Unbreakable Glass

Reported September 2005

MURRAY HILL, N.J. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- It's an unlikely discovery at the bottom of the sea that could strengthen our future; unbreakable glass.

Glass is fragile, but something found in the sea may change that. It has survived here for billions of years and is made of glass. Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., physical and material chemist at Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, N.J., says, "It uses every structural feature we know in mechanical engineering, but at a scale that is 1,000, 10,000-times smaller."

In fact, it's one of the strongest glasses known to man. Aizenberg is studying how the sponge is formed and has discovered individual needle-like glass beams make up the basic structure. "Each of the strands is about the thickness of a human hair. Actually half of a human hair," she says.

Today, architects use fiber-reinforced cements, bundled beams, and diagonal beams to reinforce building columns. You can see it in the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Swiss Re Tower in London. Engineers hope to use what they've learned about the formation of the sponge's glass beams to help create better, stronger and cheaper materials for the future.

Elsa Reichmanis, Ph.D., director of Polymer and Organic Materials Research at the Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, N.J. says, "As scientific research is evolving, we are now starting to explore and understand more of what nature does every day very easily."

The sponge cannot only show scientists how to produce glass at low temperatures, but the sponge also has optical fibers that glow in the dark.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

The American Society of Civil Engineers
1801 Alexander Bell Drive
Reston, VA 20191-4400
(800) 548-2723
http://www.asce.org



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