• Question: What do you think was the greatest material invented or discovered in the previous decade?

    Asked by jbrucetts to Andrew, Beth, Bruce, Lindy, Lizzie on 15 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Beth Mortimer

      Beth Mortimer answered on 15 Jun 2012:


      There is a lot of research going into materials which can be used in the body, which are creating a new kind of medical treatment for injured people.These materials will be accepted (and not attacked) by the body, but they can also help healing of damaged joints, nerves, muscles etc
      For example, people with damaged joints are in a lot of pain as they can’t take movement and weight on their joints. Firstly the implants can take the weight as their mechanical properties are strong/flexible enough, relieving pain from the patient. Secondly, cells will grow onto these materials and use it as a scaffold, so the shapes of the material implant added can effect the shape of the cell growth. This means you can potentially help the body to create new or repaired joint tissue. These material implants then slowly degrade away in the body, at the right time scale so that the body is replacing the implant with repaired tissue.
      These new materials are a great step forward from simple metal implants into peoples’ limbs as they help the body repair, are accepted by the body and they degrade. These materials are all very new and are developing all the time!

    • Photo: Bruce Alexander

      Bruce Alexander answered on 15 Jun 2012:


      Beth has come up with a good suggestion that I didn’t automatically think about. The materials she mentions like hydrogels have such diverse applications, something will come out of this for sure.

      I instantly thought about graphene, which was discovered 8 years ago and landed Andre Geim at the University of Manchester a Nobel prize a few years ago.

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9491789.stm

      Graphite (the “lead” in pencils) is made up of sheets of carbon atoms. Graphene is one of those sheets, which means a molecule of graphene is one atom thick! This gives it extraordinary electrical properties that other materials do not have. If you think about how much we rely on computers and other electrical gadgets, and think that these could not function without silicon chips. Graphene might just have the same impact in the future, that silicon in transistors had 60 years ago.

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