New materials will replace genuine leather. Free Technical Library News

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New materials will replace genuine leather

08.07.2016

Platinum Dirt from California, USA works with leather taken from car seats, old sofas and any other items. The result is leather jackets, skirts, bags, as well as various items such as leather leggings and wristlets.

The question is, how to replace the actual leather in cars, if it then has to be disposed of anyway? To the counter question, why change the skin, supporters of "leather replacement" point out that the skin is so widely used in cars that it has lost any "status", and the recently shown prototype of the Rolls-Royce of the future offers silk upholstery. In addition, there is a growing number of vegans in the world - vegans who oppose the exploitation of animals and exclude all animal products from their diet, as well as people who simply sympathize with animals. Accordingly, automotive companies are offering alternative upholstery materials.

For example, well-known artificial leather, which makes you feel cold in winter and sticks to your back in summer, at Toyota has turned into a material called SofTex, which dries faster than leather and surpasses it in terms of durability. And the Sensatec material used in BMW is even treated with a special compound that smells like leather. Sports cars like Lamborghini are experimenting with carbon-fibre fabric, like much of the bodywork. Maserati, like Rolls-Royce, prefers silk seat inserts, and not just any, but from the famous supplier of materials and fashionable clothes Ermenegildo Zegna.

However, the newest and most unexpected word in applied materials science seems to have come from an English startup called Ananas Anam. Using pineapple leaves from the Philippines, the company has learned how to produce artificial suede, not much different from the real one. In addition to fiber for the material, the process produces biomass that can be used as fertilizer.

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Random news from the Archive

To remember something, you need to forget something 30.12.2015

We often catch ourselves thinking that we can not cope with the huge amount of information that falls upon us. This is not only about news, pictures, texts, video and audio from social networks, news sites, etc. Even in ordinary, "non-digital" life, it happens that we just remembered why we need to go to the store , but a friend called, and after a minute of conversation, we are already at a loss standing in front of the shelves, trying to remember what we needed here. In other words, our memory sometimes demonstrates simply exceptional instability, and we would give a lot for it to be at least a little more stable - especially on holiday days.

However, according to psychologists from the University of Glasgow, we simply need to forget - otherwise it will be difficult for us to learn something else later. The experiment was as follows: a person had to learn two tasks - first it was a few simple words, and then a few simple movements (like those that we make when we dial a code on an intercom or at an ATM). Then, after 12 hours, they checked how well both tasks were learned.

The test, which was originally the first one, helped me remember the second one better. That is, if the participant in the experiment first learned the words, then later he remembered the sequence of movements better than when the movements came first. That is, the memorized information contributed to further learning, although both tasks were heterogeneous. Moreover, the effect was stronger if there was a structural affinity between the verbal test and the motion test—if, say, the sequence of words was organized in a similar way to the sequence of movements. For the learning process, it turned out to be important not specific elements - words and hand manipulations - but interconnections, interactions between them: the brain, having learned one block of interconnections, was ready to learn another.

However, the strangest result of the work is the following: the effectiveness of learning at the next stage depended on how firmly or fragilely the previous task was stuck in memory. If psychologists used techniques consolidating and reinforcing what was learned in the first task, then the next task was remembered worse. Paradoxical as it may sound, the instability of the memory helped to better cope with the new situation. For clarity, here we can present the following scheme: part of the cognitive resources of the brain during learning is engaged in obtaining and processing new information in general, in general, and part is engaged in specific meanings (in this case, words and movements). When learning, we remember both the process itself (learning to learn), and some information that we received.

Of course, you can spend all your mental power on fixing the details, but then we, roughly speaking, will forget what it means to learn. So it turns out that the shallow subject memory that we complain about, when each next piece of information displaces the previous one, is actually a guarantee that we are, in principle, able to adapt to a variety of situations and assimilate a variety of information.

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