“The new iPhone 3GS has a coating that helps you leave no, well hardly any, prints–-fingerprints. The glass screen is coated with a polymer, a plastic that human skin oil doesn’t adhere to very well,” Bill Nye the Science Guy reports or Gizmodo. “People in the chemical bonding business like to call the finished surface ‘oleophobic.’”

Nye reports, “Such a lovely Greek cognate may sound like it means ‘afraid of oil.’ And, it does, but it also connotes (or carries with) ‘aversion’ or ‘not-like-to-be-around-tivity,’ if I may. Instead of sticking to the bonded-plastic surface of your new phone, the oil from you fingers or cheekbone or tip of your nose stays more or less together as its own smooshed droplet.”

“The Applers were able to do this by bonding this oleophobic polymer to glass. The polymer is an organic (from organisms) compound, carbon-based. The glass is nominally inorganic, silicon-based… solid rock,” Nye reports. “The trick is getting the one to stick to the other.”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Judge Bork" for the heads up.]