Glass

Apple has made another new addition to its futuristic donut-shaped headquarters in Cupertino, California. Named Mirage, it takes the form of a sculpture park featuring hundreds of glass columns made from sand sourced from deserts around the world.

Windows are pretty basic necessities for letting in light and heat, but you don’t always want both at once. Now engineers at North Carolina State University have developed a new material that allows windows to easily switch between three modes.

In a fight against Iron Man, you might be better off betting on Glass DNA Nanolattice Man instead. Engineers have developed a very strong and lightweight new material out of DNA that self-assembles into lattices, and is then coated in glass.

Collectors of trading cards are always hunting for rare shiny variants – and now astronomers have found the exoplanet equivalent. The shiniest planet ever found, LTT9779 b, is an ultra-hot, cosmic disco ball thanks to clouds made of glass and titanium.

Despite its many advantages, glass has one major Achilles' heel – it’s brittle. Now, engineers at Penn State have developed LionGlass, a new form that's not only 10 times more damage resistant, but requires significantly less energy to manufacture.

Artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Sebastian Behmann have enclosed a courtyard at the AKG Art Museum with an intricate glass canopy. Inspired by the area's weather patterns, the project is defined by a stunning vortex-like funnel.

Scientists have created the world’s smallest wine glass, narrower than a human hair. Made out of actual glass, the model is a test run of a new 3D-printing process that could help make nanoscale glass components for electronic and optical devices.

While glass bricks are effective for allowing daylight into buildings, they're not good insulators and they can't be used for entire load-bearing walls. Such is reportedly not the case, however, with experimental new aerogel-filled translucent bricks.

The next World Expo fair won't begin until 2025, but initial architectural designs are already being revealed. This attractive example will consist of a top-heavy spiraling structure that pays homage to the Czech Republic's glassmaking tradition.

Most three-dimensional glass objects are produced via either a molding, blowing or 3D-printing process. Chinese scientists, however, have devised a technique of folding such items into shape – and it has some key advantages over other methods.

Even though glass is praised for being fully recyclable, the EPA states that only about a third of discarded glass items actually get recycled. With that problem in mind, scientists have developed a new type of glass which is biodegradable.

Although glass is known for being fully recyclable, the US Environmental Protection Agency states that only about one third of post-consumer glass actually gets recycled. A new glass-based building cladding material could help boost that number.