Someday your smartphone might be able to help you in a new way when you’re traveling: by telling you whether the water is safe to drink.
Although a water app isn’t close yet, researchers at Corning and elsewhere recently discovered that they could use Gorilla Glass, the toughened glass made by Corning that’s commonly used on smartphone screens, to make extremely sensitive chemical and biological sensors. It could detect, say, traces of sarin gas in the air or specific pathogens in water.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/533076/chemical-sensing-displays-and-other-surprising-uses-of-glass/