Scientists come up with a way to grease-proof our devices

Now it doesn’t matter how big or how glossy or how vivid our smartphone/tablet displays are. Without fail our greasy fingers (and that of our friends/family/strangers) will stain our displays, leaving long and ugly fingerprints and marks on them at the end of the day. If you’re the type that can’t stand looking at a smudged display, the good news is that a team of German scientists have come up with a way to help remedy this situation.

This solution that these scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Polymer Research in Mainz have come up with isn’t exactly the most high-tech. They arrived at this solution through the combination of candle soot and silica baked at the right temperature. It was a rather low-tech process of holding a piece of glass over a candle flame to gather the soot, after which it was coated with a silica shell and finally baked at 600C which caused the soot to turn transparent.

They then tested it out by spraying the glass with a variety of oils that managed to bounce off the coating instead of sticking to it. The good news is that this new coating that they have uncovered works on materials such as aluminum, steel and copper too which means that our future devices could potentially be grease free! Wouldn’t that be something to look forward to?

[Image credit]

Tyler Lee
Categories: Concepts
Tags: glass, research, scientists