A better sustainable sanitary pad

It is nearly impossible to improve on a substance considered the final frontier in lightweight materials; but chemists have done just that

Future explorers on Mars would just need to apply pressure to compact the soil—the equivalent of a blow from a hammer—to make bricks

Bioactive foam can be molded to skull bone lost to injury, surgery, or birth defect

Material could mean ceramic textiles, improved jet engine blades, 3-D printed ceramics, and better batteries

Researchers are investigating the possibility of creating food packaging from cellulose composites

When a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory tried to verify that shrinking nanoparticle size would adversely affect the mechanical properties of polymer nanocomposites, they got a big surprise

"Packaging represents about half of all plastics produced, and single-use plastic items make up the majority of what is found on beaches," professor says

Polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), which account for two-thirds of the world’s plastics, have different chemical structures and thus cannot be repurposed together

Process uses household inkjet printer without soldering to create 750 nm-thin elastomeric sheet