These articles just regurgitate press releases. The authors thus never bother to do enough of their own research to provide obviously-needed explanations, such as "What is Liquidmetal?"
So:
Metals typically cool into crystalline arrangements. However, was known that, if you cool the metal so rapidly that that the atoms don't have a chance to arrange themselves into a crystal, then you get an amorphous metal (also known as a glass state, since glasses are amorphous). And amorphous metals have certain desirable properties relative to their crystalline counterparts, including higher resistance to wear and corrosion, and higher tensile strength. Though, being a type of glass, they can be prone to shattering.
The problem is that the cooling needed to achieve this amorphous state was so rapid (millions of degrees/sec) that it could only be accomplished using highly specialized techniques on very small specimens, making commercialization unfeasible.
A few decades ago, a research team led by Atakan Peker of Caltech found that, by using particular combinations of relatively large and small atoms, the metal could solidify into an amorphous configuration without needing such extremely rapid cooling, thus making commercialization possible. Peker and his team patented these alloys as Liquidmetal, and the first commercial applicatin was released in 2003.
Source:
Here's a nice graphic illustrating the difference between a crystalline and amorphous solid (source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass )
