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Category: materials – Page 271

Two Mexican Entrepreneurs Just Created Leather Out of Cactus Leaves

Two entrepreneurs from Mexico have created vegan leather out of cactus leaves. The cruelty-free leather is called Desserto.

Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez are said to be the first to create organic leather out of only nopal (prickly-pear) cactus. They don’t use toxic chemicals, phthalates, or PVC in their design.

The vegan leather is partially biodegradable. It’s flexible, breathable, and lasts for at least 10 years. The material feels like animal-based leather. Companies can use it in furniture, cars, leather accessories, and clothing.

Scientists Create a New Kind of Artificial Flesh That Heals Itself Like The Real Thing

Artificial flesh is growing ever closer to the real thing. Scientists in Australia have now created a new jelly-like material which they claim has the strength and durability of actual skin, ligaments, or even bone.

“With the special chemistry we’ve engineered in the hydrogel, it can repair itself after it has been broken like human skin can,” explains chemist Luke Connal from the Australian National University.

“Hydrogels are usually weak, but our material is so strong it could easily lift very heavy objects and can change its shape like human muscles do.”

Atomic-level imaging could offer roadmap to metals with new properties

High-entropy alloys, which are made from nearly equal parts of several primary metals, could hold great potential for creating materials with superior mechanical properties.

But with a practically unlimited number of possible combinations, one challenge for metallurgists is figuring out where to focus their research efforts in a vast, unexplored world of metallic mixtures.

A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a new process that could help guide such efforts. Their approach involves building an atomic resolution chemical map to help gain new insights into individual and help characterize their properties.

Isotonic Regression is THE Coolest Machine-Learning Model You Might Not Have Heard Of

The term “Isotonic” originates from the Greek root words “iso” and “tonos.” The root “iso” isn’t just a file format, it actually means equal. “Tonos,” on the other hand, means to stretch. The word Isotonic can mean a multitude of things stretching from material and physical sciences to liberal arts.

Equal Stretch Regression (Isotonic Regression) is a really cool model for statistical inference. My obsession with isotonic regression has long been expanding, because the model is just so interesting, and cool.

SOFIA Reveals What May Be Keeping Milky Way’s Black Hole Quiet

Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and our Milky Way is no exception. But many other galaxies have highly active black holes, meaning a lot of material is falling into them, emitting high-energy radiation in this “feeding” process. The Milky Way’s central black hole, on the other hand, is relatively quiet. New observations from NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, are helping scientists understand the differences between active and quiet black holes.

Armored with plastic ‘hair’ and silica, new perovskite nanocrystals show more durability

Perovskite nanocrystals hold promise for improving a wide variety of optoelectronic devices—from lasers to light emitting diodes (LEDs) — but problems with their durability still limit the material’s broad commercial use.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a novel approach aimed at addressing the material’s durability problem: encasing the inside a double-layer protection system made from plastic and silica.

In a study published Nov. 29 in the journal Science Advances, the research team describes a multistep process to produce encased perovskite that exhibit strong resistance to degradation in moist environments.

Physicists Have Identified a Metal That Conducts Electricity But Not Heat

Researchers have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat — an incredibly useful property that defies our current understanding of how conductors work.

The metal, found in 2017, contradicts something called the Wiedemann-Franz Law, which basically states that good conductors of electricity will also be proportionally good conductors of heat, which is why things like motors and appliances get so hot when you use them regularly.

But a team in the US showed this isn’t the case for metallic vanadium dioxide (VO2) — a material that’s already well known for its strange ability to switch from a see-through insulator to a conductive metal at the temperature of 67 degrees Celsius (152 degrees Fahrenheit).

Ecology for Insiders

The view from the HazeCam, which is situated just west of the Jackson Street Bridge in Newark, New Jersey, usually extends for about eight miles. To the east, the skyline of New York City rises and falls along the horizon like a bar graph, buffered by a blue haze of humidity and particulate emissions and ozone. The towers are planted into the rock of Manhattan, and the island of steel-and-concrete canyons covers 59 square kilometers and accommodates 1.5 million people. Techni…

The indoor biome covers as much as six percent of the world’s landmass—and we know almost nothing about it.