Introduction: A Material Revolution

Abstract

You may have noticed it when passing by an electroluminescent store display, hearing about your neighbor’s recycled-glass countertops, using your new conductive plastic-powered mobile phone, or reading about selfcleaning paint: we live in a time of unprecedented material innovations that are affecting our lives. The accelerated pace of these innovations and the breadth of their applications have enhanced our awareness about new products and the ways in which they are transforming our physical environment. In fact, there are so many new and unusual materials in the marketplace that a cottage industry of boutique services has emerged to assess and endorse them. While it is difficult to project real numbers, it has become a widely held belief that more new products have been developed in the last twenty years than in the prior history of materials science.