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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!



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33 Comments »

Comment by xin
2007-09-18 16:39:13

WOW this is amazing.

 
Comment by spinzoa
2007-09-18 17:10:51

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.

 
Comment by NPC
2007-09-18 17:37:37

Holy crap!
Hmm I wonder what would happen if they dropped a watermelon.

 
Comment by fettlord
2007-09-18 19:58:40

haha cool

 
Comment by the overthinker
2007-09-18 20:34:12

That is pretty damn impressive magic….

 
Comment by Harvey
2007-09-18 21:29:55

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!

 
Comment by D-san
2007-09-18 21:32:25

I need some of that in my mattress.

 
Comment by shazzb0t
2007-09-18 22:55:47

Very impressive technology. In earlier days that might have been called witchcraft.. haha.

 
Comment by Virtual Dark Priest
2007-09-19 02:51:55

sugeeeee

 
Comment by Basarab
2007-09-19 06:04:39

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 :)

 
Comment by Stef
2007-09-19 10:02:51

just line the inside outside of cars with that stuff and the world could become one giant bumper-car ride.
Yayyyyy!!!

 
Comment by osgon anuchi
2007-09-19 20:48:43

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.

 
Comment by vic
2007-09-21 14:40:08

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.

 
Comment by skeptic
2007-09-27 03:13:43

Nice slight of hand by the magician, errrrr, reporter. He hid the real egg very well

 
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