There is a useful question to ask about any standardised object: what is actually setting the dimension?
For a great many things the answer is a material property or a…
There is a recurring result in materials science that is worth stating as a general principle: arrangement frequently matters more than composition.
The lining of certain shells is the standard…
There is a difference between materials that are gathered and materials that are extracted, and it explains why some textiles were cheap and others were not.
Wool is gathered. It…
There is a question about corrosion that people rarely ask and that turns out to be the whole subject.
The question is not why metals corrode. Almost all of them…
There is a small group of building materials that go round in a circle, and lime is the clearest.
The cycle is truly closed. A rock is heated to drive…
There is a difference between two ways of putting a mark on a surface, and almost everything about the history of writing materials follows from it.
The first is to…