a launch in Washington this spring, followed by expansion to Miami, Portland, San Diego and Seattle. It allows you to rent a Smart fortwo at a cheap, per-minute rate and then park it on the street for free -- in effect, making it a longer-distance complement to bicycle-sharing services like D.C.'s Capital Bikeshare.
I'm equally fascinated by startups that make better use of transportation we've already paid for, such as the Uber sedan-ride service. But when these involve privately-owned conveyances -- for instance, Lyft's carpooling -- they can run into legal hangups.
5. The Internet winning in Washington. One of the tech business's most promising developments didn't involve software code or circuit boards. But the way Internet users rebelled at the offensive overreach of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have broken the Net's basic routing system and allowed copyright holders to unplug the finances of allegedly infrinting websites pretty much at will, mattered anyway.
"SOPA" had the backing of some of Washington's most entrenched interests, but individual citizens who didn't want to see technology criminalized overcame all of it. That's good news for continued innovation, both next year and over the next decade.