UV light heals scratched polymer paint in 30 seconds flat

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Go ahead, get your car and your laptop and your sunglasses all scratched up. A new "metallo-supramolecular polymer" can switch from a solid coating to a liquid under UV light, magically repairing scratches in less than 30 seconds.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve have developed a special polymer that changes its structure when exposed to UV light. It's specifically intended to be used on stuff that people own, from cars to furniture to gadgets. The polymer is made up of lots of tiny molecular chains, held together with a glue of metallic ions. When you shine a UV light on it, the metallic ions stop acting like a glue, and the chains separate into a liquid that fills in any cracks. Take the light away and everything turns solid and smooth again.

This process happens fast enough that you can just wave a handheld light over the surface you want to fix and it'll be good as new in about 30 seconds. And because of the properties of the polymer, you're not "using up" its fixing power every time you do this: you can scratch the same spot over and over and it'll just keep fixing itself right up.

The good news is that from the sound of things, the researchers are already in talks with a few different companies to get this stuff into the commercial market as soon as possible. When exactly that's gonna be is anyone's guess, especially considering that we've heard about this kind of thingonce or twice before, but hey, progress is progress.

Latest Duke Nukem: Forever trailer

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Remember how we promised that Duke Nukem: Forever would be working overtime to earn that Mature 17+ rating from the ESRB? This new trailer lives up to the challenge: it's got violence, gore, violence, gore, gore, monster trucks, gore, and boobies.

Hey, did we mention that this trailer is NOT SAFE FOR WORK? 'Cause it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

You've been warned.

PS3 Games - E3 2011 - Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem: Forever comes out for the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and PC on May 3 June 10 June 14.

G4, via Blastr

This one is for all my coffee lovers out there

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The window of enjoyability for hot beverages is pretty small: you've got about 30 seconds of 'just right' between tongue meltingly hot and disappointingly lukewarm. Giant magic beans with liquid metal inside use the power of physics to simultaneously make hot things cooler and cool things hotter, prolonging that ideal temperature.

Coffee Joulies are stainless steel coffee beans with a special phase change metal inside of them. 'Phase change' just means that it's a metal that goes from solid to liquid and back again, but doing that is a lot of work, and the metal sucks up a substantial amount of heat when it melts. This means that when you drop one of these beans into hot coffee, the bean's insides will melt and the coffee will get cooler.

It gets better, too. The melted nugaty centers of those beans will slowly release their pent-up heat back into your coffee after they've melted, helping to keep it from getting all cold and gross. The upshot of all of this phase changing is that Coffee Joulies can cool your coffee down to a comfortable 130 or 140 degrees Fahrenheit three times faster, and then keep it at that temperature for about twice as long. And the better insulated your container is, the more effective the beans are.

If you're picky about your temperature of maximum enjoyment, you can add or subtract beans to fine-tune their cooperative performance. By the way, yes, they're shaped like coffee beans, and they're sort of supposed to be for coffee, but they'll work on just about anything that needs to stay warm besides a vaguely gross-tasting brown sludge that makes people nutty.

Coffee Joulies are currently on Kickstarter and have unsurprisingly blown way past their funding goal, but there's still plenty of time to pre-order a set of five beans for $40.