The Incredible Power of Beta Gel
September 18th, 2007 by James
Beta Gel is a soft silicone gel developed by Tokyo-based Geltec Corporation. It is an improvement of Alpha Gel, a shock absorbing Geltec gel that is currently being put to use in products such as shoe soles and the protective lining of portable radio equipment. While Alpha Gel is pretty damn good at softening blows, it loses out to Beta Gel in the following test:
Yes, that’s right: They dropped an egg onto a sheet of Beta Gel from the roof of a 22-meter tall building, and the thing didn’t break!
| Related Posts: |
|
Coming to Japan: high speed internet via power lines Best of Japan Probe 2007 – September to December The power of a cute girl (Video) |
Full RSS Feed
WOW this is amazing.
I almost wonder if I’ll be okay if I were to be dropped on that BETA Gel. It probably might have to be thicker…but then again even the egg was nicely intact. AHHgh this curiosity will kill me someday.
Holy crap!
Hmm I wonder what would happen if they dropped a watermelon.
haha cool
That is pretty damn impressive magic….
In elementary school in IOWA we had a yearly contest called the great egg drop. We would have a few days to build a contraption out of random materials that would would carry an egg from a fall off the top of the school without breaking it.
In our case, the contraption had to enclose the egg… But hey, put this stuff in a shoebox with the egg in it and you’ve got a winner!
Quick. Mail the stuff to Iowa. And we’ll start placing bets on the school kids!
I need some of that in my mattress.
Very impressive technology. In earlier days that might have been called witchcraft.. haha.
sugeeeee
No magic. Iremember me being a kid throwing an egg from my appartment, seventh flor all the way to the bys station down in a ten centimeter thick snow. Beleve me, to my disapointment the egg didn’t break. I went down to check it. It was as new. I suppose birds in Alaska never realy need stop flying to lay eggs
just line the inside outside of cars with that stuff and the world could become one giant bumper-car ride.
Yayyyyy!!!
My guess is that this is more a demonstration of the robustness of an eggshell than of a wonder material. The mat looks about 1cm thick, so the egg will undergo a huge deceleration over that distance, regardless of what material the mat is made out of. The mat, presumably, deforms to apply a braking force evenly across the lower part of the eggshell, rather than concentrated in one small region.
A human dropped form a similar height onto the mat would experience a similarly large deceleration, and would cease to be a living entity.
if a fresh egg didnt break in that fall, then i hope some jackass would try to jump from a building to that sheet of gel.
nothing to be scared of even a fragile egg doesnt break.
Nice slight of hand by the magician, errrrr, reporter. He hid the real egg very well