Both these videos are from German web retailer Innovative Materials, who apparently used to sell something called “superhydrophobic aerogel” in powder or granule form. In these videos, surfaces coated with this powder react in interesting ways to water. They seem to be sold out of the stuff, but a bit of Googling confirms that superhydrophobic aerogels do exist and can be made in many ways. Exactly what type was used in these demonstrations is unclear. [via Boing Boing]

Innovative Materials Blog: Aerogel Powder

More:
How to make water bounce

BY Sean Michael Ragan

I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I write for MAKE, serve as Technical Editor for MAKE magazine, and develop original DIY content for Make: Projects.

7 Responses to Cool Superhydrophobic Surface Demos

  1. How do you wash it off your finger?

  2. Michael Phelps on said:

    How long before an olympic swimmer coats himself in that stuff before a key race?

  3. Medical applications! :-) after some play time….

  4. Pingback: MAKE |

  5. An alternate company, call NeverWet.com is working on an arosol version of this powder. This is some really cool technology. There is more information on: http://superhydrophobiccoating.com/
    But I didn’t see where or how to obtain the stuff.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: