Materials Girl

Yesterday my colleague, design news fiend and man about town Dan, sent me the following link to a crazy article about bio-customized stingray shoes by RayFish Footwear. 

The company is pro-porting that they have the know-how and capability to genetically modify stingrays to an aesthetic end. Their website allows you to design a pattern for your stingray which is then raised for its leather, and made into a pair of hand crafted shoes. The website claims the custom design is matched with genetic markers, which are injected into embryonic rays and “as the ray grows and matures, it expresses the predetermined patterns on its skin.”  After reading the comments section after the article, the article, and the company site, I feel the need to state the following:

- This is completely implausible, though they may have altered the rays genetically to make their leather stronger, lighter in color, more accepting of dyes, easier to process, etc. There is NO WAY that they are breading stingrays that have neon pink giraffe spots. The degree of specificity allowed for on the design site and the brightness of color is a dead giveaway. The skins are DYED, just like all other leathers. 

- As for the rays, if stingray leather (shagreen) continues to grow in popularity (as it is), farm raised animals will be key to protecting the natural balance of the oceans and avoiding over hunting. We raise every other animal we use for leather in captivity, why not this one? (Also, if there is actually any genetic modification in these rays it is important to keep those animals separate from the breeding pool.)

- None of this means they aren’t pretty sweet looking. 

Auxetics sound like they are from Australia, but that is false. Auxetic materials are materials that grow in width when elongated! That doesn’t sound too bizarre, but, visualize  a rubber-band, stretch it, and… it gets thinner as it gets longer. The ratio of thinning to elongation is defined as the Poisson’s Ratio, Auxetic materials have a negative one! Foams and textiles are the most prevalent manifestation of this counterintuitive behavioral excellence. Try this at home: On a much smaller level, the crosslinked nature of paper makes it auxetic. Grab some and pull!

Instantly become a polymer expert! Just memorize this chart. 

magnified-world:

Synthetic knit textile at 10x magnification.  6th place in the 1992 Nikon Small World Competition.

Who knew bees and wasps had so much in common! (aside from the business end) For more natural papermache…

geneticist:

Osmia Avosetta are solitary bees that build their nests by biting petals off of flowers, flying them back one by one, and gluing them together often using nectar as glue. Each nest is a papermache work of art that houses a single bee egg. (via)

laboratoryequipment:

Spider Silk Conducts Heat On a Par with Metal

Xinwei Wang had a hunch that spider webs were worth a much closer look. What Wang and his research team found was that spider silks - particularly the draglines that anchor webs in place - conduct heat better than most materials, including very good conductors such as silicon, aluminum and pure iron. Spider silk also conducts heat 1,000 times better than woven silkworm silk and 800 times better than other organic tissues.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Spider-Silk-Conducts-Heat-On-a-Par-with-Metal-030612.aspx

I wish this was actually an option. Sigh, the 21st Century is really not living up to my expectations.

rrrick:

Making babies

The iridescent colors seen in this peacock feather are created by the structure of the feathers themselves. Structurally based color is awesome!

nabokovsnotebook:

Bob Fosbury measures the reflectance of interesting objects, like the peacock feather shown here. 

Check out his flickr for more spectroscopy and other great scientific images. 

I am BEYOND delighted by this oddly insightful and incipiently educational card from the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game. Read closely, with this “Polymerization” card you can turn Fusion Material Monsters into a Fusion Monster! I have no idea what that means in terms of game play, but in terms of science it appears that multiple monomers (monsters) are being turned into a bigger badder Polymer (Fusion Monster). I’m into that.

Found in the office: Pantone Plastics Color System! Happy Materials Girl.