Imagine it’s the late 1990’s.  The Backstreet Boys are playing without a trace of irony on the radio and Bill Clinton is President of the United States.  People are using dial-up modems and AOL for their Internet and email needs.  In Germany, in Pfinztal near Karlsruhe, a group of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology are inventing a renewable plastic that has wood-like qualities but can be cast by a machine.
Scientists Juergen Pfitzer and Helmut Naegele, working with Norbert Eisenreich, Wilhelm Eckl and Emilia Inone-Kauffmann found that lignin, …

I live in an apartment in the city, and while the demising walls between units are relatively stout, it should be noted that I often hear the shrill bark of my neighbor’s dog and the skittering sound of scampering paws.  On occasion my upstairs neighbor will take to jumping rope, which produces a curious rhythmic click-slap followed by a kind of “bam!” sound as said neighbor’s feet hit the slab above my head.  When I found out about Green Glue Noiseproofing Compound, I wondered what kind of damping effect judicious application throughout my abode might …

I just had one of those moments when you realize you’re compulsively writing about air conditioning.  This is my second post on the subject this month, and I can’t swear that it will be the last.  I’m most likely drawn to writing about AC because it’s summer in Texas and the heat index on any given day makes the national debt seem piddling and insignificant.  I’ll probably be writing about heaters in December, so you have that to look forward to in addition to the winter holidays.
The material on which I intend …

Every once in a while in the course of my quest to discover materials with architectural potential, I stumble across something so interesting that I emit an audible yelp akin to the bellow of an excited elephant seal, drop whatever I’m doing, and write a post about it.  Unfortunately this tendency has resulted in the accidental smashing of several objects, including one unfortunate incident where I dropped an ancient and rather valuable Ming vase on an unforgiving tile floor with predictably catastrophic consequences. 
Yesterday I learned that researchers at MIT have developed functional plastic fibers that can detect …

The content of this post can be summed up in two lines from the song Wheel in the Sky, written and recorded by Journey in 1978, which I hope is now as firmly stuck in your head as it is in mine:
“The wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’ / I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow”
Well, okay, I mostly know where I’ll be tomorrow (at the office) but there are a few hours between work and going to sleep tomorrow night that I’m going to play by ear.

Image credit www.moonbeammcqueen.wordpress.com
So now onward to our …

I like to set my home thermostat at around 80 degrees during the summer when friends and family aren’t around because I can’t stand to be cold.  I’m always freezing at work because the people who make decisions about temperature tend to be ample-waisted males of the suit-wearing persuasion who would rather have their fingernails pulled out one at a time than break a sweat.  I used to have a personal heater at my desk to counteract the effects of the arctic blast aimed roughly at the top of my head, but the heater voided the warranty on our cubicles …

I’ve been thinking about bubbles today.  I’ve been thinking how they are friendly and approachable, associated with sunny days in the park, foam parties, and protective packaging for new glassware.  Soap bubbles are fleeting – one minute they’re launching themselves off the end of a little pink plastic wand, the next they’re floating through the air, and then … they pop.  Bubblewrap doesn’t last long either because it is so tempting to sit around compulsively popping all the air pouches.  Bubbles do stick around when you trap them in something like plastic or glass – which brings me to …

Those of us who are clumsy already know that given enough time and enough force everything breaks: glass shatters, paper tears, vases get knocked off tables, ribs snap in half.  What has been surprisingly tough to figure out is exactly how things will break when they haven’t been broken yet – to determine the forces that will describe the path of a crack and how it occurs.  It’s possible that you haven’t given much thought about how useful it would be to predict precisely how something is going to break, crack, shatter, or otherwise fail spectacularly, …

Thomas Edison was working on a patent for the electric light bulb in the late 1870’s, and I think it’s safe to assume that he was a lit-tle too busy to think about the development of glowing textiles.  Lucky for those of us living in 2010, Japan’s Tsuya Textile Co. and Fukui Engineering Center have marshalled their respective resources to address the appalling lack of light-emitting fabric that has long plagued mankind.
 
Image courtesy core77
Delight Cloth consists of superthin fiber optic strands woven into a tapestry.  But while Delight Cloth emits light with aplomb, it …

Ever since I saw the movie Office Space, I can’t hear the word “flare” or any of its homophones without thinking of Jennifer Anniston’s waitress uniform and the “pieces of flair” they wanted her to attach to her suspenders.  Maybe I’m thinking too hard about this, but it seems to me that the idea behind wearing the flair (various buttons and patches with funny messages on them – if you haven’t seen this movie please stop reading immediately and rent it) was that it was a chance for people to express some individuality …