Hope For Us Older Athletes

This pretty cool. Perhaps we are about to see a new era in sports with the introduction of the "super gel:"

A flexible but resilient gel that could be used as artificial cartilage to repair ailing joints is being investigated by US researchers. Made from polymers commonly found in shampoo, the water-based gel could help people with joint diseases like arthritis – a disease affecting 46 million people in the US alone.

"You can squeeze it or pull it by 10 times its original length and it still won't fall apart," says Eric Lin of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, US. "If you tried to do that with Jell-O [jelly] or any other material that was 90% water it would just fall apart."

Natural cartilage has comparable strength. Its gel mimic – first created in 2003 by researchers at Hokkaido University, Japan – is made by mixing two polymers with water in a specific ratio.

Imagine what it can do for pitchers who now require "Tommy John surgery" or running backs that blow out knees. The debate will rage about any records set by athletes who are surgically repaired with this gel. I'm sure, yet it would be revolutionary to say the least.