Plastic That Heals Itself

Researchers have developed a new material that can fill in its own surface cracks.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have made a polymer material that can heal itself repeatedly when it cracks. It's a significant advance toward self-healing medical implants and self-repairing materials for use in airplanes and spacecraft. It could also be used for cooling microprocessors and electronic circuits, and it could pave the way toward plastic coatings that regenerate themselves.

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Potatoes: The Next Plastic?

The usual choices for potatoes include baked, mashed or french fried, but a new study suggests another option: plastic.

A report by the University of Maine's Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center says the state's potato industry could benefit by becoming a producer of bioplastics, which are made from plant starch rather than crude oil and petroleum products.

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ONARCHITECTURE- Intelligent design: Will robots take over architecture?

What if a building could build, repair, dismantle, and recycle itself? What if a building were equipped with sensors to track your movement through a space and could adapt its shape, texture, light, sounds, and heat to your presence? Finally, what if you could talk to a building and it could talk back?

Those are the kinds of questions students in UVA architecture professor Jason Johnson's Robotic Ecologies seminar are encouraged to ask and explore.

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Scientists Create Fire-Safe, Green Plastic

Scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have created a synthetic polymer-a building block of plastics-that doesn't burn, making it an attractive alternative to traditional plastics, many of which are so flammable they are sometimes referred to as "solid gasoline."

The new polymer wouldn't need the flame-retardant chemicals that are added to many plastics before they can be used in bus seats, airplanes, textiles and countless household items. Some of these additives have been showing up in dust in homes and offices, fish, fat cells and breast milk, raising concern that they pose a risk to human health and the environment. (The state of Washington recently banned a class of flame-retardants from use in household items from mattresses to computers-the first state to do so.)

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Modular Protected Billeting For Warfighters

by Lt. Cmdr. Christa FordNaval Mobile Construction Battalion 28 Public AffairsAl Asad, Iraq (AFNS) Apr 19, 2007

The word of the day for Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 28 is "prefabrication," and they're putting their words into action to complete construction by April 19 of 20 modular protected billeting facilities that will support Marines in the field.

The facilities have hardened roofs and can support between 12 and 24 warfighters, depending on how the building is used. The modular units can be used as sleeping quarters, offices or both and offers protection from mortar impacts. Pieces of the modular facilities are being prefabricated by Seabees prior to actual on-site construction of each unit.

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Atomic Design of Superstrong Materials

Researchers have learned how to design the nanoscale features of materials to make them four times stronger without making them brittle. The new insight is the result of a significant improvement to an existing computer model that allowed researchers to, for the first time, simulate the complex mechanical behavior of nanostructures in metals.

The work, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at MIT, Ohio State, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, could lead to more-durable materials for gears in microscale machines. It could also lead to coatings that dramatically improve the performance of larger-scale structures, such as metal plating on artificial joints, says Subra Suresh, professor of materials science and engineering at MIT.

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Nanotechnology to protect from earthquakes

Two separate efforts using high-tech to protect people from earthquakes have been recently revealed. At the University of Leeds, UK, researchers will use nanotechnology and RFID tags to build a 'self-healing' house in Greece. The house walls will contain nanoparticles that turn into a liquid when squeezed under pressure, flow into cracks, and then harden to form a solid material. They also will host a network of wireless sensors and RFID tags which can alert the residents of an imminent earthquake. Meanwhile, another team at the Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) will use a wireless sensor network to limit earthquake damages.

'Self-healing' House: Building-in Earthquake Resistance?

Science Daily — A high-tech villa designed to resist earthquakes by 'self-healing' cracks in its own walls and monitoring vibrations through an intelligent sensor network will be built on a Greek mountainside.