All posts tagged: materials

Turning construction materials from a climate burden into a sustainable business

Turning construction materials from a climate burden into a sustainable business

Published by skeptic

ECOFUNC is reshaping building materials with biobased panels designed for real-world performance, safety, and circularity Construction is one of the world’s biggest industries, but it is also one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise. ECOFUNC starts from that reality. The building and construction sector accounts for more than 35% of global final energy use (but around 40% in Europe), about 37% of global carbon emissions, up to 50% of natural resource use, and roughly half of total solid waste. ECOFUNC focuses on three products that are everywhere in modern buildings: cladding for ventilated façades, suspended ceiling tiles, and internal partition walls. These products shape the performance, appearance, durability, and comfort of buildings. Today, they are usually made from materials such as ceramics, gypsum, glass fibre, and fossil-based components that are energy-intensive, difficult to recycle, or both. ECOFUNC sets out to change that by developing circular, biobased, and functional alternatives that can perform in real buildings, not just in the lab. The problem The problem is not only that current construction panels have a high environmental …

Tiny ‘metajets’ could use light to steer sails for interstellar travel

Tiny ‘metajets’ could use light to steer sails for interstellar travel

Published by skeptic

An artist’s impression of a light sail RICHARD BIZLEY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Interstellar travel propelled by light just got one step closer. Light sails, which are huge sheets pushed along by light that bounces off of them, may be the best way to travel enormous distances through space, and now we may have a way to steer them. “We knew already that any light or laser can impart momentum transfer, but now we can control the direction as well,” says Kaushik Kudtarkar at Texas A&M University. He and his colleagues created a tiny device called a metajet that uses refraction of light, not just reflection, to move in more than one direction at once. The device is a material called a metasurface, an extremely thin sheet textured to manipulate light. In this case, the researchers flipped that on its head, using the light to manipulate the metasurface. A series of tiny pillars on the material steers the light that hits it, with the size and pattern of the pillars controlling the strength and direction of the …

Man builds 12-foot-long sailboat with materials from hardware store

Man builds 12-foot-long sailboat with materials from hardware store

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. It traditionally takes years of training and apprenticeship before shipbuilders truly master the art of handcrafting wooden vessels. However, that doesn’t mean all that time is necessary. Kentucky-based YouTuber Nick Kroehnke, aka Cumberland Rover, has spent the past few months documenting his progress on constructing a simple, 12-foot-long sailboat using everyday materials from the local hardware store. As he demonstrates across multiple videos, sometimes all you need is basic carpentry skills and a bit of creativity to take to the water yourself. Building a Wooden Boat 2026: Sail and Oar Skiff According to Hackaday’s recent rundown, Kroehnke began his journey by building a rowboat using two pieces of 1×12 lumber that he bent and attached to a basic wooden frame. From there, it was only a matter of fastening a plywood bottom and installing a couple seats, along with waterproofing the entire boat. But why stop there? More recently, Kroehnke added accessories like a mast and sail using additional …

Weird ‘transdimensional’ state of matter is neither 2D nor 3D

Weird ‘transdimensional’ state of matter is neither 2D nor 3D

Published by skeptic

A graphene sheet is 2D – but some thin materials may not fit neatly into that category ALFRED PASIEKA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A new quantum state of matter behaves as if it doesn’t fully belong to a world with two or three dimensions of space, revealing a previously unobserved way for electrons to move. Physicists categorise states of matter based on how electrons move within a material. This motion depends on many factors, such as the arrangement of the material’s atoms. When a thin material is immersed in a magnetic field, its electrons trace tiny circles, and any stream of them is pushed to the material’s side. This is known as the Hall effect. For materials that are magnetic, electron choreographies become more complex, giving rise to different versions of this effect. Lei Wang at Nanjing University in China and his colleagues unexpectedly discovered a new version of this phenomenon, which they call the transdimensional anomalous Hall effect (TDAHE). The team was studying electrons in a thin material made from carbon atoms arranged in a pattern …

Can photocatalytic materials combat AMR

Can photocatalytic materials combat AMR

Published by skeptic

Spectrum Blue explores the historical resistance to innovation in medicine, drawing parallels with the current challenge of antimicrobial resistance and the potential of new technologies like photocatalytic materials to address it. We like to think of innovation as inevitable. In reality, it is often resisted, especially when it asks us to act on what we cannot see. The discovery of germ theory In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis was working in the maternity wards of the Vienna General Hospital, where two nearly identical clinics produced very different outcomes. In one, staffed by physicians and medical students, women frequently died from puerperal fever. In the other, run by midwives, mortality was significantly lower. The discrepancy was persistent and unexplained. The turning point came after the death of Semmelweis’s colleague, Jakob Kolletschka, who developed a fatal infection following a scalpel injury during an autopsy. The symptoms closely resembled those of the women dying in the clinic. Semmelweis drew a connection that others had not: material from cadavers, carried on the hands of physicians, was somehow causing disease. Without …

Redwood Materials loses COO amid layoffs, restructuring

Redwood Materials loses COO amid layoffs, restructuring

Published by skeptic

Redwood Materials chief operating officer Chris Lister is leaving the battery recycling company to retire, TechCrunch has learned — and he’s not the only executive that recently departed. Lister, a former vice president who led operations at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, has been with Redwood since late 2023. He started as the company’s chief supply chain officer and was quickly promoted to the COO role in 2024. The promotion put him closer in the org chart to Redwood founder and CEO JB Straubel, who was Tesla’s longtime chief technology officer and currently sits on the automaker’s board. Redwood Materials recently informed employees that Lister was retiring, according to an employee who was granted anonymity to speak about the announcement. The company confirmed Lister’s departure to TechCrunch on Thursday. “We wish him the best in his retirement,” a spokesperson said via email. News of Lister’s retirement comes just a few days after TechCrunch revealed Redwood Materials recently laid off around 10% of its workforce, or roughly 135 employees. Those cuts were part of a restructuring that Straubel …

Redwood Materials lays off 10% in restructuring to chase energy storage business

Redwood Materials lays off 10% in restructuring to chase energy storage business

Published by skeptic

Redwood Materials has laid off around 135 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce, as it restructures to better accommodate its growing energy storage business, TechCrunch has learned. The cuts come just five months after Redwood cut 5% of its workforce, and three months after it closed a $425 million funding round that boosted the battery recycling company’s valuation to north of $6 billion, as TechCrunch previously reported. It’s been a difficult time in the battery industry lately. Earlier this month, battery recycler Ascend Elements filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing “insurmountable” financial challenges. Some battery-makers have also restructured or gone out of business as the automotive industry in the U.S. has backed away from its most optimistic and ambitious plans to transition to electric vehicles. But Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel told employees that this new round of cuts is not a sign that the company is heading down the same path. “Redwood today is the strongest it’s ever been,” Straubel wrote in an email to the workers who weren’t laid …

Quantum entanglement can be measured in solids for the first time

Quantum entanglement can be measured in solids for the first time

Published by skeptic

The behaviour of two distinct particles can be linked by quantum entanglement Science Photo Library / Alamy We finally have a way to measure quantum entanglement of solids, which could lead to advances in both quantum technology and fundamental physics. When it comes to quantum entanglement – an inextricable link between quantum particles that keeps their behaviours correlated, even when they are extremely far apart – researchers have limited experimental tools. They can determine if two particles are entangled by using a procedure called the Bell test, for example, and purposely create entanglement between several objects within quantum computers. But finding out whether a piece of some material is full of entangled particles is more challenging. This is especially important for developing new and better devices for quantum computing and quantum communication, which require entanglement. Allen Scheie at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues have spent more than half a decade developing a technique to do just that – and now it works. “We’ve established that it works, 100 per cent, …