Neutral Ambiguity

laboratoryequipment:

Plastics Bleed, Heal, Mimic Human Skin

A new genre of plastics that mimic the human skin’s ability to heal scratches and cuts offers the promise of endowing cell phones, laptops, cars and other products with self-repairing surfaces, scientists report. The team’s lead researcher described the plastics, which change color to warn of wounds and heal themselves when exposed to light, at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society.

“Mother Nature has endowed all kinds of biological systems with the ability to repair themselves,” explained Prof. Marek Urban, who reported on the research. “Some we can see, like the skin healing and new bark forming in cuts on a tree trunk. Some are invisible, but help keep us alive and healthy, like the self-repair system that DNA uses to fix genetic damage to genes. Our new plastic tries to mimic nature, issuing a red signal when damaged and then renewing itself when exposed to visible light, temperature or pH changes.”

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Plastics-Bleed-heal-Mimic-Human-Skin-032712.aspx

(via fluorescentbird)

tarnagona:

lovelalaland:

jennifertiffany:

Wedding rings with the waveform of the couple’s own voices. “I do”.

If I married a fellow linguist…

So this is kind of incredibly adorable.

Although, personally, I think I’d rather have “I love you” rings.  And I’d have my boyfriend’s voice, and he’d have mine, and then I’d have him telling me he loved me anywhere I was, even if he wasn’t around to say it in person.  And d’aww, I would have all the adorableness.  Now I just need to convince my boyfriend that this is a good idea for if/when we get married. ;P

(I wonder if it’s a linguist thing to find waveforms so endearing…?)

Agreed, this is pretty adorable, and “I love you” rings’d be a lot better, too. “I do” rings are focusing too much on the married part rather than on the love part.

(Source: mohammed-so)