Science

Ever since Apple asked Corning to build scratchless glass screens for the original iPhone, the development of glass has been a major focus of the technology world. Scientists have attempted to improve the glass-making process, devising new ways to make it thinner but stronger. Yet, glass suffers from a number of other inefficiencies: It doesn’t handle water well, it reflects too much light, and it creates glare.

On Thursday, researchers at MIT announced a major breakthrough in glass-making technology, which basically involves a new way to create surface textures on glass to eliminate all of the drawbacks of glass, including unwanted reflections and glare. In fact, this new multifunctional glass is not only crystal clear — unlike all other glass, which is reflective by nature — but it also causes water droplets to bounce right off its surface, like tiny rubber balls.

The glass is self-cleaning, anti-reflective, and superhydrophobic. If it ever gets to be as strong as Corning’s Gorilla Glass, MIT will have effectively created the perfect glass — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A group of international scientists working in outback South Australia has devised a crop production system which does not rely on diminishing fresh water supplies.

There is an incongruous sight in the parched outback; a state-of-the-art greenhouse powered by the sun and reliant only on salt water as a basis for irrigation.

Philipp Saumweber, of Sundrop Farms, has assembled a team of water and engineering experts outside Port Augusta.

This set-up is unique. Nobody has done what we’re doing before and to our knowledge nobody has done something even similar, he said.

What we were really looking for when we built this team is people who had a passion for changing the way agriculture is done.

Rather than lamenting about all the problems in agriculture and the water scarcity and the energy security issues, we wanted a team that was passionate about solving problems — via redwolf.newsvine.com

So-called non-Newtonian fluids are the stars of high school science demonstrations. In one example, an ooey-gooey batter made from corn starch and water oozes like a liquid when moved slowly. But punch it, or run across a giant puddle of it, and it becomes stiff like a solid. Pour it on top of a speaker cone, and the vibrations cause the fluid to stiffen and form strange tendril-like shapes. Now, a group of college students has figured out a new use for the strange stuff: filler for potholes.

The students, undergraduates at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, devised the idea as part of an engineering contest sponsored by the French materials company Saint-Gobain — and took first prize last week. The objective was to use simple materials to create a novel product.

So we were putzing around with different ideas and things we wanted to work with—and we were like, what’s a common, everyday problem all around the world that everybody hates?” explains 21-year-old team member Curtis Obert. And we landed on potholes. He and four other students decided on a non-Newtonian fluid as a solution because of its unusual physical properties. When there’s no force being applied to it, it flows like a liquid does and fills in the holes, says Obert, “but when it gets run over, it acts like a solid — via redwolf.newsvine.com