Sea Shepherd ’pirates’ Set To Take On Whalers It takes a certain type of courage - or maybe even a lack of concern for your own life and those of others - to ram a Japanese whaling ship, thousands of kilometres from land in the freezing Southern ... Read Full Article Nielsen Looks Beyond TV, And Hits Roadblocks Nielsen wants households to let it eavesdrop on Web surfing and cellphone use, but it is finding it a tough sell.... Read Full Article Federal Regulators To Ease Rules On Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac In a move that could help the housing market, a federal regulator said that it was removing limits on the investment portfolios of the two large mortgage buyers.... Read Full Article A Director Comfortable With Catastrophe Danish director Susanne Bier has a fear of becoming comfortable. It shows in her movies, in which happy characters are jolted by events of unfathomable sadness.... Read Full Article US Warms To Arabian Knights LAST year, when DP World tried to buy into the US market, the proverbial hit the fan. “Foreign control of our ports, which are vital to homeland security, is a risky proposition. Riskier yet is ... Read Full Article |
Elastic And Fantastic: The Self-healing Rubber BandANYONE who has heard the snap of a rubber band breaking knows its time to reach for a replacement. But a group of French scientists has made a self-repairing rubber band material that can reclaim its stretchy usefulness by a person pressing the edges back together for a few minutes. The material, described in this weeks issue of the journal Nature , can be broken and repaired over and over again. It is made from simple ingredients — fatty acids like those found in vegetable oils, and urea, a waste compound in urine that can be made synthetically. The material would be an asset to industry and might even help shed light on the physics of elasticity, say Philippe Cordier and colleagues at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution in Paris. Standard rubber bands, which can stretch up to several hundred per cent then snap back into shape, are made from long chains of cross-linked polymers. The new material is linked by short chains of a type of molecule called ditopic — which can associate with two other molecules — and multitopic molecules, which can associate with more than two molecules. This network of molecules is strengthened by hydrogen bonds that allow the material to stretch. If severed, the material mends itself when the ends are pressed together at room temperature, allowing these bonds to re-form. "The mended samples are able to sustain large deformations and recover their shape and size when stress is released," the French scientists say in the journal. The material can "withstand multiple fractures, needs no catalysts and is otherwise straightforward to produce", Justin Mynar and Takuzo Aida of the University of Tokyo say in an accompanying article. "A final blessing is that it can be broken down with heat and easily recycled — so it is environmentally friendly, too." REUTERS Tag CloudExternal InformationAdditional InformationGeneral Calls Iraq Situation ?Dire?...Polgamy mums speak out... Syrian Pardon Omits Dissidents... Leader strikes blow for China democracy... Where Am I?News Main Page - Business - Elastic And Fantastic: The Self-healing Rubber Band |
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