WOVNS ~ Kickin Woven Textiles-on-Demand!

WOVNS is Kickstarting now to allow you to turn digital designs into custom short-run Jacquard-woven fabric!

"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."

Beetle Farts ~ Pulse-Jet Explosive Defense Mech!

MIT Material Science grad student Eric Arndt describes and shows how explosive pulse-jet Bombardier Beetle defensive "farts" result from internal organ reaction chamber transmorphing!

Harvesting Fog ~ Capturing Aerosolized Water!

MIT colleague Karthik spots fog harvesting technologies...

"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."

NeverWet ~ Liquid-Repelling Spray Coating Ships!

Gizmodo's Leslie Horn spots that NeverWet is shipping!

MIT Glass Lab ~ Pure Extracurricular Joy & Play!

The MIT Department of Materials Science & Engineering (DMSE) has two primo facilities on our first-floor Infinite Corridor -- the NanoLab and the Undergrad Materials Teaching Facility -- both dedicated to Research & Education at MIT. But as important -- and perhaps moreso -- is our Infinite basement-level MIT Glass Lab, a space dedicated purely for creative joy, something entirely Extracurricular...

Bare Conductive ~ CNN Spots Electric Bodypaint!

CNN Blueprint's Arion McNicoll and Stefanie Blendis spotlight new materials+design venture Bare Conductive in their piece Liquid lights and musical posters: Welcome to the world of electric paint...

"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."

Engineering Biomaterials ~ MIT's Langer @ TEDx

MIT Institute Professor Bob Langer speaks about engineering biomaterials at TEDxBigApple...

Superomniphobicity ~ Liquid-Repeling Nanocoats

Paul @ GeekPress spots Gizmag summary piece by Darren Quick on Superomniphobic Nanoscale Coatings at UMich...

"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."

Harvesting Spider Silk ~ Fritz Vollrath's Threads!

The Guardian Observer spots Fritz Vollrath's Oxford Silk Group research on harvesting spider silk by reeling...

"...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."

Jambot ~ Cornell's Jamming-Based Robogrips!

Very cool to see this jambot gripping solution from the Cornell Creative Machines Lab made basically out of coffee and a balloon plus a suck'n'blow pump and some kind of positioning scheme! Thanks to Neatorama for spotting!

Ultraglass ~ MIT's Nanotextured Functionality

Very compelling to read David Chandler's MIT News piece about the work on nanotexturing ultraglass by MIT team of Park, Choi, et al. Their ACS Nano paper describes Nanotextured Silica Surfaces with Robust Super-Hydrophobicity and Omnidirectional Broadband Super-Transmissivity. That's a remarkable combo of water resistance, clarity, anti-fogging, and self-cleaning qualities!

Printing Functional Materials ~ Lewis Visits MIT...

Just saw very cool talk by Prof Jennifer Lewis from Materials Science at UIUC about Printing Functional Materials. Many interesting examples including self-healing materials, tissue scaffolds, printing of flexible electrodes, small 3D antennas, origami in metals and ceramics, and finally her collaboration with Media Lab colleague Leah Buechley doing pen-on-paper electronics...

Science of Steel ~ NatGeo on Amazing Alloy!

Nice NatGeo show on Science of Steel...

Glass Day Unpacked ~ Behind Corning Vision

Paul at GeekPress spots A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked...

Mediated Matter ~ Oxman's Fab Bioinspirations!

Check out Media Lab LabCast on Neri Oxman's Mediated Matter group and their bio-inspired fabrications including morphables, topographical shapebots, foamcretes and more!

NeverWet ~ Ultrahydrophobic Spray Coating...

Geek.com spots slick superhydrophobic NeverWet...

"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."

Amazing Oobleck ~ Non-Newtonian Material

Time to get another dose of Oobleck! This non-Newtonian fluid changes from liquid to solid phase when stressed. That means some very bizarre behaviors... And remarkable transient supportiveness... Could be used as a kind of armor-gel... What would you use it for?

3DP Tools ~ Printing Working Wrench w/ Gears...

Thanks to Kottke for spotting 3D printing of working tools, for example a wrench with proper gears and leverage ability... More progress towards Star Trek replicators!

Synthetic Organs ~ First Successful Transplant!

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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SWITL ~ Wow, Semi-Liquid Picker-Upper!

Wow, thanks to Paul at GeekPress for spotting the SWITL semi-liquid picker-upper by Furukawa Kiko! (Via Kottke and earlier Engadget!)