Smart material types include piezoelectric polymers, conductive polymers, piezoelectric and electrostrictive ceramics, electrorheological fluids, magnetorheological fluids, electrochromic coatings, magnetostrictive materials, micromachined integrated devices, and biomimetic polymers and gels, shape memory alloys and polymers.

And so what does that mean, that it's biodegradable and biocompatible?

I mentioned it briefly at the beginning the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible.

But I thought, no, no, experiment with resins, experiment with polymers.

Being biodegradable, these raw materials did not produce by products that were eco hostile.

In our world we use about 350 polymers to make all this.

Natural polymers, well ... I think that's what's most important, because these polymers have been tried and tested in our ecosystem for the last billion years, in everything from mushrooms to crustaceans.

Shoes for Nike, where the uppers are polyesters, infinitely recyclable, the bottoms are biodegradable soles.

Examples include natural fibres, organic agricultural products, recyclable and biodegradable products or sustainably produced forest products.

We use five polymers in the natural world to do everything that you see.

This is made bone is made from a mixture of inorganic minerals and polymers.

And also, I thought that there would be synthetic polymers, plastics, embedded in the rock.

When that moves into polymers, you can change the elasticity, the fluidity of the form.

79. Conductive polymers can change colour and conductivity in response to chemical and electronic stimuli.

(d) The fact that biofuels are biodegradable, and are ideal for inland waterways and other environmentally sensitive areas.

The revised proposal was sent again for evaluation, and now the reviewers reason for rejecting it was that new polymers would not be safe to test on animals or people. Another graduate student showed that the polymers were safe.

Shape memory polymers are commercially available in a number of convenient physical states, including pellets, solutions and liquids.

Yet one of my graduate students synthesized the polymers for his doctoral thesis. We sent the proposal back for another review, only to be told that the grant should still not be funded, because the polymers would react with whatever drug we wanted to deliver.

Supramolecular assemblies 82. Both natural and synthetic polymers can be designed to form large assemblies of molecules with useful properties.

Fossil fuels are also essential for the creation of plastics and polymers, key ingredients in computers, entertainment devices and clothing.

Although biomimetic polymers and gels are currently at the research and development stage, future use as biosensors and neural prostheses is possible.

The alarming UNEP report on marine debris only heightens our concern over the ever growing accumulation of non biodegradable debris in the marine and coastal environments.

78. Shape memory alloys and polymers can return to their original shape upon being heated to a higher temperature after being shaped under thermomechanical conditions.

If this behaviour can be understood and extended to common commodity polymers, such nanocomposites could compete effectively with higher priced engineering plastics and find widespread application.

(d) Bio ecology obtaining highly effective strains of micro organisms for producing biodegradable preparations of petroleum, organophosphorous substances, means of protecting plant life and exopolysaccharides used in the oil industry

Then we would have an anaerobic digester, which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area, turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid.

But, of course, for most of us, we know how to grow teeth, and therefore we can take adult stem teeth, put them on a biodegradable mold, re grow a tooth, and simply implant it.

In the future they will look like that, because we need to move away from those type of polymers and use that for medical equipment and more important things, perhaps, in life.

The project attracted 600,000 from a private company that was involved in the solid waste recycling programme and in producing fertilizer from biodegradable refuse, as well as in recycling of plastic, glass and paper for sale.

Matt Froind, a dairy farmer in New Canaan, Connecticut, who woke up one day and realized the crap from his cows was worth more than their milk, if he could use it to make these biodegradable flower pots.

Some polymers reinforced with clays that have been exfoliated to produce sheets with nanometer spacing have shown greatly increased mechanical properties and higher service temperatures with only a few per cent of the clay additive.

It's sustainable it's a sustainable material that is processed all in water and at room temperature and is biodegradable with a clock, so you can watch it dissolve instantaneously in a glass of water or have it stable for years.

Working in a hospital, I saw that almost all polymers used in medicine were derived from household objects. For example, the materials used in girdles for women are used in artificial hearts because of their good flex life.

We see it that way. Plants are busy making long chains of starches and glucose, right, out of CO2. He's found a way he's found a catalyst and he's found a way to take CO2 and make it into polycarbonates. Biodegradable plastics out of CO2 how plant like.

The first step was to select monomers a polymer s building blocks that would be safe in the human body. We then synthesized these polymers and discovered that by changing their composition, we could make them last in the body for a period ranging from days to years.

(d) Guidance provision of guidance on various waste management options and best practice (for example, obtainment of compost or anaerobic digestion of organic waste, installation of whole site landfill gas collection, followed by its utilization (or flaring, where applicable) at new sites receiving biodegradable waste, and at existing sites, if remaining capacity and gas production is likely)

With Henry Brem, now the chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, we thought we could use these polymers to deliver drugs locally in the treatment of brain cancer. But I had to raise money for this project, so I wrote grant applications to government agencies that were reviewed by other professors.

Meanwhile, our gatherer ancestors ate carbohydrates (polymers of glucose), which was also transported to the liver, via the glycolytic pathway, and broken down for energy. Any excess glucose stimulated the pancreas to release insulin, which transported glucose into peripheral fat tissue, and which also caused the liver to store glucose as glycogen (liver starch).

Given that most of these items are not biodegradable, and are not recycled, plastics waste is building up with serious environmental consequences. While governments have begun to implement new (and often quite strict) regulations aimed at managing plastics waste for example, China banned lightweight plastic shopping bags in 2008 they are inadequate to address the world s growing plastics waste problem.

But the emergence of molecular comparisons in the 1960 s, and DNA technologies in the 1980 s, presented a new way of comparing species. The comparison of linear polymers proteins made up of chains of amino acids, or DNA made up of chains of nucleotides held out the promise of a simple tabular approach to evolution.

Given that tumors take several months to grow, biocompatible systems had to be developed that could release proteins and other large molecular weight substances slowly and continuously in the body something that scientists were convinced was impossible. However, after two years of work, I discovered that I could modify certain types of polymers to release molecules of virtually any size over a 100 day period.