The mysteriously titled symposium X happens each lunchtime, and gets a huge crowd because it serves pizza.
Today’s talks included one by Gregg Zank, vice president of Dow Corning – the silicone company. He was talking about innovation being fuelled by advanced materials. Zank spots trends and then suggests needs that emerge from that trend that require innovative thinking to solve. So taking data storage for example, Zank saw a trend for mass archival storage – calling it WORN – write once, read never. The materials innovation needed to get away from this, he said, was a holographic data storage material that can be easily read,-re-read and added to. It’s light-sensitive, and contains a dispersion of monomers and polymers, randomly distributed in the dark, but in light the polymers and monomers separate and set up a refractive index differential, and this, somehow, can be used to store data.
Even more cool was a material for an active protection system – a body armour for old people to stop them breaking bones when they fall, or for pesky kids who fall off their skate boards.
An acrylate backbone polymer of silicone was the innovative material Dow developed to help improve L’Oreal’s Stay Beautiful lipstick. It can last for 16 hours and withstand all those lip-based activities one might indulge in. Like eating free pizza.
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