For decades, construction companies have used fireproofing chemicals associated with risks to human health and the environment. We need safer alternatives.
As a material, bacteria’s ability to rapidly multiply and adapt to different conditions is an asset.
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The walls of your house could someday be built with living bacteria. Synthetic biologists are engineering microbes into living materials that are cheap and sustainable.
Musculoskeletal injuries can cause severe pain and lead to greater problems.
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Most of my work takes place in the lab. But recently I became involved with an organisation which allows me to connect with the very people who could one day benefit from my research.
A close-up of the head of a leafcutter ant, Atta cephalotes, showing the metal-infused teeth on its mandibles.
Ryan Garrett
Many small animals make their teeth and claws from a smooth blend of proteins and heavy elements. These materials can form very sharp tools that make it possible to cut tough substances using tiny muscles.
The glue that gives spider webs their stickiness is a form of spider silk protein. Researchers can imagine cool uses for a synthetic version – but had to wait for the tricky glue gene to be sequenced.
Thanks to a novel process, human urine can be turned into bio-bricks.
Robyn Walker
Some of the things we discard - like urine - can actually be useful resources.
Strange new materials that propel the fictional Star Trek universe are being developed by scientists in reality today. Above, the USS Discovery accelerates to warp speed in an artist’s rendition for the TV series Star Trek Discovery.
(Handout)
Alexis Noel, Georgia Institute of Technology and David Hu, Georgia Institute of Technology
How do a frog’s tongue and saliva work together to be sticky enough to lift 1.4 times the animal’s body weight? Painstaking lab work found their spit switches between two distinct phases to nab prey.
Theoretical physicists are caricatured in the popular imagination as only involved in abstruse and difficult-to-imagine topics. But some of these theoretical physicists are involved in something closer…