Favorite Ideas
- Metals can be made softer with heat or harder with hammering. They can be alloyed with other materials with various techniques for more customization. One example is how steel becomes self-repairing (rather than rusting) and tasteless when combined with chromium. This makes it an ideal material for cutlery.
- Paper is produced when wood pulp from trees is chemically bleached. It can then be treated with other chemicals and bonders to give it unique properties, such as a specific depth for ink to soak in or the ability to react with silver to produce photos. Though digital means of doing things are slowly replacing paper, it remains in use today because of its sentimentality in activities like handwriting or reading a book.
- Concrete, frequently used in buildings, is a mix of water and rock that can crack under weight or with the natural expanding and contraction of buildings. It can be made stronger when mixed with steel but then becomes prone to rust. New innovations to concrete include using bacteria to make it a self-repairing material resistant to rust.
- Chocolate is a well-loved, aromatic confection. Its flavor is largely determined by how cacoa nuts, harvested from cocoa pods, ferment in the sun before being mixed with milk, sugar, and other ingredients. It can be mixed differently for different purposes, such as cooking, coating ice cream, or eating on its own.
- Silica aerogel is a material with a sky blue hue because it reflects light similarly to how the atmosphere does. Though it is the lightest material known, it is incredibly heat resistant. Placing it between a flame and a flower will prevent the petals from burning. NASA uses the material to capture space material.
- Plastics may be one of the most versatile materials. Its invention fueled a materialistic shift in society and a new way of preserving bodies after death.
- In some places of the world, near-perfect glass is created when lightning strikes white sand deserts. Most sand contains impurities, which must be filtered out before the quartz can be heated to become glass.