Tag Archives: smart materials

A glass stronger than steel

If you think at something difficult to break and resistant you won’t think to glass. How many time did you hear: “be careful, it is glass!”? Well it turns out that glass can be strong, even stronger than steel. It just a matter of how you manufacture it. If you …

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Tickling a bug … it takes advanced robotics

I should say I never felt the need to tickle a bug, not even sure if tickling is something that bugs experience, like/dislike. Yet a team of researchers at the Ritsumeikan University  noticed that with our big human fingers it would be impossible to “tickle” a bug and therefore took …

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Smart windows are, still, around the corner

Many of our homes have double, even triple glass panes windows. Adding glass panes provides better heat and sound insulation, saving money and providing enhanced comfort. The characteristics of these windows do not change with seasons, they remain the same in Winter as in Summer. Yet, the problem in Winter …

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MXene: the marvel of alloys

There are 92 elements in the periodic table (118 if you want to include the artificial ones) and they can be combines in gazillions of ways, not just in terms of placing two or more different atoms together, also by placing them in different 3D structures. Each of the resulting …

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From gene editing to gene writing

The discovery of the DNA first and the sequencing of the human genome have created huge expectation for a future where it would be possible to radically cure/stop genetic diseases (and there are over 6,000 genetic disorders already identified). Clearly the first step is to understand what might be wrong …

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Vantablack in Nature

Some two years ago I published two posts on Vantablack, a black that is “blacker” than any black you see around. It was invented, created, by researchers using carbon nanotubes able to absorb 99.965% of light, practically creating a black void with no reflection to the point that a Vantablack …

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Robotics: learning from spiders

Nature had billion of years to try solutions and select the ones that worked best. The process has been completely random hence resulting in many dead-end, but what we see around us is something that has worked out. It might seem impossible that something as complex as an eye can …

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Sutures that heal and monitor

Sutures have been used for thousands of years by all civilisation. We have testimony of sutures using vegetable fibres, even sutures using the claws of some type of insects. Of course, modern medicine is no longer using these “natural” materials having been able to leverage on much better materials created …

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