LiTraCon (Light-Transmitting Concrete)

The world has great challenges and it needs useful solution for the challenges as like the global warming, using energy in a sustainable way and protecting the environment. We should find a good solution, for instance: use of solar energy, transparent heat insulation, passive buildings etc.. The development of the building technology in the field of building industry is a good way to eliminate the emission of green house gases, because we shall use less loam and the the industry will not need to transfer those materials.

LiTraCon provides a simple and cheap solution to the challenges. Filled with optical fibers that run from one end of a poured piece of concrete to the other, these prefabricated blocks and panels effectively transmit light from one side to the other.

 

Colors and light remain remarkably consistent from end to end, but with a natural variation from the pouring process that actually softens the effects considerably. The inventor himself, Mr. Áron Losonczi will explain in this 3 minutes video innovative ways of using the light transmitting concrete:

This Light transmitting Concrete is also very cheap and easy to make. Someone has homemade a small block and shared it on Youtube: 

NewspaperWood

Trees to wood to paper - paper to wood to useful objects! 

What can be more clever than recycling by reversing the line of production? Well, maybe not turning the paper into a tree, but at least to something useful! Yes, we all know it is bad to cut down trees, we know we can read the newspaper online nowadays, but personally I still prefer reading a good old newspaper in paper format. Designer Meike Meijer and DesignLabel ViJ5 take newspapers back to their origins by turning them into a wood-like building material called NewspaperWood. Furniture, decorative objects and even jewelry look spectacular when made with the artificial wood. Here is a short interview with the team on their inspiration. 

Self-Healing Paint

Fixing scratches on cars and furniture may be cheap and easy to do yourself in the not-too-distant future. Together with partners in the USA and Switzerland, Case Western Reserve University have developed a polymer-based material that can heal itself when placed under ultraviolet light for less than a minute.

Nissan has applied this technology and produced iPhone cases as the world's first "self-healing" iPhone case. Stuart Rowan, Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University will explain how it works in this video: 

Auxetic materials

Auxetic materials have the property of getting thicker when stretching it. If you pull them in one direction, they will expand in the other one. Even though this material is pretty recent, it already has many patents from different brands such as Toyota or Mitsubishi. Some of the applications can be personal protection clothing, biomedical or high strength ropes or cords.

ex-AA walls

We have seen many walls made out bottles. Some of them reached a cleaner design than others. Some people even went nuts and just decided to turn his own house into a spiky shaped shelter. We could even use the bottles to start a green wall.

And here we have a video showing how we can build our own green wall:

Instructions

Let those who have never sinned throw the first stones: How many times have we got lost even with IKEA instructions? Building things is a process that needs a specific order. Ikea designers know they have to deal with non-technician-ordinary-people, and yet those explanations for dummies always lack something.

Turning clothes into furniture

Tobias Juretzek combines old clothes with resins to give a second life to those things we have in our drawers and that we won't use anymore. We can buy his furniture through Casamania.

Also from one of the most popular pants worldwide, the jeans, we obtain this Scrap Lab denim chair. The Scrap Lab is part of the Innovation and Technology Department of Kasetsart University in Thailand

Ferrofluids

As we have seen in the previous post, fluids don't always have the same behavior. Non-newtonian fluids aren't so popular, but how about if we think about magnetic properties and we try to apply them to a fluid? We will obtain a ferrofluid. This material acts as a liquid, but at the same time, if it's close to a magnet it will have magnetic properties. Beautiful sculptures have been made through this material.

Here we can see a video showing some of these sculptures moving. It is called ""Morpho Towers -- Two Standing Spirals" by Sachiko Kodama and Yasushi Miyajima

Corn Starch?

This is an experiment showing how corn starch reacts when it is disturbed. This material is called a non-Newtonian fluid, which means that it becomes more viscous when is hit repeatedly, so the behavior changes from liquid to solid.
Here you can see a Discovery Channel clip describing its properties:

Soft Gel Magnets and more inventables

All of a sudden magnets are no longer hard. And how about a material that temporarily protects surfaces up to 7500F? How can we apply this new material into our daily life? In Inventables they know a lot about this issue...