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.

"I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous." So said the 1966 U.S. Poet Laureate James Dickey. One could only imagine how Dickey would react today if he had Google's latest AI project Verse by Verse by his side. He could whip out 150 drafts in minutes with 150 mere clicks of a key, and with those 50 additional clicks, sculpt his initial passages into the grandest styles of any of dozens of his literary peers. For all aspiring great poets today--and for all those whose poems simply suck--there is help.

Christie Rice, left, of Intel, welcomes panelists Jeff Donaldson of Intriosity; Dawn Dickson of PopCom; and Laura Rea Dickey of Dickey's Barbecue. Artificial intelligence has emerged as one of the most powerful tools for improving the customer experience, but retailers must be willing to accept operational change once they embark on their AI journeys. That was a key theme of a panel on driving innovation with AI during the Interactive Customer Experience Summit at the Omni Frisco Hotel in Frisco, Texas. Retailers will find themselves inundated with more data to manage, and they will likely uncover the need to make organizational changes and reassign some employee responsibilities. "Understanding how to use your data is the biggest thing," said panel moderator Christie Rice, worldwide kiosk and digital signage segment manager at Intel.