Katy Devlin, Glass Magazine, January 7, 2010

Safti First, San Francisco, supplied its SuperLite II-XL 120 in GPX Framing for Ohio's Cleveland Clinic.

Nonresidential construction spending is expected to fall 5 percent in 2010, following a 5.7 percent loss in 2009, and isn't expected to rebound until 2011, according to Jim Haughey, chief economist, Reed Construction Data, Norcross, Ga. Despite the grim forecast, representatives from fire-rated glazing suppliers remain optimistic. The market segment is partly insulated from the downturn thanks to code requirements, building trends and increased funding for some public projects, they say.

"Although we are currently experiencing a very soft market in the commercial construction industry, demand for non-wired fire-rated glazing products continues to grow," says Dan Poling, sales manager, fire rated glass products, Schott North America Inc., Elmsford, N.Y. Poling attributes the growth to adoption of International Building Codes nationwide.

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Andrew Parker, Laser Focus World, January 1, 2010

"In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." This famous dictum from H. G. Wells tells us something that may seem self-evident: sight matters. But imagine for a moment that the country of the blind is in fact the whole world, 521 million years ago. It's a world in which life is primitive and aimless, and evolution slow and painstaking.

Then something remarkable happens. Over the next million years,Biomimetics the process of evolution kicks into overdrive. For the first time, animals evolve hard external parts. Both hunters and prey develop armaments and defenses. So in this short space of time-the blink of an eye in geological terms-all animals on Earth, no matter how unrelated, leave their soft skins behind. When I traced back the origin of vision, I found that the first image-forming eye evolved in a predatory animal (one that could have an impact on others) around 521 million years ago, precisely at the beginning of this Big Bang of evolution. Hence vision appears to have lit the fuse for life's explosion.

But why is this important to the photonics community? Because with those first hard parts in animals came the first photonic nanostructures on Earth. With the evolution of the eye, the size, shape, color, and behavior of animals were suddenly revealed for the first time. The animal kingdom exploded into life. Color was among their main weapons. And from that moment until today, color on Earth has functioned to provide camouflage and crypsis, as well as warning colors and mating colors to attract the eye...

Mitch Jacoby, Chemical and Engineering News, February 26, 2010

The periodic table officially has a new entry.  The International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry announced its approval last week of the name copernicium and symbol Cn for element 112 (Pure Appl. Chem., DOI: 10.1351/PAC-REC-09-08-20).

The approval follows IUPAC's extensive review of claims made by the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research, in Darmstadt, Germany, of being the first team to synthesize element 112. GSI's claims date back to 1996. IUPAC's announcement raises to six the total number of elements officially discovered and named by GSI.

GSI team leader Sigurd Hofmann explains that his team's intention in selecting the name for element 112 is "to salute Nicolaus Copernicus, an influential scientist who didn't receive any accolades in his own lifetime, and to highlight the link between astronomy and the field of nuclear chemistry." Copernicus was the 16th-century Polish astronomer who developed the sun-centered model of the solar system-a radical departure from the thinking that prevailed in Copernicus' day.

The Darmstadt researchers have previously been recognized for the discovery of five other elements, which they named bohrium (107), hassium (108), meitnerium (109), darmstadtium (110), and roentgenium (111).

Larry Hardesty, MIT News, February 26, 2010

Microelectromechanical devices - tiny machines with moving parts - are everywhere these days: they monitor air pressure in car tires, register the gestures of video game players, and reflect light onto screens in movie theaters. But they're manufactured the same way computer chips are, in facilities that can cost billions of dollars, and their rigidity makes them hard to wrap around curved surfaces.

MIT researchers have discovered a way to make microelectromechanical devices, or MEMS, by stamping them onto a plastic film. That should significantly reduce their cost, but it also opens up the possibility of large sheets of sensors that could, say, cover the wings of an airplane to gauge their structural integrity. The printed MEMS are also flexible, so they could be used to make sensors with irregular shapes. And since the stamping process dispenses with the harsh chemicals and high temperatures ordinarily required for the fabrication of MEMS, it could allow MEMS to incorporate a wider range of materials.

Conventional MEMS are built through a process called photolithography, in which different layers of material are chemically deposited on a substrate - usually a wafer of some semiconducting material - and etched away to form functional patterns. Since a wafer is at most 12 inches across, arranging today's MEMS into large arrays requires cutting them out and bonding them to some other surface.