Materials Sciences

Finland Leads Europe In The Development Of Biodegradable Plastics

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, has made degradable bioplastic more durable due to reinforcement with natural fibres. This biocomposite, which is totally biodegradable, supports sustainable development. The waste costs for products made from this will be small, and in the future consumers will have an enhanced appreciation of biodegradability of materials.

VTT achieved this biocomposite using flax fi

An ultrathin film containing 1-nanometer thick clay particles has been created for the first time, an accomplishment that may yield new materials and devices for medicine, electronics and engineering, according to Purdue University and Belgian scientists.

Using a method that captures clay particles on a crystal, Purdue and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven research partners were able to produce, see and manipulate a single layer of clay. It would take 70,000 of these layers to equal the thickn

Anyone who buys a swayed plank of wood has to be, well, warped.

But a Texas forestry sciences researcher may have a straight-forward computer model just around the bend, saving millions for wood manufacturers and consumers.
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“Wood is an old material that has been used in construction for thousands of years,” said Dr. Zhiyong Cai, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station forest products researcher. “Every place in the world uses wood products, but there still are things we don

The same characteristics that make misfolded proteins known as prions such a pernicious medical threat in neurodegenerative diseases may offer a construction toolkit for manufacturing nanoscale electrical circuits, researchers report this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists working at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the University of Chicago write that they have used the durable, self-assembling fibers formed by prions as

Scientists and engineers trying to share materials property data over the Internet will have an easier time now thanks to a new computer language called MatML–Materials Markup Language–developed by an international group of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), industry, government laboratories, universities, standards organizations and professional societies. MatML provides a standard format for managing and exchanging materials property data on the World Wide

Nanocomposites for space

A microscopy technique originally developed to image the molecular-scale topography of surfaces is now helping engineers choose the right materials for a new generation of lightweight high-strength composites based on carbon nanotubes.

Light, conductive and nearly as strong as steel, carbon nanotubes are being combined with lightweight polymers to produce composite materials with properties attractive for use on future space vehicles. But choosing th