materialscience
You are viewing stuff tagged with materialscience.
You are viewing stuff tagged with materialscience.
These days, the most technologically advanced dental crowns are made from an interesting combination of materials. Before I get into that, let’s first talk about how your teeth resist breaking in twain.
The toughest building materials have a combination of strength and flexibility. Think about wood or steel: they have strength (compressibility, tension), but because their rigidity is not infinite, they also derive durability from their ability to flex and rebound under load.
In a good example of the type of real writing/reporting that I read Gizmodo for, the popular tech magazine recently wrote about Zetix, a fabric that can stop multiple car bombs without sustaining damage. Zetix uses a relatively new material science technique called “auxetics,” whereby materials get thicker instead of thinner when they are stretched. As a special bonus, the material uses a lower concentration of special polymer threads per unit of material, which reduces its cost.
When you think ‘aerogel,’ think unbelievable - The most expensive chemical substance known to man, more than safron, etc. For example: “Silica aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records for material properties …” and “it is very strong structurally, able to hold over 2000 times its own weight” oh … it’s “90-99.8%” air, so it’s also almost transparent. Unreal.