openMaterials

Interesting article at The Japan Times :) TSUKUBA, Ibaraki Pref. (Kyodo) Researchers at the National Institute for Materials Science have found that an iron compound becomes superconductive — where electrical resistance disappears in a substance — if it is dipped in wine, sake or beer. “It is still not known what it is in sake that causes [...]

ghost dress grown from a vat of green tea Treehugger recently reported on BioCouture, a fashion research project based at Central Saint Martin’s College in London and led by Suzanna Lee, which seeks to grow textiles from a vat of liquid: The process uses a sugary green tea recipe, to which, a bacterial culture is added. It [...]

This is from quite some time ago, but a beautiful artwork from Philip Beesley called Hylozoic Soil which I saw at VIDA 11.0 last year. I just love the way he’s used nitinol in the work-

The worldwide first EAP propelled airship was made at Empa in collaboration with aeroix GmbH and the Technical University of Berlin. This lighter-than-air vehicle with 8 m in length consists of a slightly pressurized Helium filled body of a biologically inspired form with Dielectric Elastomer (DE) actuators acting as muscles and deforming the body and [...]

Refarm the city (aka re:farm) is a collective project started and led by Hernani Dias with the purpose of developing open source software and hardware tools for urban farmers. In its creators’ words, the project is a cross between a good meal (the crop, the seeds, the friends), hardware (the urban farm, the composter, the [...]

I just found an interesting ‘Technical Note’ authored by Western Research Laboratory (WRL), a research group that was founded by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1982. ‘Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems’, inspired by the work of Bill Bidermann, investigates claims that by inserting electrodes into a dill pickle, and energizing with modest alternating currents, caused the pickle [...]