A fun thing to do at CES: wrap orange goo around your finger and whack it with a mallet

Popular Science visits a goo hawker at CES 2012. (Via Salon)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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xzzy

Think they have that backwards, I would assume you want the material to go soft in an impact to absorb the shock. It’s the sharp blow that shatters screens, not soft ones.
That said, getting a handful of the stuff as a desk toy would be pretty awesome.
- Glen Able
  
  You’re right that a sharp blow would be transmitted through a hard cover. But a soft cover is obviously no good unless it’s very thick – the blow isn’t transmitted, but the mallet doesn’t get stopped.
  
  I think the trick is that the material hardens locally around the impact site and diffuses the energy into the surrounding soft parts.
millie fink

Seems like a good idea. I wonder what it’s made of. Is it another petroleum by-product?
- Florian Bösch
  
  Chemistry: 99.9% petrochemical.
- TheOven
  
  It’s corn starch and water.
rob_cornelius

isnt this just silly putty?
- Bozobub
  
  To the nth degree, perhaps.
- Gary Quick
  
  I have a pound of orange silly putty that looks pretty much the same.
  Silly putty will shatter if you hit it hard enough with a hammer.
  One way to look at it is that in a very short time-span it behaves like a solid. A very quick hammer strike. Over longer time-span it behaves more like a liquid. Where it oozes and you can easily stretch it slowly.
http://twitter.com/bigattichouse bigattichouse

body armor?
- Bozobub
  
  It would seem to make sense as an underlayer for some kind of segmented, hardened shell.
- http://www.lightning-rose.com/ LightningRose
  
  As envisioned by John Brunner in his 1968 novel, “Stand on Zanzibar”.
  
  http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1745
DreadJester

Looks like a starch and water mixture reaction. Perhaps it’s got a third ingrediant in it?
- http://www.facebook.com/david.guilbeault David Guilbeault
  
  Snake Oil?
http://beerandmilk.com/ Mark N.

Neat. A non-nutonian phone case!
rrh

I like the little touch that they give them both the same colour to imply they’re essentially the same, yet one’s a solid and one’s a liquid (Or non-Newtonian fluid) so they’ll have completely different properties.
- bcsizemo
  
  Agreed. Besides that phone case is how thick exactly? Even turning into a more “solid” solid there isn’t very much material to absorb an impact. I certainly think it be a fine and dandy phone protector, but I doubt it be much better than other things on the market.
  - TheOven
    
    I had a look at their other products and they make motorcycle gear, knee-pads for construction workers etc. There’s a huge market for something like this. Very interesting. Soon, this will be bullet proof. I wonder how much it weighs.
- ocker3
  
  Perhaps it’s a way of demonstrating the underlying properties of the material without a long, complicated (and trade-secret revealing) explanation of the actual product?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

I’ve been hawking up goo all morning. Not sure if I’d want to hit it with a hammer.
http://twitter.com/KatjaKat Katja

Repulsion Gel!
Hawkins Dale

Hogwash! If you look closely, that’s not his real finger that he’s wailin’ on.
- http://twitter.com/Listener43 Listener43
  
  I can tell by the pixels!
DreadJester

I’d like to see him wrap his finger in the thiner material that he says is actually in the phone case and hit it with the same hammer……..
- oasisob1
  
  Yes.
Joel Burton

http://www.d3o.com/ is the link to the company that makes the ‘goo’ you are seeing in this video
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=26109648 Jim Davison

So, is the legitimate? Or is the business plan is something like, “Find non-newtonian putty, make it orange. Take generic phone protectors, add trace amounts of putty, make them orange. Make infomercial style claims about their similar properties, and sell a bunch before people look too closely”
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kenahoo Ken Williams

I totally *smashed* the competition a few years ago in a neighborhood egg-drop contest by suspending the egg in a baggie in the middle of some oobleck (corn starch & water). It escaped perfectly unscathed.

Unfortunately about half of peoples’ eggs survived intact too, they weren’t dropped from very high, and parachutes etc. were allowed. So about half of us smashed the competition in a dozen-way tie for first place. But I was pretty sure mine was the awesomest. As did everyone else, probably.
http://profiles.google.com/daniel.goldsworthy Daniel Goldsworthy

This case won’t protect the phone from the sudden deceleration that it is still subject to. I imagine that this could cause internal damage too