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Traditional methods to make real-world objects invisible are usually based on materials that route incoming light around the hidden object, but researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have employed plasmonic materials that can affect the electric and magnetic fields the incoming light used to offer us a new way to make objects invisible. These new materials present a “photo negative” of the hidden object, which can cancel the disruption the object causes to the electric and magnetic fields.  That means, if you apply the material onto any object, the object would then become completely invisible from all angles- even the radars cannot detect it anymore.

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Scientists of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California have succeeded to create super-hot solid plasma burning at 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (about two million degrees Celsius). That’s not only hotter than almost everything on the earth, but even hotter than the temperature of the Sun corona. That’s also something never created by humans, and you could only find the kind of matter in the heart of stars or giant planets before.

Noble Prize-winning chemist George Olah has released his newest development, a breakthrough low-cost while most-effective CO2 absorber material around the world. The material is created by fusing a common plastic that soaks up CO2 with a silica substrate which can vastly increases its surface area- thus to improve the absorber’s effectiveness. Except for absorbing CO2, the material also exhibits other attributes: for example, it can catalyze at room temperature and releases CO2 at 80 degrees Celsius – still more effective compared to other alternatives.

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The newly-developed silver ink, coming from the University of Illinois, is announced may lead to dramatic decrease in the price of flexible electronics. Commonly, conductive silver inks used in electronics are printed at a very high temperature, which thus requires that plastics materials the ink printed on must come with high temperatures tolerance, and that finally increased the cost of materials. The new silver ink, however, can work at 194 degrees Fahrenheit, so lower-cost, flexible plastics are ideal for flexible electronics production too.

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With eBooks becoming more and more popular these days, the technology of electronic ink is gradually improved too. The electronic ink shown here is made up of millions of tiny microcapsules, each of which contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. So when a positive or negative electric field is applied, these particles will then move to the top of microcapsules, displaying some words or graphs on the screen. This new technology has several notable features, e.g. it can be applied onto almost all kinds of surfaces, especially idea to large-screens; it’s durable, can last a long time; and it’s still visible to naked eyes even under the sunshine.

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One possible new tendency for car manufacturing announced at the beginning of 2012 is the smart fabric seat covers developed by researchers from Polytechnic School in Montreal, Canada. The new fabric has electrical properties that will change depending on where touched, so that it allows the drivers to control their radio volume via merely a simple swipe. It means the fabric might replace the nobs, buttons and dials commonly built in cars in the future, so as to offer us a more convenient way to control the car. As BMW is reportedly interested, we guess it wouldn’t be long for us to see the touch fabric roll out in future car models.

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Scientists from China have recently brought good news for people who seldom want to clean their clothes: the self-cleaning clothes. The new material was created by coating titanium dioxide and nitrogen on cotton fibers, and those two elements will break down dirt and kill microbes once exposed to the sunlight. Additional nanoparticles using silver and iodine are also adopted to accelerate the discoloration process. Of course the self-cleaning clothes can be washed with water too, as the special coat is claimed to be robust enough to withstand washing and drying.

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Change, change, almost every day we’re delivering new changes happened in the world. Today’s news comes from Japan, where scientists from Toray Industries have developed samples of the world’s first renewable, bio-based polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fiber, which is what polyester is made of. The new creation is durable, coming with all good features as common polyester does while is better and safer to the environment since it is constructed of renewable material.

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Welcome to learn about another world’s best invention and this time we’ll show you new artificial muscles that can contract and twist, made by researchers from the University of Texas using cylindrical übermolecules. By twisting together “untold billions” of microscopic, straw-like carbon nanotubes into filamentous strands of “yarn”, the researchers have successfully endowed the artificial muscle with an outstanding nanoscale motor capable of spinning at nearly 600 rpms.

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With a density of 0.9 mg/cc, the world’s lightest material is put forward by researchers from UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology. The material features a unique “micro-lattice” cellular architecture, 99.99% of which is air and only 0.01 percent is solid metal. Thus it weighs incredibly light, even about one hundred times lighter than Styrofoam, and can stand safely on the top of dandelion. Even so, the material still comes with a good mechanical behavior, including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50 percent strain and high energy absorption.

Milk can build your clothes? German biochemist/fashion designer Anke Domaske says “yes”. The young lady recently received an innovation award from the German Textile Research Association, due to her creation of the hypoallergenic fabric made from sour milk. Quite surprisingly, the fabric is not cheap to make, costing even more than the money spent in producing organic cotton fabric. On the other hand, Domaske’s fabric actually needs only 2 liters of water for 1 kilogram of fabric, compared to more than 10,000 liters of water required to make the same amount of cotton. So what do you think, the money or the water is more important?

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Apart from the Black Hole, the new black material developed by NASA may be the most-efficient material to absorb light. It’s a special coating blacker than ordinary black materials, featuring an outstanding ability to absorb almost all the light that hit it. Through the visible spectrum it absorbs about 99.5 percent of the light hitting it, and at the ultraviolet and infrared ends the black coating sucks up to 98 percent of light. The coating is made from carbon nanotubes, and can be applied to many types of materials to form an absorbent coating on them.

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Traditional clothes, especially those made from synthetic fiber, burns so easily in flame that they usually result in heavy burns to people who get stuck in fire.  To solve that problem, researchers from Texas A&M University have developed a nontoxic fabric that is fire-resistant. The new fabric is composed of renewable ingredients like clay and chitosan, and forms a protective layer of foam on the clothes’ surface to prevent the fabric from igniting when fire is applied to it. It is said that the flame-resistant fabric could find applications in clothes, car seats and many other fields, thus featuring a wide prospect in the market.

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The Zoological Institute at the University of Kiel has drawn an inspiration from geckos and insects which have an ability to defy gravity, to develop a new dry adhesive tape that features quite outstanding performance. Moreover, the super-strong tapes can maintain its boning strength even when it has been used for thousands of times. It can also work under water, and leaves no sticky residue.

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The first high-efficiency OLED on plastic was claimed by researchers from the University of Toronto recently, which is deemed as an important development that may lead to more durable and “impact-resistant” displays. The flexible OLEDs were invented by adding 50-100 nm thin layer of tantalum oxide onto plastic, thus to achieve the same refractive index as that of heavy metal-doped glass. The new technology is believed to be producing OLEDs with a low cost, while promoting the efficiency and durability of OLEDs in the meanwhile.

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