Remember watching the “clap on! clap off!” commercials back in the day? I always thought that the idea that you could turn out the lights by clapping was pretty fantastic.  The idea seemed so fantastic, it would cause me to clap my hands in excitement and plunge myself into darkness.  No, I’m kidding – I’ve actually never been in a situation where “clap on! clap off!” was installed, but I bet it made a lot of people’s lives better. When it’s tough to get up, it’s nice to be able to alter your environment without walking over …

ARCHITERIALS is a year old now, and like most healthy, well-adjusted one-year-olds it needs to be changed constantly, crawls all over my apartment, and makes strange burbling noises.  No, really – it does.  It’s terrifying.
Over the past year I’ve profiled approximately 65 materials and learned about blogging, bacteria, and biscuits, although I must confess that the biscuts were a side project.  A delicious, buttery side project.  Anyhow, to celebrate the birthday of ARCHITERIALS and the fact that the tagline “Investigating architectural materials since 2010” has finally attained temporal legitimacy, I’ve compiled for this, …

It’s the holiday season and people everywhere are wishing they had the power of invisibility.  Just imagine what you’d overhear at the office holiday party if you could mingle with your coworkers sight unseen!  You might also wish to disappear from time to time during Christmas dinner, in order to prevent being cornered by Aunt Sally or a similar relative given to detailed descriptions of bunion surgery and reports on the latest arrests and obituaries.  And maybe the power of invisibility could extend from people to objects; what would life be like if you …

Stairs are challenging enough for adults at times, but I distinctly remember how hard it was to climb them when I was little.  When you are small in stature, 7″ high risers hit at mid-thigh and most of the time you have to take each stair on all fours.  Many of the epic, all-out “Alli versus the Stairs” battles ended with a small, defiant child celebrating wildly on the second floor, but sometimes things didn’t go my way.  On the days that the straight run, open tread, carpeted monster was …

Not too long ago, a group of researchers at the University of British Columbia (namely associate professor of chemistry Mark MacLachlan, PhD student Kevin Shopsowitz, post-doctoral fellow Hao Qi, and one Wadood Hamad of FPInnovations) were working to create a material that could be used to store hydrogen.  From what I hear, British Columbia is a heavily forested part of the world, and the researchers wanted to derive the new material from a byproduct of the local wood processing industry, nanocrystalline cellulose.
Nanocrystalline cellulose, a “building block” of wood pulp, is organized in a helical structure …

 
Life is funny sometimes.  Just yesterday I was talking to a coworker about this crazy book I’m reading that I may have mentioned in a previous post called The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil, in which the author posits that we are moving towards a world where our technology and biology fuse to become indistinguishable, and now today I’m writing about solar cells powered by bioluminescent jellyfish.  Let me also say that I’d much rather write about jellyfish than swim with them; they navigate the sea in creepy pulsing motions and some of them …

 
It’s hard to compete with the luminous output of a ball of hydrogen and helium gas 864300 miles in diameter, but it should be noted that sunlight is not without its drawbacks.  It’s nearly impossible to use at night, and the quality of light is affected by everything from cloud cover to latitude.  Fire works indoors and at night for light, but it’s not very bright, often rather smoky, and could potentially rage out of control and destroy one’s house.  Incandescent light bulbs use too much electricity and put out a kind of yellow …

While I was in New York a few weeks ago I stopped by the American Museum of Natural History – mostly in order to pay a visit to @NatHistoryWhale – which, in case you’re not familiar, is a 1:1 replica of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling.  As I went to enter the gigantic hall of enormous ocean life I stopped short to examine a back-lit wall bedazzled with a fascinating array of taxidermied creatures including a 7 pound lobster from New Jersey. 

Images courtesy amnh.org and vipnyc.org 
Pinned up along one side of the wall was a row of brilliantly …

As Kermit the Frog has said time and again, it’s not easy being green.  You don’t have to tell that to scientists working with LED’s (Light Emitting Diodes); producing red light is a cinch, blue light has been with us for around 15 years thanks to some clever researchers from Japan, but green light is as hard to get right as a celebrity marriage and people have been struggling with the problem for the past ten years (Scanlon).  Red, blue, and green light combine to make white light.  So if you don’t have a green, you’re …

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 …