Glassy gel is hard as plastic and stretches 7 times its length

When you think of gel, you might imagine goo – but a new gel-like material has been engineered to be soft enough to stretch to almost seven times its original length while still being strong and clear, like glass. Michael Dickey at North Carolina State University says his team discovered these "glassy gels" when his student, Meixiang Wang, was experimenting with ionic liquids and kept finding unexpected mechanical properties. The materials they devised are more than 50 per cent liquid, but as strong as the plastics used for water bottles, while also being very stretchy and sticky. "There are a bunch of cool things about them," he says. A hydrogen fuel revolution is coming – here's why we might not want it Each glassy gel consists of long molecules called polymers mixed with an ionic liquid, a fluid that is essentially a salt in liquid form.