Two entrepreneurs from Mexico have created vegan leather out of cactus leaves. The cruelty-free leather is called Desserto.

Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez are said to be the first to create organic leather out of only nopal (prickly-pear) cactus. They don’t use toxic chemicals, phthalates, or PVC in their design.

The vegan leather is partially biodegradable. It’s flexible, breathable, and lasts for at least 10 years. The material feels like animal-based leather. Companies can use it in furniture, cars, leather accessories, and clothing.

Spraying this material on desert sand will turn it into green, fertile land.

High-entropy alloys, which are made from nearly equal parts of several primary metals, could hold great potential for creating materials with superior mechanical properties.

But with a practically unlimited number of possible combinations, one challenge for metallurgists is figuring out where to focus their research efforts in a vast, unexplored world of metallic mixtures.

A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a new process that could help guide such efforts. Their approach involves building an atomic resolution chemical map to help gain new insights into individual high-entropy alloys and help characterize their properties.

Perovskite nanocrystals hold promise for improving a wide variety of optoelectronic devices—from lasers to light emitting diodes (LEDs) — but problems with their durability still limit the material’s broad commercial use.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a novel approach aimed at addressing the material’s durability problem: encasing the perovskite inside a double-layer protection system made from plastic and silica.

In a study published Nov. 29 in the journal Science Advances, the research team describes a multistep process to produce encased perovskite nanocrystals that exhibit strong resistance to degradation in moist environments.

The view from the HazeCam, which is situated just west of the Jackson Street Bridge in Newark, New Jersey, usually extends for about eight miles. To the east, the skyline of New York City rises and falls along the horizon like a bar graph, buffered by a blue haze of humidity and particulate emissions and ozone. The towers are planted into the rock of Manhattan, and the island of steel-and-concrete canyons covers 59 square kilometers and accommodates 1.5 million people. Techni…

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The indoor biome covers as much as six percent of the world’s landmass—and we know almost nothing about it.