Slow it down, Hank
I worked with a type of hydrogel in my one summer of actual benchtop research at Miami University twenty-some years ago, and I certainly never would have imagined them to have the properties described in today's video. I was just looking at the ability of the get to absorb and subsequently release transition metal ions, so I wasn't exploring their mechanical properties, admittedly.
SPNs, in case you were wondering, are supramolecular polymer networks, networks of polymer chains held together by - according to this video - non-covalent bonds like intermolecular forces like hydrogen bonds.
Halfway through the video, Hank makes a turn to a possible application of a particular SPN that was used to help paralyzed rats to regrow nerve cells and allow them to 'walk' again. That's a long way from human trials, but the initial study sounds amazingly promising.
