Why was aluminum once more valuable than gold? Why are some buildings built on giant springs and where can they be found? Why does a nuclear waste remain hazardous for thousands of years? In this book, you will learn about the chemical and physical changes that can occur in materials, including chemical and metal reactions, the effect of substances on materials, and the various types of physical changes and their causes. Find out what a huge part the material world plays in your life! Each book in the 'Material World' series looks at a key area of materials science, covering subjects such as states of matter, material characteristics and behavior, the uses of different materials, and the technology used to make new materials or change existing ones for new purposes.

Learn how materials change when they're affected by such things as heat and cold temperatures. Includes easy experiments that show how to change materials using common household items.

The Reading About Starters series introduces early readers to non-fiction. Each book is designed to increase reading fluency and combines a narrative text, accessible language and an easy-to-follow format. Keywords are introduced in non-fiction pages then

This book presents a design-driven investigation into smart materials developed by chemists, physicists, materials and chemical engineers, and applied by designers to consumer products. Introducing a class of smart materials, that change colors, the book presents their characteristics, advantages, potentialities and difficulties of applications of this to help understanding what they are, how they work, how they are applied. The books also present a number of case studies: products, projects, concepts and experiments using smart materials, thus mapping out new design territories for these innovative materials. These case studies involve different fields of design, including product, interior, fashion and communication design. Within the context of rising sustainable and human-centered design agendas, the series will demonstrate the role and influence of these new materials and technologies on design, and discuss how they can implement and redefine our objects and spaces to encourage more resilient environments.

A unique overview of the manufacture of and applications for materials nanoarchitectonics, placing otherwise hard-to-find information in context. Edited by highly respected researchers from the most renowned materials science institute in Japan, the first part of this volume focuses on the fabrication and characterization of zero to three-dimensional nanomaterials, while the second part presents already existing as well as emerging applications in physics, chemistry, biology, and biomedicine.

What are active materials? This book aims to introduce and redefine conceptions of matter by considering materials as entities that ‘sense’ and respond to their environment. By examining the modeling of, the experiments on, and the construction of these materials, and by developing a theory of their structure, their collective activity, and their functionality, this volume identifies and develops a novel scientific approach to active materials. Moreover, essays on the history and philosophy of metallurgy, chemistry, biology, and materials science provide these various approaches to active materials with a historical and cultural context. The interviews with experts from the natural sciences included in this volume develop new understandings of ‘active matter’ and active materials in relation to a range of research objects and from the perspective of different scientific disciplines, including biology, physics, chemistry, and materials science. These insights are complemented by contributions on the activity of matter and materials from the humanities and the design field. Discusses the mechanisms of active materials and their various conceptualizations in materials science. Redefines conceptions of active materials through interviews with experts from the natural sciences. Contextualizes, historizes, and reflects on different notions of matter/materials and activity through contributions from the humanities. A highly interdisciplinary approach to a cutting-edge research topic, with contributions from both the sciences and the humanities.

Today, architects and designers are beginning to look toward developments in new "smart" or "intelligent" materials and technologies for solutions to long-standing problems in building design. However, these new materials have so far been applied in a diverse but largely idiosyncratic nature, because relatively few architects have access to information about the types or properties of these new materials or technologies. Two of the leading experts in this field - Addington and Schodek - have solved this problem by incorporating all the relevant information of all the latest technologies available to architects and designers in this one volume. They present materials by describing their fundamental characteristics, and go on to identify and suggest how these same characteristics can be exploited by professionals to achieve their design goals. Here, the wealth of technical understanding already available in the materials science and engineering literature is at last made accessible to a design audience.