I’ve been looking at dresses on the Internet lately because my lovely friends keep getting married and, for some unknown reason, they keep inviting me to their weddings.  I’ve found some good deals online, and it’s nice not to have to deal with roaming tween hordes off-gassing pale clouds of angst or resist the insincere entreaties of pushy salespeople at the mall.  The drawback of Internet shopping, of course, is that you can’t try anything on and whatever you’ve purchased must be shipped. 
While waiting for my latest dress to arrive (it’s a snazzy sky-blue linen number with strategic pleats, …

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 …

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 …

Until today I never in my wildest dreams imagined that bees could produce any kind of silk.  I thought worms were in charge of silk production and that was the end of it.  It pains me to admit this (you have no idea how it pains me) but I was wrong.  Not only are silk worms falling down on the job, as it turns out spiders aren’t any better!  Apparently it’s down to good old Apis mellifera (also known as the western honey bee) to make the silk that takes care of business.  …