Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

by Mark Miodownik

As you bend a paper clip, you are causing approximately 100,000,000,000,000 dislocations to move at a speed of hundreds of meters per second. Although each one only moves a tiny piece of the crystal (one atomic plane in fact), there are enough of them to allow the crystals to behave like a super-strong plastic rather than a brittle rock.

The technology relies on the ink being made into a form of the so-called Janus particle. Each particle of ink is dyed so that it is dark on one side and white on the other. The two sides are given opposite electric charges, and so each pixel on the electronic paper can be made dark or white by applying the appropriate electric charge.

Dark chocolate usually contains 50 percent cocoa fat and 20 percent cocoa nut powder (referred to as “70 percent cocoa solids” on the packaging). Almost all the rest is sugar.

What was jelly? he asked. He knew that it wasn’t a liquid, but it wasn’t really a solid either. It was, he decided, a liquid trapped in a solid prison, but one in which the prison bars were like an invisibly thin mesh.

When a glass smashes, it is because the force is so great that a chain reaction occurs within the material, with the failure of each atom causing the failure of its neighbor. The bigger the force, the smaller the bubble or crack needed to initiate this chain reaction.

But diamonds are not forever, at least on the surface of this planet. It is, in fact, diamond’s sibling structure, graphite, that is the more stable form, and so all diamonds, including the Great Star of Africa in the Tower of London, are actually turning slowly into graphite. This is distressing news for anyone who owns a diamond, although they can be reassured that it will take billions of years before they see an appreciable degradation of their gems.

Just for starters, graphene is the thinnest, strongest, and stiffest material in the world; it conducts heat faster than any other known material; it can carry more electricity, faster and with less resistance, than any other material; it allows Klein tunneling, an exotic quantum effect in which electrons within the material can tunnel through barriers as if they were not there.