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The ages of civilization, from the Copper Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, represent a succession of stronger and stronger alloys. Copper is a weak metal, but naturally occurring and easy to smelt. Bronze is an alloy of copper, containing small amounts of tin or sometimes arsenic, and is much stronger than copper.
Self-healing concrete has these bacteria embedded inside it along with a form of starch, which acts as food for the bacteria. Under normal circumstances these bacteria remain dormant, encased by the calcium silicate hydrate fibrils. But if a crack forms, the bacteria are released from their bonds, and in the presence of water they wake up and start to look around for food. They find the starch that has been added to the concrete, and this allows them to grow and replicate. In the process they excrete calcite, a form of calcium carbonate.
These days the type of milk added to chocolate varies widely throughout the world, and this is the main reason that milk chocolate tastes different from country to country. In the USA the milk used has had some of its fat removed by enzymes, giving the chocolate a cheesy, almost rancid flavor. In the UK sugar is added to liquid milk, and it is this solution, reduced to a concentrate, that is added to the chocolate, creating a milder caramel flavor. In Europe powdered milk is still used, giving the chocolate a fresh dairy flavor with a powdery texture.
But its most intriguing claim to fame is that it is a two-dimensional material. This doesn’t mean it has no thickness, but rather that it cannot be made any thicker or thinner and be the same material. This is what Andre’s team showed: add an extra layer of carbon to graphene and it goes back to being graphite, take a layer away and the material does not exist at all.
As we have seen, the reason why a stainless steel spoon doesn’t taste of anything is because the chromium atoms within its crystals react with oxygen in the air to form an invisible protective layer of chromium oxide on the surface. If you scratch its surface, this protective layer grows back more quickly than rust will form. This is why we are the first generations not to taste our cutlery.
On Earth, ninety-four different types of atoms naturally exist, but eight of these elements make up 98.8 percent of the mass of the Earth: iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel, calcium, and aluminum. The rest are technically trace elements, including carbon.
But as the scale chart shows, living matter is, in some sense, no different conceptually from non-living matter. What dramatically distinguishes the two is that in living materials we find there is an extra degree of connectivity between the different scales: living materials actively organize their internal architecture. They do this by setting up communication between the different scales of the organism.
