Food facts
A review of the book Molecules, microbes, and meals by Alan Kelly. The book is engaging in parts when there is a story to tell, such as how milk becomes cheese, but in others it’s just a materials science textbook with terrible puns. The bigger and more interesting story of our food remains untold.
Surprisingly smart
The Fundamentals of smart materials is a collection of essays written mainly by the editor Mohsen Shahinpoor. Eighteen of the 24 chapters are authored by him. Topics include piezoelectric materials, magnetostrictive materials, shape memory alloys, mechanochromic materials, thermochromic materials, chemomechanical polymers as well as self-healing materials. Read the book review.
Every star tells a story
Book review by Michael Gross of A history of the Universe in 21 stars (and 3 imposters). In his beautifully packaged book, Giles Sparrow merges the old and the new way of telling stories about stars. Read the book review.
Magic MOFs
Since the first ‘MOF’ structure was made over 20 years ago, researchers have created more than 20,000 different versions using a variety of metals and organic ligands, Maria Burke reports. Read the full story in C&I Magazine.
Wanted: plastic waste
Plastic waste is increasingly at the forefront of environmental concerns, from overflowing landfill sites to plastics littering the oceans. While we are familiar with shopping bags and fleece jackets made from repurposed PET bottles, they are something of an outlier, as many other plastics are difficult, if not impossible, to recycle into functional materials.
Digital DNA
The world is heading towards a data explosion. Could DNA be the answer to our storage problems? Katrina Megget investigates. Read the feature in C&I Magazine.
Water from air
An increasingly hotter and drier climate is set to put further strain on terrestrial water resources. But scientists are eyeing water in the atmosphere as an alternative source, XiaoZhi Lim reports. Read the feature article in Issue 11 2020 of C&I Magazine.
Milestone for fusion
Fusion research has achieved a milestone with the news in October 2020 of the ‘powering up’ of the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s latest fusion research machine, the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade. The machine has achieved ‘first plasma’ meaning that it was able to generate a mass of electrically-charged gas plasma in its core. Read more in C&I Magazine.
Polymer self-assemblies
Scientists in the US have created a polymer that self assembles using non-covalent bonds in a way that mimics the dynamic construction of proteins and DNA in biology. Read the article in C&I Magazine.