Science: In the near future your broken phone screen will repair itself in 30 seconds.

The cost of replacing a broken screen is usually high.

 The amazing glass that repairs itself in 30 seconds when it breaks.

It happens even to the most cautious of mortals: at some point, distraction through, the cell phone escapes from the hands and ends up on the floor with the screen shattered.

Replace it is often expensive, so many, if they are lucky that the phone continues to work, prefer to go through life with the screen broken.

But now, a team of Japanese researchers seems to have found a solution to the problem.

Led by Professor Takuzo Aida of the University of Tokyo, they created a new type of crystal that has the ability to repair itself.

Glass, which has the potential to be used for the screen of mobile phones and other fragile devices, is made of a lightweight polymer that recomposes its own breaks when pressed with the hands.

Unlike other previously created materials that "heal" alone, this polymer does not need temperatures in the order of 120º C to reorganize its structure.

It is repaired simply by pressing manually for 30 seconds, at a temperature of 21ºC.

Accidental discovery.

The magnificent properties of the material were discovered by chance by graduate student Yu Yanagisawa, when he was working on the creation of a glue.

Without wanting to, Yanagisawa cut the surface of the polymer.

He almost had no time to mourn the incident, when he noticed that the edges of the broken surface were sticking together again.

The young man repeated the process to check what he had just discovered and noticed that, in addition, the glass recovered its original firmness in a couple of hours.

The new polymer, the researchers said in the study published in the journal Science, is "very robust from the mechanical point of view while it can be quickly repaired by applying pressure on fractured surfaces."

"I hope that the glass that repairs itself becomes a new material friendly to the environment, that you do not need to throw when it breaks," Yanagisawa told the Japanese media NHK.

BBCWorld.

Novel method to rapidly and cheaply make electrical circuits by printing with inkjet printers.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.

Georgia Tech Develops Inkjet-Based Circuits at Fraction of Time and Cost.

Researchers from Georgia Tech, the University of Tokyo and Microsoft Research have developed a novel method to rapidly and cheaply make electrical circuits by printing them with commodity inkjet printers and off-the-shelf materials. For about $300 in equipment costs, anyone can produce working electrical circuits in the 60 seconds it takes to print them.

The technique, called instant inkjet circuits, allows the printing of arbitrary-shaped conductors onto rigid or flexible materials and could advance the prototyping skills of non-technical enthusiasts and novice hackers.

“We believe there is an opportunity to introduce a new approach to the rapid prototyping of fully custom-printed circuits,” said Gregory Abowd, Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech and an investigator in the study. “Unlike existing methods for printing conductive patterns, conductivity in our technique emerges within a few seconds and without the need for special equipment.”

Recent advances in chemically bonding metal particles allowed the researchers to use silver nanoparticle ink to print the circuits and avoid thermal bonding, or sintering, a time-consuming and potentially damaging technique due to the heat. Printing the circuits on resin-coated paper, PET film and glossy photo paper worked best. Researchers also made a list of materials to avoid, such as canvas cloths and magnet sheets.

“Everything we introduced in our research is available in the market and makes it possible for people to try this at home,” said Yoshihiro Kawahara, Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo and the primary investigator who developed the methodology while in Atlanta. “The method can be used to print circuit boards, sensors and antennas with little cost, and it opens up many new opportunities.”

To make the technique possible, researchers optimized commercially available tools and materials including printers, adhesive tape and the silver ink. Designing the circuit itself was accomplished with desktop drawing software, and even a photocopy of a drawing can produce a working circuit.

Once printed, the circuits can be attached to electronic components using conductive double-sided tape or silver epoxy adhesive, allowing full-scale prototyping in mere hours. The homemade circuits might allow tinkerers to quickly prototype crude calculators, thermostat controls, battery chargers or any number of electronic devices.

“Using this technology in the classroom, it would be possible to introduce students to basic electronics principles very cheaply, and they could use a range of electronic components to augment the experience,” said Steve Hodges, a team member from Microsoft Research.

To show the capabilities of the new technique for capacitive touch sensing - the interaction prominent in smartphone interfaces - and the flexibility of the printed circuits, the researchers attached a capacitive ribbon with embedded inkjet-printed circuits into a drinking glass. The capacitive ribbon sensor formed to the contour of the glass and, when connected to a micro controller, was able to measure how much liquid was left in the glass.

The details for replicating the process were presented at the 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2013) in Zurich, Switzerland, Sept. 8-12. The research “Instant Inkjet Circuits: Lab-based Inkjet Printing to Support Rapid Prototyping of UbicComp Devices” won a best paper award at the conference and can be found here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2493486.