Free Republic

CLEVELAND – A Parkland, Florida, man pleaded guilty on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023, to devising a scheme that defrauded several companies involved in the sale of polymers, including one business in Northeast Ohio, and multiple logistic companies, causing losses of more than $4.1 million. According to court documents, from July 2013 to January 2020, Terrence Anderson, 66, devised a scheme to steal shipments of polymers from businesses involved in the sale of the chemicals. The scheme was achieved, in part, by fraudulently obtaining services from logistic companies involved in processing rail shipments. Court documents show that Anderson owned and operated...

Engineers at MIT have developed a new ultrathin material that’s as light as plastic but stronger than steel. The durable material could be used in vehicles or electronics, and makes use of a manufacturing technique that was previously thought impossible. Polymers are versatile materials, of which plastics are perhaps the most well known examples. Under a microscope, polymers usually look like squiggly threads, one-dimensional chains of units called monomers, but they can be coaxed into three dimensional shapes through manufacturing methods like injection molding. However, getting polymers to bind together to form two-dimensional sheets has been surprisingly difficult. While some...

Department of Energy's scientists announced this week that they have designed a plastic that can be recycled over and over again. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wrote in Nature Chemistry that they had designed new plastic, called polydiketoenamine or PDK, that could be disassembled down to the molecular level and reassembled into different shapes, textures or colors multiple times. Modern-day plastics are reinforced with chemicals to make them more resilient and often end up making the material more difficult to fully recycle. ..... < snip > < snip > ..... Even the most recyclable plastic is only being...

Simple processes can make wood tough, impact-resistant—or even transparent Some varieties of wood, such as oak and maple, are renowned for their strength. But scientists say a simple and inexpensive new process can transform any type of wood into a material stronger than steel, and even some high-tech titanium alloys. Besides taking a star turn in buildings and vehicles, the substance could even be used to make bullet-resistant armor plates. Wood is abundant and relatively low-cost—it literally grows on trees. And although it has been used for millennia to build everything from furniture to homes and larger structures, untreated wood...

One challenge facing researchers was learning how to control crystallization of the polymer. As similar shape-shifting materials are stretched or cooled, atomic strands of polymer molecules re-align, driving the object to stay in the "temporary" alignment. This process makes it more and more difficult to bring the object back to its "relaxed," original form. Individual "linkers" were used to connect the molecules, reducing the effects of crystallization in the new polymer. By carefully controlling the placement of the linking chains, researchers were able to precisely direct the turning point of the material. When the new polymer is removed from the...

A new plastic that "heals itself" has been designed, meaning your cracked phone screen or broken tennis racquet could mend its own wounds. The polymer automatically patches holes 3cm wide, 100 times bigger than before. Inspired by the human blood clotting system, it contains a network of capillaries that deliver healing chemicals to damaged areas ... But even the best self-healing plastics and polymers can only repair small-scale damage, the Science magazine authors note. "Although self-healing of microscopic defects has been demonstrated, the re-growth of material lost through catastrophic damage requires a regenerative-like approach," said Prof White. To fix larger...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – What are the limits of organic life in planetary systems? It’s a heady question that, if answered, may reveal just how crowded the cosmos could be with alien biology. A study arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council (NRC), has pulled together a task group of specialists to tackle the issue of alternative life forms -- a.k.a. "weird life". To get things rolling, a workshop on the prospects for finding life on other worlds is being held here May 10-11. The meeting is a joint activity of the NRC’s Space Studies Board's Task...