A bit of a stretch for a chemistry blog, perhaps, but I couldn’t resist sharing this lovely find. The designer Makoto Tojiki has created some stunning light sculptures with a little bit of science thrown in. Well worth a look if you get a chance as they’re really quite beautiful. Pi is cited to a large number of decimal places along the side of the glowing twisted tapes that make up the sculptures, and he’s called the design ‘Archimedes dream’, apparently because Archimedes was renowned for being a bit of a visionary and ahead of his time.

In some places on the web people are saying that these sculptures are made from organic light-emitting diodes (which is what first attracted my attention). After a closer look, however, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The electroluminescent (EL) tapes appear to be a copper wire threaded through a layer of phosphor, covered in a protective plastic sheath. I’ve never seen them before, though, and I can’t locate more information than that – does anyone know which kind of phosphor is used for them? They tapes are available in a range of colours and I can think of a number of uses for them, though to be fair, most of them involve me doing my own Tony Hart impression and trying to create something artistic out of them.

Vicki

Vicki Cleave (Senior Editor, Nature Materials)

For reasons that will hopefully become clear in the near future, I’ve recently been working on a list of chemistry-oriented papers that have appeared in Nature Materials, and attempting to categorise them into ‘type of chemistry’. You may think that this would be quite simple for a materials journal, and that you could simply lump them all under the ‘materials chemistry’ heading. Sadly (for my workload), not so, and as seems to be the case so often these days in research, most papers fit into several categories at once. Take our paper from last year, for instance, on photocontrolled living polymerisations – clearly of interest to materials chemists, but also relevant for the categories of synthesis and polymer chemistry. Or our paper on redox-controlled permeability of microcapsules – the materials chemistry is of interest here, but the paper has great relevance for biochemists looking at potential drug delivery, too.

All this has reminded me of a discussion meeting I went to last year hosted by the RSC, entitled “Defining materials chemistry”. The meeting brought together many materials chemists and the aim was to pin down exactly where the boundaries of this research area lie. But this seemingly simple remit turned out to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. Needless to say, there was plenty of debate, and we ended up questioning whether we could even come up with a perfect definition of ‘materials science’ or what precisely a ‘material’ is in this context. The OED gives quite a good definition of materials science, but doesn’t even try to define ‘materials chemistry’.

The report from the meeting makes interesting reading, although I wouldn’t say we arrived at a definitive answer, so I was wondering if anyone out there had their own definition that might fit the bill? Just putting it into words seems to get harder the more you think about it – though perhaps it’s easier to come up with a personal definition than to reach a consensus amongst a group.

Despite the interesting debate, I can’t help thinking that for most researchers, the most important definition lies in the research they’re doing, and not the label they are given.

Vicki

Vicki Cleave (Senior Editor, Nature Materials)