SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Jolting a super-stretchy, self-healing material with an electrical field causes it to twitch or pulse in a muscle-like fashion. The polymer can also stretch to 100 times its original length, and even repair itself if punctured.
Cheng-Hui Li, working in the Stanford University lab of chemical engineering professor Zhenan Bao, wanted to test the stretchiness of a rubberlike type of plastic known as an elastomer that he had just synthesized. Such materials can normally be stretched two or three times their original length and spring back to original size. One common stress test involves stretching an elastomer beyond this point until it snaps.
But Li, a visiting scholar from China, hit a snag: The clamping machine typically used to measure elasticity could only stretch about 45 inches. To find the breaking point of their one-inch sample, Li and another lab member had to hold opposing ends in their hands, standing further and further apart, eventually stretching a 1-inch polymer film to more than 100 inches.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday April 20 2016, @04:35PM
So eventually they had to stretch that 1-inch polymer film inch by inch until it became more.. like metric, like an enormous 254 of them even, cm ones. :P
The president has signed a decree to abolish those imperial ones and instead all schools will educate on the system of obamas. All volumes will be measures in presidential obama^3 farts, from there all other units can be derived by an army of special groups, special interests.