Time crystals: from impossible physics to pocket security
Artwork by Affan Qasim, created using Gemini Pro
Imagine pulling out a 1000 Rupee bill and watching its security stripe pulse like a heartbeat, shifting, shimmering, and repeating in patterns no counterfeiter could fake. That’s the strange promise of time crystals, a form of matter physicists once thought impossible.
At the University of Colorado Boulder, researchers have just made the first visible time crystals. Born from twisted liquid crystals and light, they ripple with psychedelic tiger-stripe patterns that are robust, stable, repeating, and visible sometimes even to the naked eye.
This isn’t sci-fi fuel for a time machine, but it might rewrite how we protect currency, store data or create futuristic displays. Imagine displays that self-animate, shifting colors or patterns in rhythmic cycles, all powered by the physics of time symmetry breaking.
Layering different time crystals could create ultra-secure, always-changing holographic images or vibrant, shimmering surfaces for everything from wearables to architectural design. From “impossible” physics to potential banknote holograms, time crystals prove that sometimes, the wildest science can end up right in your pocket.
Snapchat adds infinite retention and group streaks
Artwork by Syed Alihasan Agha, created using Gemini Pro
Snapchat’s shaking up its playbook: the app famous for disappearing messages now wants your chats to live forever, and your friendships to stay on fire.
With “Infinite Retention,” you can pin conversations in place instead of watching them vanish, a bold swerve from Snap’s original here-today-gone-tomorrow vibe.
And “Group Streaks” turns your group chats into a collective game of loyalty: everyone contributes to one streak, meaning one lazy friend can tank the whole squad’s record. It’s Snap’s clever way of gamifying connection and making sure your group chats feel less like a drop-in and more like a daily ritual.
“Good morning, it’s a sunny day! Solve for X”
Artwork created by Daniyal Khuhro using Gemini
Nowadays, it feels like there’s such little innovation going around and more repackaging of the same old things.
Awake is iOS’s newest addition to the roster of alarm apps that force you to perform some sort of task or challenge before you’re allowed to shut it off. To set it apart, they’ve added more features to the app, such as providing the weather report, morning news, calendar events, and the like. They even have a block function for social media in the morning. In short: things we’ve already seen before, just rolled into one package.
But like most useful things in the good old 21st century, most features are paywalled at $19.99 a year or $6.49 a month.
They want you to pay for convenience, not novelty. As per usual.
