What on earth is "Liquid Metal"?

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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, think glass...)

On a side note, they can also be ridiculous strong (for a bunch-a technical reasons).

In closing, I'll leave you with Ubergizmo pointing out that the future may actually be "liquid iron"
 [...]there are studies currently ongoing about a possible alloy mixture involving iron that would bring about a percentage of characteristics contained by liquid metal but will apparently make it 2-3 times stronger than the best steel around. In addition to that, it will be even lighter and would make materials like aluminum and titanium; a lightweight material of the past. In addition to that, if claims from the research group are true, it will be cheaper as well so that will help scale down the hurdle to subsequently allow this material to feature more broadly in our daily endeavors
Looking forward to the future here...

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