The heat of an active volcano. A 5,000 pound weight dropped from above. A sandstorm that lasts ten years. These are just some of the ways GE torture-tests the super-strong materials that go into jet engines, wind turbines, and more. And thanks to the company’s fascinating YouTube channel, we get an up-close view of the process. No safety goggles required.
Graphene may be the supermaterial to rule them all—but it turns out you can make it at home. In your kitchen blender. Here’s how.
A new water-repellant concrete impregnated with tiny superstrong fibers promises to leave roads and bridges free of major cracks for up to 120 years.
The human body at rest radiates 100 watts of heat—heat that does nothing other than make crowded rooms stuffy. But body heat can be converted to electricity, and new technology is always improving the process. With the rise of wearables, the body heat-powered device becomes an ever more tantalizing promise.
A renegade professor and his team at Iowa State just unveiled a mind-bending new technology. Put bluntly, they’ve created self-destructing electronics: gadgets that disappear with the flip of a switch. And, yes, it’s just like Mission Impossible.
In thermodyanimcs, there’s a concept known as triple point: it’s a combination of temperature and pressure where a substance can exist as a solid, liquid and gas, all at the same time. This is what it looks like.
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Surgeries, major or minor, virtually always require sutures—but they can prove uncomfortable and painful, or even become infected. Now, a spray-on film of biodegradable polymer nanofibers could replace them for good.
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Ceramics are an increasingly common material to work with—from hard-wearing bearings to heat-proof cladding on spacecraft—but they all share one fatal weakness: they’re fragile. Now, though, inspired by nature, researchers are making a ceramic that mimics mother of pearl—and is ten times stronger than normal ceramics.
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Many of us have suffered from broken bones, but it’s rare, outside of the most serious accidents, for bones to ever shatter. Now, researchers have worked out why: because our bones, it turns out, are filled with goo.
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Researchers at MIT have been busy creating a new type of biolfilms—sheets of living E. Coli cells combined with materials such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dots—that could provide large, self-aware surfaces.
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