Home / Channel / General Tech / T1000 incoming: new liquid metal can move and conform

T1000 incoming: new liquid metal can move and conform

That's it, judgement day is practically a given and as usual, it's all the fault of those meddling scientists. Chinese researchers investigating unique properties of certain metallic alloys have managed to make a self assembling and self propelling liquid metal, which has the potential for a huge range of products and applications.

t1000
Most notably this.

The alloy is mostly made of gallium, a metal that exists as a liquid just under 30 degrees Celsius. It was discovered late last year that if you apply an electrical current to it that it can change shape, which is in itself quite a unique property. However, the new discovery that's been made with the specialist alloy is that if you ‘feed' it with chips of aluminium, it consumes them and exhausts hydrogen gas, propelling itself in a specific direction. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffxYE15JbPs']

Scientists now believe that with more research, this might make it possible to create liquid metal robots that can shape-shift and self propel.

“The machine has two processes. One is to create gases like hydrogen. Part of these gases form the propulsion. There's also something important, which is the electricity generated behind the alloy,” said professor Liu Jing from China's Tsinghua University (via Reuters). “So this galvanic battery creates an internal electrical power, and this type of electricity will very easily lead to stretching of the surface of the liquid metal in an asymmetrical pattern, and this pattern leads to rotations inside the liquid metal, and the process of these rotations will set the liquid metal in motion in a certain direction.”

Although the first thought in most people's minds is a T1000 like scenario, Liu believes this is more likely to apply to medical sciences, potentially being used to conform to certain body shapes for implants in places like the windpipe or digestive system. It could also be used, he said, to carry medicine to specific points in the body.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Pretty interesting tech. If they did make a T1000 out of it, we'd probably need that big vat of molten metal, as this stuff doesn't hit its boiling point until 2673 K, or around 2400 Celsius. 

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Nvidia says less than 0.5% of RTX 50 GPUs affected by missing ROPs

In recent weeks, early buyers of RTX 50 series graphics cards have discovered that their GPU does not meet the advertised specification. At first, it was thought that this issue was only impacting a limited number of RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti models, but this week, the first affected RTX 5080 was discovered. Now, Nvidia has responded with an updated statement.

3 comments

  1. yrt . true that Patricia `s report is impossible… on wednesday I bought Saab 99 Turbo since I been making $8569 thiss month and also ten/k this past month

    . it’s actualy my favourite-work I’ve had . I began this three months/ago and pretty much straight away was earning more than $75… p/h . you could try here HERE’S MORE DETAIL

  2. That is actually very cool. I’ve seen ferrofluids before but this is quite different

  3. There are a LOT of you smeggers who bought a Saab 99 Turbo on Wednesday, despite the fact Saab no longer produce any cars… if you bought second hand you have been had mate! Also you all seem to have made $8569 ‘thiss’ month, that’s really lovely for you all and thank you for rubbing it in our faces you lowlife scum 🙂

We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker.

Thank you for visiting KitGuru. Our news and reviews teams work hard to bring you the latest stories and finest, in-depth analysis.

We want to be as informative as possible – and to help our readers make the best buying decisions. The mechanism we use to run our business and pay some of the best journalists in the world, is advertising.

If you want to support KitGuru, then please add www.kitguru.net to your ad blocking whitelist or disable your adblocking software. It really makes a difference and allows us to continue creating the kind of content you really want to read.

It is important you know that we don’t run pop ups, pop unders, audio ads, code tracking ads or anything else that would interfere with the KitGuru experience. Adblockers can actually block some of our free content, such as galleries!