Olympic cardboard beds win a silver medal
Does cardboard cut it as furniture?
The world’s best athletes are always the focus at Olympics, but this year in Tokyo they’ve been almost outperformed a...
Materials
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Super-strength spider silk made by bacteria
New bacteria engineered to produce fibre as tough as steel.
If you’re scared of spiders but also need really strong silk, have no fear, because engineers at Washington Universit...
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A new world of plasma screens?
The fourth state of matter can make cheap, smart, waste-free screen components.
The plasma used to make the coating. Credit: Dr Behnam AkhavanAustralian researchers have used plasma to make a m...
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Where do you go when the chips are down?
Why Taiwan’s water supply matters to us all.
This article first appeared in Cosmos Weekly on 9 July 2021. For more stories like this, subscribe to Cosmos Weekly. ...
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Where do you go when the chips are down? Why Taiwan's water supply matters to us all
They call it ‘chipageddon’: the worldwide shortage of silicon chips prompted by the COVID pandemi...
TAIWAN LEADS THE WORLD in semiconductor manufacturing, with a single company – Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Com...
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Overcoming atomic level perovskite defects
Impurities found in the crystal structures of perovskites could be hindering their performance.
A group of Australian and Chinese researchers have found tiny defects – and ways to resolve them – in the atomic stru...
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Material with zero thermal expansion
Australian researchers have found an advanced material that doesn’t change size over a huge tempe...
It’s a basic rule of chemistry and physics: when you heat things up, they get bigger. While there are exceptions (lik...
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Video
Turning textiles into raw materials
We talk to Robert Speight and Adrian Jones about recovering fabric waste at BlockTexx.
If they can’t be used second-hand, is it possible to recycle old clothes? What about recycling other fabrics and text...
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It’s a small, silent, stable world
Creating the conditions to see things at an atomic level requires a special brand of engineering....
At 10 Innovation Walk on Monash University’s Clayton Campus, in Melbourne, there’s a building like no other in Austra...
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Using a phone to identify molecules
Researchers have put together a cheap device that could carry out sophisticated chemical analyses.
With a few additions, commercial smartphones can be used as microscopes and medical monitors. But the humble phone ma...
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What is “green steel”, and are we going to be able to make it at Whyalla?
If we want to green the world, we have to make steel without using coal.
Last year, British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, industrialist and head of GFG Alliance, announced his intention to mode...
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Solar-powered desalination
New device speeds up evaporation to desalinate water.
A team of Chinese researchers have announced an efficient solar-powered desalination technique that directly uses the...