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…
There is a small category of materials obtained from a living organism without killing it, and a smaller category still where the organism replaces what was taken.
Cork belongs to…
There is a plant that behaves so differently from a tree that most of what people assume about it is wrong, starting with what it is.
Bamboo is a grass.…
There is a useful question to ask about any traditional material: what problem does the processing solve, and what happens if you skip it?
For leather the answer is unusually…
There is a useful principle in materials: if a substance behaves oddly in several unrelated ways, there is usually one structural feature responsible for all of them.
Wool behaves oddly…
There is a category of biological material that outperforms engineered equivalents, and the interesting question is usually not the material but the manufacturing.
Silk is the clearest example. The properties…