No one is prepared for....hagfish slime

[LadyStanley]

No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime - The Atlantic



Looks innocuous, but 40ml can create a liter of slime (expands 10,000 times volume). And it's not sticky. Just a lot of it.

Indeed, it’s one of the softest materials ever measured. “Jell-O is between 10,000 and 100,000 times stiffer than hagfish slime,” says Randy Ewoldt from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who had to invent new methods for assessing the substance’s properties after conventional instruments failed to cope with its nature. “When you see it in a bucket, it almost still looks like water. Only when you stick your hand in and pick it up do you find that it’s a coherent thing.”

Weird stuff.

Science!

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