Heating and cooling a home is costly, and inefficient building materials often make a house's carbon footprint even worse. But thanks to a new generation of futuristic building materials, those ...

Transparency is a physical property that we observe every day, though perhaps it is not one that we give a huge amount of thought to. Also known as diaphaneity or pellucidity, transparency in ...

Lots of glass surfaces can brighten up a room, but it also lets in too much heat as well as neighbors’ prying eyes. A new metamaterial is not only more transparent to light, but adds privacy, cools ...

Wood that you can see through? It sounds like something that shouldn't exist, doesn't it? Well, scientists have already proven it can be done. And now they've developed a new kind of transparent wood ...

In design theory, extensive use of Glass is often avoided on south-facing facades in the Northern Hemisphere (or north-facing facades in the Southern Hemisphere) due to the risk of heat gain caused by ...

Glass might soon have some competition from an unlikely rival – bamboo. Scientists in China have turned regular old bamboo into a transparent material that’s also resistant to fire and water, and ...

Wood is a great material because it’s cheap, renewable, and versatile. But this crazy transparent wood that scientists in Sweden brewed up is nuts. It could replace glass for some seriously ...

Transparent aluminum oxide (TAlOx), a real material despite its sci-fi name, is incredibly hard and resistant to scratches, making it perfect for protective coatings on electronics, optical sensors, ...

Thirty years ago, a botanist in Germany had a simple wish: to see the inner workings of woody plants without dissecting them. By bleaching away the pigments in plant cells, Siegfried Fink managed to ...

Engineers demonstrate in a new study that windows made of transparent wood could provide more even and consistent natural lighting and better energy efficiency than glass. Engineers at the A. James ...