"WOVNS is a platform that empowers everyone to create their own woven textiles. Unlike digital printing, weaving integrates a design into the very construction of the fabric, yielding a textile rich in both color and texture. WOVNS fabric is perfect for medium-weight apparel such as shorts, dresses, bags, and wraps, as well as home decor including upholstery, pillows, and throws. Or think of your own creative uses."
"A system for collecting fresh drinking water from fog that regularly rolls through Chile’s otherwise arid coastal region. [...] A series of suspended mesh structures [...] strategically placed on top of hills and angle toward locations where fog typically blows in from the ocean. As the fog comes through, the webbing in the structures captures small droplets of water and filters them down into a collection silo. [...] There is around 10 billion cubic meters of potential fog water produced every year along the Chilean coast."
"Imagine if you could paint a working light switch directly onto your wall, without any need for sockets, cables or wiring. A group of students from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London has made that possible by creating electrically conductive paint. The paint acts as a form of liquid wiring. Unlike conventional wires, it can be applied to almost any surface, including paper, plastic, metal and even fabric. [...] Its inventors, RCA graduates Isabel Lizardi, Matt Johnson, Bibi Nelson and Becky Pilditch, call their creation "Bare Paint." While they don't claim to be the first group to have invented a conductive ink, they are pioneering new ways it can be used."
"Similar to the way water droplets are suspended by air pockets created between tiny hairs on the surface of lotus leaves, the coating creates a structure that is 95 to 99 percent air pockets. This means that liquids coming into contact with the coating barely touch a solid surface, thereby reducing the intermolecular Van der Waals forces that normally draw two states of matter together. [...] Already proven effective on coffee, soy sauce, vegetable oil, gasoline, and various alcohols, the coating can also repel acids that could burn skin, such as hydrochloric and sulfuric acids. Tuteja says the coating is also the first demonstrated to repel low surface tension non-Newtonian liquids. These are liquids, such as shampoos, custards, blood, paints, clays and printer inks, that change their viscosity depending on the amount of force applied to them."
"...silk directly from the spider. At the start of this film a spider is pinned down after being sedated with carbon dioxide gas. The silk being pulled from the spinnerets consists mainly of major ampullate silk which forms the main structure of the web (like scaffolding) and minor ampullate silk, which is used to form the main spiral of the spider's web. The silk thread is pulled over on to the spool and attached with a dab of glue, and the motor is then run to start collection on to the spool. The species of this spider is Nephila edulis. It's possible to harvest between 30-80 metres of silk in one go, after which the spider can be released back to its web to feed ready for reeling another day."
"Ross Technology Corp. needed a better way to reduce corrosion on the steel products. When they couldn't find a suitable one, they worked on creating something on their own. And eventually they hit upon a slick product that's led to a whole new business. That product is NeverWet, a silicon-based spray-on coating that repels water and heavy oils."
Tia Ghose writes in The Scientist of the first Synthetic Organ Transplant Success, a replacement trachea (windpipe)... "The recipient of the first synthetic organ transplant -- a synthetic trachea seeded with the patient’s own stem cells -- is sent home from the hospital. [...] The patient had an aggressive, golf ball-sized tumor blocking his airways that had resisted chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Without surgery, the patient would have died, BBC reports. Researchers from University College London built the trachea out of a porous nanocomposite material, using detailed 3D scans of the patient’s trachea to create an exact replica. The researchers then soaked the synthetic trachea in bone marrow stem cells taken from the patient’s nose to reduce the risk of organ rejection and the need for immunosuppressive drugs. After growing for two days in a bioreactor developed by Harvard Bioscience, the millions of holes in the porous synthetic surface were seeded with cells, and the trachea was shipped to Sweden for surgery."This is just the beginning of a huge wave of personalized medicines, 3D-bioprinting, and replacement body parts to-come! Also, check out the Newsy summary...
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