Ancient furnace workers experimented with heating the ends of glass tubes to rework them. One day, someone blew into that tube and changed history.
Articles on Glass
Displaying 1 - 20 of 22 articles
Fiber optics allow you to search the internet, text your friends and check your social media feeds. They also have geological, security and manufacturing applications.
Researchers say a palm-sized piece of glass could store the equivalent of 2 million books for over 10,000 years.
Glass seems simple − it’s just sand and a few more ingredients. Yet mining and production are rarely local, raising questions about sustainability.
Materials science might seem very technical, but as a scientific discipline, it has led to many shifts in society over the past few centuries.
Its staggering forms made monuments out of ordinary places frequented by ordinary people.
The sensitivity of the exhibition’s themes, coupled with low lighting, seems to demand quiet in the space. In this silence, you hear the gentle chiming of hand-blown glass.
Sea glass, while an eye-catching treasure and a multimillion-dollar industry, exists because of decades of improper waste management.
Two glass researchers explain how glass is made, the unique properties of glass and how those properties have allowed it to be a useful material to humans for thousands of years.
Evidence suggests that Scotland’s bottle deposit scheme would prevent huge amounts of litter from entering the environment.
In Canada, milk is available in jugs, cartons, bags and glass bottles. A new analysis reveals which type of container has the smallest environmental footprint — from container production to disposal.
Here’s how to quench your thirst in an environmentally responsible way.
Africa has always contributed to global technological breakthroughs and economic systems.
The origin of Libyan desert glass found scattered in an Egyptian desert has puzzled scientists for years. But a new look at the glass structure reveals its meteoric formation.
Glass has always been a notoriously energy inefficient building material – but an obsession with aesthetics led architects to ignore its shortcomings.
An unlikely combination of artists, medieval historians, philosophers and scientists have converged to create an exhibition of glass artworks.
Lightning strikes are powerful – but we haven’t had solid estimates of their energy until now. Researchers turned to the hollow stone tubes they create by vaporizing sand for more precise calculations.
The laws of physics dictate that to pick out ever fainter objects from space and see them more sharply, we’re going to need a bigger telescope. And that means we need massive mirrors.
Air conditioning alone won’t make global warming more bearable – architects must reinvent the window.
Before Pilkingtons invented plate glass in the mid-19th century, flat panes could not be made. Old windows are uneven. Some once thought this was because glass is a liquid that flows down slowly over the…
Top contributors
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Director of Steward Observatory and Head of the Department of Astronomy, University of Arizona
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Professor of Low Carbon Design, University of Bath
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Associate Professor of Geosciences, University of South Florida
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Lecturer, University of Bristol
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Senior Lecturer in Architectural Glass, University of Sunderland
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Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics, University of York
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Project Scientist at the Steward Observatory and Associate Research Professor of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona
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Professor in High Medieval History, Durham University
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Professor of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona
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Smuts Research Fellow in African Studies, University of Cambridge
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Senior Lecturer (US: Associate Professor) in Sustainable Architecture, University of Kent
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Doctor of Environmental Science, University of Southampton
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Professor of Applied Environmental Science, University of Southampton
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PhD Candidate in Materials Science, Penn State
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Research Chair, Indigenous Approaches to Environmental Management, Keele University