A Turko-German group has announced a liquid glass product “that will revolutionize everything.” It really does sounds like the applications are endless! They are shipping to the UK soon, but many markets may be unwilling to stock the products because they make really huge profits from cleaning products that need to be replaced regularly. Liquid glass would make virtually all of these obsolete!
Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage such as – water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. This makes it suitable for use on an huge array of products.
The liquid glass spray (technically “SiO2 ultra-thin layering”) is almost pure silicon dioxide (silica is the regular compound in glass) taken from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on the type of surface to be coated. There are no additives, and the nano-scale glass coating bonds to the surface because of quantum forces. Liquid glass has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily.
Check it out! What do you think?
Categories: nanotechnology
Pittsburgh Google is expanding its local presence, hiring …and moving to Bakery Square in the former Nabisco factory.
The Pittsburgh office has created two new Google features on the company’s 20% time policy, which encourages outlandish thinking as well as research – one an astronomy app on the new Android phone, Nexus One, that identifies constellations when the phone is pointed at the night sky and Google Sky Map. (Link to upcoming presentation at SciTech Days at Carnegie Science Center.)
What would you invent?
Categories: information technology
During the past 12 months, robots got better at grasping, smiling, and avoiding angry humans. One robotic highlight for 2009 comes from CMU’ s Howie Choset. This snakelike robotic arm may one day medically attend to soldiers as they are carried off the battlefield.
Image is a Roboinspector: A snake robot inspects the head of a skeleton lying on a high-tech stretcher designed by the military, called the Life Support for Trauma and Transport system.
Credit: Howie Choset/Carnegie Mellon University
What robotic advance impresses you the most?
Categories: robotics
Correspondent Morley Safer interviews both Dr. Stephen Badylak, deputy director at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Dr. Blair Jobe, associate professor of surgery in the Heart, Lung and Esophageal Surgery Institute at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC.
Dr. Badylak makes body parts. He describes how a material, Extra Cellular Matrix, can regrow virtually every tissue we have in our body.
Also in Pittsburgh, these techniques have been used to regrow the esophageal lining of a cancer, and to transplant a hand from a cadaver onto the arm of Marine, who lost his right hand.
Click for 60-minutes News segment (please ignore Viagra ad)
Categories: biotechnology
All will be looking to Copenhagen this month, and Mt. Lebanon resident Christa Owens will be there covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) as a new media reporter.
Chirsta was selected by the Sierra Student Coalition to serve as a youth delegate to COP 15. She is a political science major at Carleton College in Minnesota, and one of 18 college-aged students in the delegation traveling to Denmark next week along with Sierra Club volunteers and staff.
What do you think about including college students in this conference?
Categories: environmental technology
The discussion of Darwin’s theories was primarily conducted among the intelligentsia of the day because books were pretty expensive.
However, the fraction of people who figured that they could and should keep more or less up to date with what was happening in geology, in botany, in zoology, even in physics and mathematics was a much bigger fraction than it is today.
Science has gotten a lot more technical and specialized… and no one can really stay up with every field of research. Many of us hear about scientific claims, in fact a very large fraction of the population now knows, through electronic media, about Dolly the [cloned] sheep, about the human genome and about what’s going on in the latest finding with climate change.
However, the proportion of people that can evaluate new research and follow along with these ideas is quite small.
Are we looking to know – Who to rely on? Who is speaking the truth?
What do you want/need to know?
Categories: advanced materials processes · biotechnology · environmental technology · information technology · nanotechnology · robotics
This year’s jellyfish swarm is one of the worst seen. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.
The venom of the Nomura, the world’s largest jellyfish, a creature up to 6 feet in diameter, can ruin a whole day’s catch by tainting or killing fish stung when ensnared with them in the maze of nets.
Addressing the surge in jellyfish blooms in most places will require long-term fixes, such as introducing fishing quotas and pollution controls, as well as capping greenhouse gas emissions to control global warming.
What do you think should be done?
Categories: environmental technology
In what may be the first tangible proof that the G-20 did, in fact, lead to international exposure and opportunity for the Pittsburgh region, the United Nations announced Thursday that the Steel City will play host to World Environment Day in 2010.
Scheduled for June 5, World Environment Day was created by the UN Environment Programme in 1972 to stimulate environmental awareness and action. The theme for 2010 is “Biodiversity: Connecting with Nature.”
How cool is that?
Categories: environmental technology
‘Transparent aluminium’ only existed in science fiction, for ex. in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.
Picture: Experimental set-up at the FLASH laser used to discover the new state of matter.
Your thoughts?
Categories: advanced materials processes · nanotechnology
