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 [...]

The first Open Science Summit will be held this year at the Berkeley International House (I-house) in Berkeley, California on July 29-31. Fora TV will stream the Summit at http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010 What could be more important that optimizing the functioning of our science + technology paradigm for a 21st century Open Knowledge Economy? More than 40 speakers from across [...]

A great new service has just been launched called BioTorrents, which allows scientists to rapidly share their results, datasets, and software using the popular BitTorrent file sharing technology. Here’s the abstract from the paper BioTorrents: A File Sharing Service for Scientific Data published on PloS ONE: The transfer of scientific data has emerged as a [...]

D-Shape, whose 3d printers are capable of fabricating amazing mega scale free-form building size models, are now working with the European Space Agency to create a 3d printer that can extrude within the moon’s vacuum environment using lunar dust. They are currently experimenting with ’simulant’ lunar dust, and hope to conduct trials in a vacuum environment [...]

Another great initiative from Stanford, this time involving the novel usage of accelerometers. Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. It involves installing software that collects data from the computer’s accelerometer, which pings the quake-catcher networks’ server if a tremor [...]