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Made to Measure introduces a general
audience to one of today's most exciting areas of scientific
research: materials science. Philip Ball describes how scientists
are currently inventing thousands of new materials, ranging
from synthetic skin, blood, and bone to substances that
repair themselves and adapt to their environment, that swell
and flex like muscles, that repel any ink or paint, and
that capture and store the energy of the Sun. He shows how
all this is being accomplished precisely because, for the
first time in history, materials are being "made to
measure": designed for particular applications, rather
than discovered in nature or by haphazard experimentation.
Now scientists literally put new materials together on the
drawing board in the same way that a blueprint is specified
for a house or an electronic circuit. But the designers
are working not with skylights and alcoves, not with transistors
and capacitors, but with molecules and atoms.
This book is written in the same engaging
manner as Ball's popular book on chemistry, Designing the
Molecular World, and it links insights from chemistry, biology,
and physics with those from engineering as it outlines the
various areas in which new materials will transform our
lives in the twenty-first century. The chapters provide
vignettes from a broad range of selected areas of materials
science and can be read as separate essays. The subject
include photonic materials, materials for information storage,
smart materials, biomaterials, biomedical materials, materials
for clean energy, porous materials, diamond and hard materials,
new polymers, and surfaces and interfaces.
Philip Ball is an associate editor for
physical sciences with Nature. He regularly contributes
articles on all fields of science to the academic and popular
press, and is the author of Designing the Molecular
World (Princeton).
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