This one caught my eye, and WebGizmo's. He thought it was air freshener.
A spray on antenna. Imagine you’re lost in the woods with a phone but zilch bars, Or on the side of a road out where there’s zero reception. Maybe after a hurricane or disaster, and the only antennas are miles away. Or on a battlefield.
There’s a plane overhead, but you can’t call for help. Yes you can, now (well, on VHF in the example below, because that’s the band planes use), but it works equally well with phones.
“The aerosol spray coats an object's surface with thousands of nanocapacitors and spray-on particles that can turn a wall -- or even a tree -- into a transmitter. "Within five minutes we had" the tree "connected and transmitting on VHF to an airplane 14 miles overhead -- double the range we could get from a standard antenna on the ground," Sutera said. Sutera's team sprayed a third generation iPhone antenna with the material and boosted the signal by almost 10 percent. "What we're talking about is a profound way of thinking -- a whole paradigm change on antenna technology," Sutera said. "What we'd like to think about" are "ways to enable wireless connectivity anywhere."
So, with this stuff, you can reach twice as far at x milliwatts or, the prior distance at half the power. Maybe your phone will last twice as long on a charge? Or, say you’re driving down the road and this stuff is sprayed on the lane paint? You’d have wireless connectivity wherever you went. Without cell towers. And a real information superhighway. Couldn’t resist writing that. Sorry.
Turns out that even underwater this stuff works. Regular antennas? 50 feet. The spray on nanocapacitors? More than a nautical mile. That might mean life or death for submariners.
Also, the material can have further uses with relation to self powered communication nodes. Amazing… so, I wanted you to see it.
And they have prototype kits, too:
Source:
http://news.discovery.com/tech/spray-on-wi-fi-120214.html#mkcpgn%3dmsn1