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Liquid crystals are widely used in technologies such as displays, which manipulate their orientation to display colors across the spectrum.
In traditional displays, liquid crystals are stationary and uniform, free of defects. But that stillness can be altered by adding bacteria to the crystals, creating what scientists and engineers call "living liquid crystals": liquid crystal, they generate "defects" that can be used for engineering purposes.
Researchers with the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, along with colleagues at UChicago-affiliated Argonne National Laboratory, have shown how this material becomes active and disordered through this process, creating floral patterns from the bending instabilities that eventually lead to creation of defects. But the results are not just aesthetic: They are an important step toward understanding how to ultimately control this material for emerging technologies that rely on defect formation.
[...] Living liquid crystals are an example of materials that can act on their own. In nature, these materials are responsible for the motility of cells. Proteins within the cells "walk" along the surface of polymer molecules and exert a force that causes displacement and motion.
[...] The researchers hope to use this information to be able to fully control these living liquid crystals. That would allow them to eventually create a new kind of microfluidic device that transports fluids autonomously without pumps or pressure, or to create synthetic systems that resemble cells and that could move autonomously from one place to another.
Emergence of Radial Tree of Bend Stripes in Active Nematics, Physical Review X (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.9.031014)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 29 2019, @02:19AM (1 child)
I have what I'm pretty sure is gradual moisture damage on one of my old laptop LCD screens, like this [imgur.com] but with more of a concentric ring pattern emanating from the left and right sides. Makes it look kind of biological, like a fungus. But it's still usable. That's what I imagine the failure mode could look like, but it could be far worse.
But the researchers aren't using this for a display technology:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 29 2019, @04:44AM
That looks like a crack and leak, more than moisture. I have had several laptop repairs with screen swaps similar. Sometimes the affected area where the LCD's leaking is immediately blown out to white (or more rarely black) but more often it's a gradual seep with gradient like that. That corner likely took a strike, not important if it was after installation or during shipping. Take it in for a lcd swap if you want.