Tag: materials

Iron Man, 3-D Printing and the Responsibility of Power

Monday, May 13th, 2013 | Tags: , ,

If you’ve seen Iron Man 3, you know that – SPOILER ALERT!!!! – billionaire inventor Tony Stark reveals dozens of specialized Iron Man power suits. As fantastic as the suits are, the technology Stark likely uses to make them is not far removed from reality – and neither are the big questions that such technology

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Iron Man, Reverse Engineering and the Future of Materials Science

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 | Tags: , ,

Iron Man 3 isn’t out yet, but the first two movies (and decades of Iron Man comics) raise some interesting questions about how scientists can create and utilize new materials – like the energy source for Iron Man’s suit. For those who have been shut off from pop culture, here’s a recap of the first

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The Heat Is On To Understand Thermal Transport between Materials

Monday, March 18th, 2013 | Tags: , , ,

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Losego, a research assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State. Losego recently co-authored a News and Views article about nanoscale heat flow in Nature Materials with David Cahill of the University of Illinois. The basics of heat flow have long been overlooked, but

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Thor’s Hammer Is Not That Heavy (But It Is Scientifically Interesting)

Friday, February 15th, 2013 | Tags: , ,

In early February, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said on Twitter that the superhero Thor’s Hammer (aka Mjolnir) “weighs as much as a herd of 300 billion elephants.” News outlets pounced on this, and the news was quickly circulating online. Sadly, Tyson was wrong. Tyson’s reasoning was based on the idea that Mjolnir was “made of

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Why Doesn’t Plastic Dry As Easily As Glass In The Dishwasher?

Monday, January 28th, 2013 | Tags: ,

An Abstract reader recently sent me this question: “Why doesn’t plastic dry in the dishwasher? Or why doesn’t it dry as quickly/easily as glass? This drives me totally nuts.” Good question! That phenomenon drives me nuts too. The answer appears to have a lot to do with the amount of energy (in the form of

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