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, …

Even if building owners aren’t always eager to spend the considerable amount of capital it takes to certify their projects with green building programs like the US Green Building Council’s LEED and the Green Building Initiative’s Green Globes, municipalities are increasingly adopting green standards into law.  Green building programs and codes don’t expressly certify materials, but material choices can go a long way towards meeting recycled content, low VOC, and reclaimed materials requirements for certification.
Kirei USA (kirei is the Japanese character signifying “beautiful”or “clean,” and it’s pronounced “Key’-ray,” in case …

Public steps make me happy.  I’m talking about those large stone or concrete steps that typically line plazas or porches.  They’re great places to sit and read, talk, eat lunch, and watch a parade of people thronging past.  Some of the best public plazas I’ve ever encountered have been located in Italy; I spent hours sketching in one of my favorites, the Piazza dei Signori in Vicenza, one summer during grad school.  The only complaint I have about public steps is that they’re a little rough on the hindquarters if you try to sit in one place for …

If you’re anything like me, you don’t spend much time around children and probably find them slightly unnerving.  I mean, think about how fast they’re growing.  It’s completely freaky.  Just consider this: if you measured a child’s foot when it was one year old and then you measured it again six years later, the second time you measured it, the foot would be a completely different size.

Image courtesy www.geekinspired.com
Feet grow, but shoes don’t.  What this means, of course, is that children go through an enormous quantity of plastic rain boots as their feet get larger.  And …

Materia’s excellent materials newsletter for May just hit my inbox (I’m not in any position to complain about the timing since I’ve been a delinquent blogger since April) and I learned about an intriguing material being produced in Dong Guan, China: PU Gel.  It’s mostly used for sporting goods such as shoes, but it can also be used for bags, power tools and electronics cases, and on clothing.  The manufacturer, Taiwan Kurim Enterprises, was founded in 1987 and has been molding PU gel and printing silicon ever since. The company …

Sometimes when you’re really mad and you’re an adult, you just want to throw something on the ground and smash it to smithereens in order to vent your frustration with “the system”.  In fact, in the United States each year 300 million tires are thrown on the ground by adults of both genders.  Some of these tires are then buried under other trash and discarded objects in landfills, and some of them are sheepishly picked up again and burned for fuel in cement kilns.  For a long time, throwing tires on the ground …

If you’ve ever accidentally superglued your fingers together, you know firsthand (so to speak) that adhesive forms powerful bonds with materials.  When it happened – a self-gluing accident happens to everyone eventually – you probably did a little Internet research (which was itself a challenge since you’d only eight or so unstuck fingers with which to type) and found out that superglue dissolves away with the application of a little acetone.  I bring this up to highlight a fundamental law of gluing: sticking two things together is useful; being able to unstick as them as needed is even more useful.  To that end, General Motors researchers have created an …

Remember when you could invite people to your house to build a fort, and nobody thought it was unusual?  You’d be all, “hey, wanna build a fort?” and Linny and the rest of the gang would be all, “sure, but you should know we’ve already built three sweet fortifications this morning and we’re walking to the candy store for pixi stix first.”  These days if I called up some friends and asked them if they wanted to build a fort in the living room they’d think I was crazy.  Well, my friends would probably …

“There’s always that one [material] that will always have your heart
You’ll never see it coming cause you’re blinded from the start
Know that you’re that one for me, it’s clear for everyone to see
Ooh baby aw…
You’ll always be my boo” – My Boo by Usher feat. Alicia Keys
How can you not fall madly in love with bamboo?  It’s tall, ridiculously strong, and you can bring it home to your mother.  The source of bamboo’s heady blend of charisma and reliability is “its growth system, which generates a root system that produces 30% more oxygen and sequesters 35% …

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, …