Firing bricks and making mortar and cement is very costly, but organic chemists are working on more sustainable alternatives -- focusing on building materials made from waste products. In another move ...

Every day, new advances in polymer seal and material technology are made for a broad range of applications that protect, enhance and improve our lives. In order to keep up with the fast pace of need ...

MIT says the two-dimensional nature of the polymer gives it strength not typically associated with plastic. An MIT dean sees the new two-dimensional polymer as appropriate for “applications where high ...

Research in the areas of plastics, polymers, and biodegradable materials ranges from additive manufacturing to food packaging. This work focuses on the development and characterization of sustainable ...

What if we could invent materials that can repair themselves when damaged? Polymer molecules in various states – solid, melt, solution – are susceptible to covalent bond changes in response to ...

Chemists discovered a new way to make polymers stronger: introduce a few weaker bonds into the material. Working with polyacrylate elastomers, they could increase the materials' resistance to tearing ...

What if a complex material could reshape itself in response to a simple chemical signal? A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the University of Edinburgh has shown that even small ...

Traditional polyesters are obtained via ring-opening polymerization (ROP), but significant research is currently directed at designing new biodegradable vinyl polymers with esters groups in the ...

Scientists often seek new materials derived from polymers. Rather than starting a polymer search from scratch, they save time and money by blending existing polymers to achieve desired properties.

As this polymer network is stretched, weaker crosslinking bonds (blue) break more easily than any of the strong polymer strands, making it more difficult for a crack to propagate through the material.