For decades, construction companies have used fireproofing chemicals associated with risks to human health and the environment. We need safer alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
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…