The Fermart Lab

Singapore University of Technology and Design

Coverage

Media Coverage

Here is a selection of explanations and opinions of our scientific results that have appeared in English-language media. They are classified by topics. You will find much more (multilingual) information about our main results on internet, the selection of articles and videos on this page, and personal interviews on the left menu.

We are proud of the results of our collaboration with journalists as part of our work connecting science with the global community around the world. If you like to feature our scientific results in an article or video, or learn more about our laboratory, please feel free to contact us for more details.

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New Scientist: Seven new materials to change the world

Combine the hard stuff in shrimp shells with a spider silk protein and you get shrilk, a tough, biodegradable replacement for world-choking plastics

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Discovery Channel: Can We Make Plastic from Shrimp?

We’ve been looking for an alternative for petroleum-based plastics for years, and … to talk about how we’re now able to make plastic from the shells of shrimp!

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Science/AAAS: Making Plastic Out of Shrimp Shells

Harvard University researchers have created a fully biodegradable plastic from shrimp shells. Dubbed shrilk, the bioplastic is made of the main ingredient found in the hardy shells: chitin. The tough, transparent material is already being transformed into complex shapes like egg cartons and chess pieces, the Harvard Gazette reports. Shrilk, which breaks down in the environment in as little as 2 weeks, is described in Macromolecular Materials and Engineering.

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Harvard Gazette: Promising solution to plastic pollution

Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have introduced a new bioplastic isolated from shrimp shells. It’s made from chitosan, a form of chitin — the second-most abundant organic material on Earth.

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The Guardian: Five wonder materials that could change the world

Materials such as graphene and shrilk are so new that the scientists who discovered them hardly know what to do with them – they only know they might yet transform our lives.

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Huffington Post: Nature Has A Promising Replacement For Plastics

Javier Fernandez admits he’s not a huge fan of chess. “I’m not very good either,” he says. Nevertheless, his queen, king, rook and knight are attracting a lot of attention. The black and white chess pieces are made of plastic, but not the petroleum-based kind experts warn may be laden with hormone-scrambling chemcials. Rather, Fernandez and his colleagues molded the complex game pieces from a compostable material abundant in nature: Chitin.

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Entomology Today: Got Shrilk? Insect Inspired Bioplastic

Since their inception after World War II, synthetic plastics have left an indelible mark on society. However, plastic bottles can take up to 450 years to decompose, according to the U.S. National Park Service. While they do indeed break down eventually, plastics are not truly biodegradable. Instead, they accumulate in landfills and oceans, sometimes killing wildlife.

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National Geographic: Supermaterials

Combine shrimp shell and silk proteins and a miraculous new substance is born. “Shrilk” was invented by researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard, who layered the two components in a way that mimicked structures found in shells and insect cuticles. Shrilk is inexpensive to manufacture but has invaluable virtues: It’s tough, flexible, and biodegradable. In the future it may be used to make everything from wound dressings to trash bags to disposable diapers. And it might make many landfill-choking plastics obsolete.

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Scientific American: 9 Materials That Will Change Manufacturing

Researchers are developing cutting-edge foams, coatings, metals and other substances to make our homes, vehicles and gadgets more energy efficient and environmentally friendly.

Daily Mail: A lab-grown version of insect armour which could replace plastics

The hard ‘shells’ of insects – such as the rigid outsides of grasshoppers and houseflieess – is light, and provides the insects with hard-wearing protection without weighing them down. Now researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard have developed a new material that replicates the exceptional strength, toughness of insect shell – known as ‘cuticle’.

Fast Company: Insect-Inspired Material That Could Solve Our Plastic Problem”

Javier Fernández a Spanish materials scientist, and his collaborators at the Wyss Institute, have created the material they’re calling “Shrilk,” which mimics the architecture of arthropod exoskeletons. Grasshoppers and other similar bugs have an exoskeleton that is strong enough to support their innards, but light enough to allow the insect to fly. Shrilk, made from the proteins in these natural materials, also adopts a similar duality: It has the strength of an aluminum alloy, but is half its weight. It’s also completely biodegradable.

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Fast Company: Insect-Inspired Material That Could Solve Our Plastic Problem”

Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering analyzed insect cuticle, which includes chitin and other proteins, such as the fibroin also found in spider silk. They then devised a method to produce a material made up of layers of chitin and fibroin. The result is on par with an aluminum alloy for strength, but at half the metal’s weight.

Stanford University: Transforming Cells into Bricks Offers New Method for Assembling Tissues

Researchers at the MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) recently developed a method to potentially overcome the reluctance of cells grown in vitro to form complex 3-dimensional shapes.

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The New York Times: Micromasonry & Biological Lego

The “micromasonry,” employs a gel-like material that acts like concrete, binding the cell “bricks” together as it hardens. Javier Gomez Fernandez describe the work in a paper published online last week in the journal Advanced Materials.

CNET: Breakthrough in tissue engineering: 'Bio-Legos'

A new technique called micromasonry uses a gel-like material to bind cell bricks together as the material hardens, enabling the formation of 3D shapes to build such things as new organs.

New Scientist: 'Human Lego’ may one day build artificial organs

Building artificial tissue could become child’s play, if Lego-like blocks made of human cells can be assembled into working organs. So far the blocks have been used to build a variety of living 3D shapes that have never before been created on a cell-by-cell basis, such as tubes and solid spheres. The hope is that the bricks will be used to construct artificial tissues for human implantation.

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MIT: Building organs block by block

Tissue engineering has long held promise for building new organs to replace damaged livers, blood vessels and other body parts. However, one major obstacle is getting cells grown in a lab dish to form 3-D shapes instead of flat layers.
Researchers at the MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) have come up with a new way to overcome that challenge, by encapsulating living cells in cubes and arranging them into 3-D structures, just as a child would construct buildings out of blocks.

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Huffington Post: Tiny Bits Of Plastic Polluting Our Oceans

“We never thought of looking for plastic,” said Javier Gomez Fernandez, a biologist at Singapore University of Technology and Design.

His team’s accidental finding of plastic in the skin of both farmed and wild fish, published online this month in the supplementary section of their unrelated peer-reviewed paper, adds to already growing environmental and public health concerns about the plastic particles pervading our oceans and waterways.

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