Reportedly, fully 20 percent—some 200 million—of the world’s mobile devices incorporate a clear cover made of Corning’s Gorilla Glass brand toughened aluminosilicate glass. Depending on the particular test used to make the determination, Gorilla Glass is seven or eight times stronger than the common soda-lime glasses used, for instance, in most windowpanes.
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Very cool widget from British firm RTL Materials, who’ve figured out a trick for making composite tubes that are pre-stressed, like a tape measure, such that they want to roll up into a rigid round tube structure when unfurled from a flat, coiled state. Unlike a tape measure, however, these “bistable reeled composites” are also […]
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Shape-memory metals get a fair amount of attention, but shape memory polymers exist, too. In fact, heat-shrink tubing is a familiar example of a simple shape-memory effect in a polymer. This video uploaded by MIT researcher Vikas Srivastava back in 2009 is a more impressive demonstration of heat-induced shape recovery. The plastic material is tBA […]
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Our crack shot of an Art Director, Jason Babler, sent me a link to this video of Dutch artist Jólan van der Wiel’s Gravity Stool project.
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In celebration of Advanced Materials Month here on MAKE, I’m bringing you the most fabulous wearable electronics using innovative conductive materials like fibers and paints. This is the roundup to end all other roundups; it showcases 22 of my favorite projects. Above: Soft Circuit Musical Hats
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Those of you, um, enthusiastic enough to remember Star Trek IV may recall the scene embedded here. If not, let me set up the clip: The crew of the Enterprise has gone into the past to retrieve some whales, OK? And take them “back to the future,” to coin a phrase. But Scotty has a […]
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On Friday, I wrote about the development of amorphous or “glassy” metal alloys, in which the atoms are packed together with no regular crystal structure. At the microscopic level, almost all metals are made of crystal grains, which can be bigger or smaller depending on how the metal has been heat treated. Amorphous alloys, recall, […]
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