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Slippery Plastic
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File Under: Best invention ever. GE has made a cheap plastic so water-repellent even honey slides right off it. Check out the video at GE’s Global Research Blog (side note: check out the rest of the blog too; pretty interesting). You may have to right-click on the video and download it to view the full thing.

What does this portend? For one thing, ketchup (or shampoo or honey, etc.) bottles where all the ketchup slides right out with no coaxing. Technology Review imagines self-cleaning buildings and cool medical applications. (via Everywhere)

February 23, 2006 / Uncategorized

4 comments

It would be interesting to find out if this new form of Lexan can also shed Bisphenol-A the way polycarbonate does–or more, or less.

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Listen Datta, maybe you can drop your ‘bisphenol-A’ references on other blogs where people are ‘smart’ without having to ‘explain what it is’ — but this is Snarkmarket. Say whaaa?

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Heh. I was trying to keep the editorializing to a minimum.

Polymers are basically strings of building blocks, like a string of pearls. Any given polymer–DNA, Lexan, whatever–has to be made of component “mers”. In the case of Lexan—which is used in everything from Nalgene bottles and fighter cockpits, apparently–one of the components is a chemical called Bisphenol A. And studies have found that certain treatments of the plastic–srubbing, detergents, high heat–can cause the plastic to shed some of the Bisphenol A. And *other* studies have shown that Bisphenol-A might be nasty stuff in suficiently high doses. There’s the usual debate about how nasty, how high, and how much shedding happens–and the usual suspects of industry-funded researchers yelping about the numbers. The link above spells out some of those interests.

You can draw your own conclusions, but in the meantime I too have switched to Kleen Kanteen. For one thing, it made look just a little less conspicuously foreign during my recent trip to the motherland.

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Bah. Bisphenol, schmisphenol. All I want to know is will it keep this winter salt crap off my H2!

Er, I mean, Saheli, thank you for always helping me think a little differently about things. It is easy to forget that many of these things we take for granted as being “advancements” may come with rather significant tradeoffs attached.

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