Resin is intriguing stuff.  In my mind it’s like honey to the power of two; it’s sticky as all hell, often golden or amber (ha!) in color, and it is, chemically speaking, a lot many kinds of serious.  Technically resin is a “hydrocarbon secretion of many plants, particularly coniferous trees valued for its chemical constituents and uses such as varnishes and adhesives, as an important source of raw materials for organic synthesis, or for incense and perfume” (Wikipedia).  It can also be used to make translucent panels in a wide range of colors …

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 …

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 …

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 …

I love the name of this product:  Bendywood.  It sounds like someone Gumby would have befriended, or a trendy new subdivision on the outskirts of Las Vegas.  It’s also an accurate name because Bendywood is wood that you can bend by hand.

Image courtesy imagethief.com
Here’s how it works:  blanks of hardwood – beech, ash, oak, or maple – are steamed to soften the cell walls.  (Woodworkers are now scratching their heads and wondering how this is different from any other operation in which you’d steam wood to bend it, but take it easy …

Kids these days.  You never know what they’re going to come up with next, but you can bet they’ll post whatever it is on YouTube.  In my day we made videos with cameras the size of Volkswagens, walking uphill both ways in the snow talking on 12″ cellphones that took D batteries.  We certainly didn’t sit around building robots out of Intel processors and spare parts.  But this is the second decade of the new millennium, and that is why it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Matt Bunting, an electrical engineering …

I have a confession to make.  I’m not proud to admit this, but I can’t keep it to myself any longer: I do not like fungus.  There!  I said it!  I don’t like mushrooms on my pizza and fairy rings creep me out.  Those little ridges on the underside of mushroom caps remind me of dirty filters on air conditioning units; I don’t like how they’re spongy and dense, or how mushrooms taste like soil.  They live on dead things and grow in damp, dark places.  It’s not that I …

An astonishing amount of plastic is used in construction projects, although it performs primarily as a an insulator or protector, “embedded and unseen within the larger systems of a building” (Faircloth).  It can take on any shape from filmy transparent sheets to complex, chunky molded forms.  While its longevity is a virtue in some cases, the accumulation of plastic across the planet is cause for alarm.  A quick investigation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch led me to some disturbing photos of tiny pieces of plastic recovered from the bellies …