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Archive for the ‘materials’ category: Page 185

Jun 27, 2019

Adidas is making 11 million shoes out of recycled ocean plastic

Posted by in category: materials

The demand for these shoes has blown away expectations.

Jun 26, 2019

Physicists Are Making Solid Light

Posted by in categories: materials, particle physics

Circa 2014


A team of researchers from Princeton University has started doing some very strange things with light. Instead of letting it zip by at incredibly high speed, they’re stopping it dead: freezing it into crystal.

Crucially, they’re not shining light through crystal; rather, they making light into crystal. It’s a process that involves fixing the particles of light known as photons in a single spot, freezing them permanently in one place. It’s never been done before, and it could help develop new exotic materials with weird and wonderful properties.

Jun 24, 2019

Did Scientists Stumble on a Battery that Lasts Forever?

Posted by in categories: materials, nanotechnology

Circa 2016


Researchers studying nanowires have found a battery material that can be recharged for years, even decades.

Jun 23, 2019

In traditional Chinese culture Photo

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, materials

In traditional Chinese culture, qi or ch’i is believed to be a vital force forming part of any living entity. Qi translates as “air” and figuratively as “material energy”, “life force”, or “energy flow”. Qi is the central underlying principle in Chinese traditional medicine and in Chinese martial arts.

Qi translates as “air” and figuratively as “material energy”, “life force”, or “energy flow”. Qi is the central underlying principle in Chinese traditional medicine and in Chinese martial arts. The practice of cultivating and balancing qi is called qigong.

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Jun 23, 2019

With this graphene jacket, you’ll never be too hot, too cold or too smelly

Posted by in category: materials

The Goldilocks coat.

Jun 23, 2019

Elements of science and fiction

Posted by in categories: chemistry, materials

Scientists and non-scientists alike have long been dreaming of elements with mighty properties. Perhaps the fictional materials they have conjured up are not as far from reality as it may at first seem.

The periodic table of elements has become one of the defining symbols of chemistry. It is, of course, a handy chart of the building blocks that make up absolutely anything and everything around us, but it is also the outcome of the work of a huge number of scientists, which led to the current understanding of the elements’ atomic structure and behaviour. For those who like organization, patterns and chemistry, what’s not to love?

Jun 23, 2019

Would you like to be able to shoot laser beams out of your eyeballs like Superman?

Posted by in categories: entertainment, materials

The flexible lasers, less than a thousandth of a millimetre thick, work as free-standing films and can stick to different materials including banknotes and contact lenses.

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/…/science-has-peaked-we-can-now…/

Jun 22, 2019

Helaman Ferguson, Sculptor

Posted by in category: materials

Dimensions: 3.5″ x 3.0″ x 1.8″ Date: 1993 Material: original stone is virginia albamarle serpentine, reproductions silicon bronze Special Engraving: the matrix (0,1 | 1,1) Weight: 4 oz Copyright Notice: © 1993 Copyright Registered: 1996.

The Fibonacci numbers are ubiquitious in nature and mathematics. This palmsize sculpture encapsulates the generating matrix for these numbers. In a problem published 800 years ago, Leonardo of Pisa, a.k.a. Fibonacci formulated his famous rabbit problem: beginning with a newborn fertile pair of rabbits, how many pairs will accumulate monthly if each pair produces another pair from their second month on? The solution of this leads to a recursively defined sequence of integers, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, … This sequence has the property that two consequtive terms added give the next term.

The Fibonacci Matrix Torus has raised (esker) curves or continuous crests which wind around the torus either the short way or both the short and long way. This gives the matrix with first row (0, 1) and second row (1, 1) respectively. The powers of this matrix give matrices whose entries are always Fibonacci numbers.

Jun 20, 2019

‘Little Big Coil’ creates record-breaking continuous magnetic field

Posted by in category: materials

Compact high-temperature superconductor magnet reaches 45.5 T.

Jun 18, 2019

Scientists discover new type of self-healing material

Posted by in categories: materials, robotics/AI

A research group from RIKEN and Kyushu University has developed a new type of material, based on ethylene, which exhibits a number of useful properties such as self-healing and shape memory. Remarkably, some of the materials can spontaneously self-heal even in water or acidic and alkali solutions. The new material is based on ethylene, a compound that is the source of much of the plastic in use today.

Materials that can self-heal have become a popular area of research during the last decade, and a variety of materials have been developed. However, most of the materials reported to date have relied on sophisticated designs that incorporate chemical mechanisms into polymer networks, such as irreversible or reversible covalent-bond formation, hydrogen bonding, metal-ligand interactions, or ionic interactions. As a result, they require some , such as heat or pressure, to prompt them to heal, and in most cases, they do not function in water, acid or alkaline solutions because the chemical networks cannot survive such conditions. The ideal is to create a material that possesses sufficient toughness and can autonomously self-heal under various conditions.

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