Understanding the atomic structure of glass and other amorphous materials is difficult because, unlike crystals, the structure only consists of short-range and medium-range order; long-range order is absent. Researchers led by Aalborg University demonstrate how a topological method called persistent homology could help reveal a glass’s medium-range order structural features.
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The August 4 port explosion in Beirut killed dozens, injured thousands, and caused billions of dollars in property damage. As the city looks to rebuild, volunteers, nongovernmental groups, and entrepreneurs are trying to salvage some of the wreckage by recycling at least part of the tonnes of glass littering the streets.
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Toilets are likely one of the last technologies people associate with innovation, but creating high-tech toilets is big business in Japan. And innovating the bathroom experience is not just limited to personal and private settings—the new Tokyo Toilet project looks to dispel perceptions that public toilets are dark, dirty, and smelly.
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Agrivoltaics, the practice of co-locating photovoltaic infrastructure and agriculture, can lead to reduced crop yield if the solar panels block too much light. Researchers in the United Kingdom and Italy investigated using tinted semitransparent solar panels that selectively absorb certain wavelengths and found a substantial overall financial gain compared with classical agriculture.
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ACerS held its first virtual conference, the Virtual Glass Summit, on Aug. 3–5, 2020. The conference welcomed 230 attendees from 13 countries and featured a wide variety of glass topics.
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Determining viscosity of a glass through experiment is a slow and expensive process. In two recent papers published in JACerS, Penn State professor John Mauro and his colleagues show how it can be predicted much easier by using dilatometry and DSC to calculate parameters for a glass viscosity model that was proposed in 2009.
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Historically, Corning focused on improving drop resistance rather than scratch resistance when developing new Gorilla Glass. But Gorilla Glass Victus—the latest version announced last week—improves both resistances, with significant results.
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Vitrification is the process through which a material turns into a glass or glasslike substance by undergoing rapid cooling. Though the discovery this year that a man’s brain vitrified during the Mount Vesuvius eruption surprised some people, vitrification of human tissue is actually a well-established practice in fertility treatment.
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Fuel cells are an alternative to batteries to power electric vehicles. Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells in particular are of high interest, and researchers in Japan have now developed a new glass material that could serve as an improved electrolyte in these cells.
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Metal-organic frameworks have immense potential in various applications but are difficult to synthesize in bulk. Fabricating MOFs in the glassy phase provides the necessary stability for bulk synthesis, and two new studies investigate the mechanical properties of these unique glasses.
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