The Orange Goo That Could Save Your Laptop

Barence writes "A British company has patented what can only be described as an orange goo that could save your laptop or iPod after a nasty fall. The amazing material is soft and malleable like putty, but the substance becomes solid instantly after impact. You can punch your fist into a ball of the material sitting on a desk and not feel a thing, according to the staff at PC Pro who have been testing the material, called 3do. It's being used by the military, the US downhill ski team, and motorcycle clothing manufacturers to provide impact protection in the event of a crash. However, it's also appearing in protective cases for laptops and MP3 players."

Silly Putty?

[LS]

And this differs from Silly Putty how?

Re:cool stuff, but not for this purpose

[silanea]

In other words: Yes, the surface of your precious Macbook will be scratchfree after the fall, the harddisk will still be toast.

So? A new harddisk is cheaper than a new laptop. And since you diligently maintained your backups...

Oblig. Quotation:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, an excess of perspiration wafts through it like a napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel; feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books."

Ringworld

[chthon]

Larry Niven and Ringworld, anyone ?

Size queens...

[geekmux]

Of course. They evolved to be that way, to maximize their fitness in an environment full of size queens.

Yes, because never in our history (cough, Great Pyramids, cough) have we humans ever been accused of having inadequacy issues.

Somehow I think this "evolution" started well before someone thought to take a truck and bolt a "trunk" on it.

Re:cool stuff, but not for this purpose

[Miamicanes]

> So? A new harddisk is cheaper than a new laptop. And since you diligently maintained your backups...

Mod parent WAY up. It might be irrelevant for netbooks and cheap notebooks from Best Buy, but if you're talking about a kilobuck+ Macbook or high-end performance notebook, the hard drive isn't just one of its cheapest components... it's also one of its few components that can be easily replaced by end users, with a part that's readily-available even in small towns, often on sale, and frequently would result in improved performance over the original part. Try buying a new Thinkpad keyboard, Macbook case, or Dell motherboard at Best Buy on Sunday afternoon at some city in the midwestern US with a population of ~500k living within a fifty-mile radius. Hell, with the possible exceptions of Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and Akihabara , I doubt whether there's anyplace you could walk into a retail store and buy stuff like that at all, let alone on a weekend.

Re:I've got your goo!

[ArsenneLupin]

Maybe his mate had a bad case of diarrhea?

Re:I don't get it..

[Dekker3D]

wait... "stopping force proportional to the square of the speed"
so if something impacts it twice as fast, it'll push back four times as much?

doesn't that mean it'd be perfect in some kind of new body armour? if it's not too heavy to be useful, that is. or just on the parts that need the most protection..

Re:I don't get it..

[SkyDude]

Using it on a laptop is silly. The case is already a firm solid. You could get much better protection by just using a harder shell on the laptop.

Maybe being less clumsy would help? Just a thought......

Re:I don't get it..

[Muckluck]

Actually, I must take your disclaimer with a pinch of salt. You are an undergraduate, which implies that you are still studying. Since you are studying, this implies that you are using your brain trying to figure things out. This means that you have NOT yet reached the point where you "know it all" because you have been "doing this for years and this is how everything works". Work as hard as you can not to fall into this type of "Engineer Brain" trap. The older I get, the harder it is to fight... Thanks for a well thought out post and follow up. Makes sense to me...

Re:I don't get it..

[denobug]

Yes. to fit the poor soccer mom and her four pretty girl in a busy schedule. Or on a long family trip where the parents up front can stop hearing kids constantly asking "are we there yet?"

I hate to break it to the urban dwellers, but there are plenty of folks in Unites States that lives well outside of the city limits of a major city. I know plenty of folks who dislike the crowded city and choose to live in smaller towns. In the case where driving 100+ miles are short for a family trip over the weekend an SUV of reasonable size is actually very well suited for a family's needs. It is not evil (just as those small-town folks don't call a dirty major metropolitan bad--they just don't like it), it is just a different way of life.

I'm not suggesting that the we don't need to improve the gas miilage of the SUV category. I just think that the space requirements are truely appealing and there can be a compromise between the space and fuel efficiency, and the fact that one out of several vehicle a family owned in US is an reasonable sized SUV, not necessarily a beast such as a Suburban, is a bad thing.

Re:I don't get it..

[Anonymous Coward]

"SUVs are designed to kill people."

Yeah, but not the people in them.

And that is the real tragedy.