Core77 2013 Year in Review: Materials, Part 3: The New Stuff
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More on BASF’s premium penny-farthing below…
Core77 2013 Year in Review: Top Ten Posts · Furniture, Pt. 1 · Furniture, Pt. 2
Digital Fabrication, Pt. 1 · Digital Fabrication, Pt. 2 · Digital Fabrication, Pt. 3 · Digital Fabrication, Pt. 4
Insights from the Core77 Questionnaire · Maker Culture: The Good, the Bad and the Future · Food & Drink
Materials, Pt. 1: Wood · Materials, Pt. 2: Creative Repurposing · Materials, Pt. 3: The New Stuff
True I.D. Stories · High-Tech Headlines
If industrial designers are unsung, materials scientists are even more unsung. You don’t know the name of the person who shaped the handle on your coffeepot, and you darn sure don’t know who invented the plastic it’s made out of.
We don’t always know their names, but we know the fruits of their labor. So what stuff did the guys in white lab coats come up with that made the news this year? The hands-down Materials traffic winner was “Kinetic Sand,” which results from mixing regular sand with an ingredient from Silly Putty. If you haven’t already seen it, peep the video, be amazed.
A material nearly as humble as sand, cement, also caught rec’ this year. Not regular cement of course, but the pollution-killing, smog-eating variety first developed by Italian manufacturer Italcementi. Once the magic ingredient of titanium oxide is added to the mix, everything from Roman churches to sidewalks in Chicago to Dutch roads do the environment a good turn—while remaining self-cleaning, as mere rainwater rinses them off.
Speaking of rainwater, it never seems to fall in a consistent schedule, which farmers know only too well. That’s why Mexican engineer Sergio Jesus Vaelasco created Solid Rain, which is essentially instant water. Vaelasco’s invention can let farmers dodge droughts, and make greenery possible in environments where it was not previously viable.
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