Materials

A film promoting the European linen industry offers a rapturous look at machinery spinning straw into gold. Video after the jump.

The teeth of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus remain sharp through a lifetime of rock-scraping. But do they come with a matching fork for easy carving?

With a fabbed flute, we see emergence at its natal stage; the imperfect copy of the old instrument is a promising harbinger of the novel sounds to come.

The history of NASA's wearable spacecraft will be visible in a traveling Smithsonian exhibition scheduled to make the rounds this Spring.

Well into the digital era, paper keeps surprising us with its creative potential.

These minimalist, stick-on outsoles prefigure a future in which we'll pad and weaponize our bodies with consumer-grade prosthetics for fashion and fitness.

"Just think how many periodic tables you could put on my whole head!"

Solitary bees with a talent for producing durable polymers may point the way to a petroleum-free future.

3-D printing is going viral. With 3-D fabrication technology at for the desktop, for LEGOs, and for nanoscale materials, it was only a matter of time before the paradigm found its way into space�and corporate science fiction. But this promising technology still has to prove itself in terrestrial infrastructure first.

A great series of videos made by the chemistry department at the University of Nottingham in England�one for each of the elements in the periodic table, 118 in all. It's full of insights�and it will have you wondering about the activation energy of professor Martyn Poliakoff's hair.