MEMORY GLASS
Glass that will store your info for ever
Hard drives can be wiped. DVDs degrade. So let's
do like Superman and record our most precious
memories in shards of data-hungry glass
SHRILK
Shrimp plus spider kills plastic
Combine the hard stuff in shrimp shells with a spider
silk protein and you get shrilk, a tough, biodegradable
replacement for world-choking plastics
STANENE
Electron freeway for cool gadgets
Wish your smartphone could keep its cool?
Then discard its wasteful silicon chip and get on
the stanene superhighway instead
Then discard its wasteful silicon chip and get on
the stanene superhighway instead
AEROGELS
Frozen smoke to clean the world
Almost as light as air, aerogels are a heavyweight
olution for everything from heat-bleeding windows
to carbon emissions
SELF-HEALING POLYMERS
Things that repair themselves
Scratch-free cars and chip-free nail varnish are only
the start of dreams for "Terminator" materials that
can regenerate themselves
SKUTTERUDITES
Heat scavengers promise energy bonanza
A new breed of structures called skutterudites could
finally tap the floods of energy our machines waste as heat
WOOD
Amazing material that does grow on trees
Wood could hold up the skyscrapers of the future –
now that it's stronger and more versatile than ever before
