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Category: futurism – Page 1,015

Engineered Metamaterials Make Invisibility Cloaks and More

The most common materials in the world, including plastic, steel, glass or wood have distinct molecular and chemical properties that give them intrinsic qualities, such as strength, flexibility or transparency. But an entirely different class of materials, called metamaterials, are coming onto the scene.

Artificially engineered, these materials have unique geometries and physical structures that can manipulate any mechanical or electromagnetic wave that passes through them. Metamaterials can perform a host of futuristic tricks; they can absorb sound waves to produce silence, bend light to create an invisibility cloak and dampen seismic waves to safeguard a building against an earthquake.

Metamaterial applications are numerous, but here are five of the coolest.

Note on Posthuman Resilience

https://paper.li/e-1437691924

This post is adapted from a paper presented at a workshop organised by the Open University’s PRiME (posthuman resilience in major emergencies) research group held in London, 18th-19th October 2016.

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Resilience – understood as the capacity to recover from perturbations and resume “normal functioning” – appears seems to be a generic rather than domain specific property. It has a general application to complex systems at all scales and levels of complexity, and applies across the notional and contested divide between the natural and the artificial. It thus seems consonant with a “flat” posthuman world in which humans – rather than having privileged status – are just a distinctive being amongst other – similarly distinctive – beings. [1].

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