What on earth is "Liquid Metal"?
You've seen the writeups on "liquid metal", and how its going to be on/in everything from Apple, Samsung, Cars, Motorcycles, and quite possibly, killer robots from the future. The obvious question is, ignoring Mercury, what on earth is it? It turns out that its just a brand name for a particular kind of metallic alloy that cools slowly, and just gets more viscous (thicker) as it cools, to the point where its basically solid at room temperature. This is in contrast to "regular" metals, which are crystalline, and don't really have a given melting point. The point behind all this? Metals, being crystalline, are difficult to mold in to complicated shapes - you usually have to forge them into that shape which has all sorts of limitations in what you can actually do with them. This is in comparison to "liquid metals" which being amorphous (think glass) can be worked into all sorts of fun shapes when they are molten/viscous (really, thin...