Inside the Materials Library - Telegraph Aerogel (Zoe Laughlin) Aerogel: a cosmic sponge People say that aerogel looks like solid smoke. Twisting it in the light it looks blue and then yellow, and because of the way it refracts light, its edges are indistinct and blurry. Held in one's hand, it feels like polystyrene, but it is extremely easy to crumble or shatter (the technical term is "friable"). Its uses are as magical as its appearance: you could call it a cosmic sponge. The Library's sample of aerogel came from Nasa. It's very expensive, and Nasa doesn't sell the stuff, but Laughlin wrote the agency a note to ask for a chunk, and it obliged. Aerogel is 99.8 per cent air, and when this sample was developed in the Nineties, it was the lightest substance on Earth. Today there are other aerogels which are infinitesimally lighter. The remaining 0.2 per cent is silicon dioxide. Aerogels have been around since the Thirties, but it was only when scientists at Nasa were looking for a material to help them collect stardust - the grains of dust formed around stars that pre-date our sun - that a use was found for them. Stardust travels at something like 11,000mph; it explodes on impact with solids and passes through gases, but can be trapped in the tightly packed foam of aerogels. Bioglass (Zoe Laughlin) Bioglass: healing the human body Professor Larry Hench was working at the University of Florida in the late Sixties when he had a chance encounter that would change the way we heal the human body. On a bus on the way to a conference, he met a colonel from the US Army who'd just returned from a tour in Vietnam. The colonel was distressed that many soldiers whose limbs had been broken or fractured ended up as amputees, because their bodies rejected the steel or plastic implants used by surgeons in the field. "We can save lives but we cannot save limbs," he told Hench. We need new materials that will not be rejected by the body. Hench's quest began on that bus, and ended with the invention of Bioglass. Bioglass stands on the frontier between the animate and the inanimate. It was the first man-made material to bond with living tissue, and its main use today is in the regeneration of bone. Bioglass is "seeded" with a patient's stem cells and implanted into the part of the body that needs new bone. Bone cells like to use Bioglass as a scaffold, growing into the channels that run through its porous structure; as they grow, they consume the original Bioglass, so ultimately all that is left is real bone. Hench now presides over research labs at Imperial College, from whence this fat white tablet originates. Self-healing concrete (Zoe Laughlin) Self-healing concrete: a life-saver Smart materials bring the mechanisms of living materials - the ability to respond to environmental changes, to heal and to grow - to non-living materials. This class of materials is in its infancy. Self-healing concrete is definitely a smart material: it can repair itself when stressed. Given that around half of the structures in the world are made from concrete, the upkeep of this material is a matter of crucial importance. In some cases, it's a matter of life or death: in Haiti in 2010 and Japan in 2011, buildings made of concrete were reduced to rubble by powerful earthquakes. The concrete pictured here is an especially peculiar specimen. It began life filled with dormant bacteria spores, and a food that the bacteria like to eat. When a hairline crack forms - inevitable as concrete expands and contracts in summer and winter over a period of years - and moisture penetrates the structure, the bacteria wake up and go on the hunt for food. Once they've sated themselves, the bacteria excrete a material called calcium carbonate, which affixes to the concrete and hardens to heal the crack. It's a recent addition to the Library, coming fresh out of a research lab in Germany, and although it's yet to be used in a building, it points to a future where unloved concrete buildings can take care of themselves. Steel cloth (Zoe Laughlin) Steel cloth: a gadget you can wear Woven from incredibly fine steel filaments - around the tenth the size of a human hair - this steel cloth looks and feels like an elasticated cuff. But because it's 100 per cent steel, it is magnetic - as demonstrated in the photograph - as well as resistant to various chemicals, and able to stand up to slashing by a knife (although stabbing might be problematic, as the material is knitted, and contains holes). The steel thread was developed by a company that manufactures car tires; they lay the thread in the rubber to reinforce it. When they distributed the material more widely, it piqued the interest of textile designers, who began to look at ways of weaving and knitting it. At the moment this sort of fabric doesn't really have any specific uses, despite the impressive properties it possesses. It may have a future in a type of clothing which is only just beginning to be developed - wearable electronics - because it conducts electricity. Uranium Glass (Zoe Laughlin) Uranium glass: beautiful but deadly It's no surprise that uranium glass fell out of fashion in the Fifties, with the arrival of the atomic age. But for 100 years beforehand, the fluorescent properties of glass made from uranium-contaminated sand made it a coveted material for decorative items. Two almost identical uranium glass bowls have made it into the Library from opposite ends of the world: one was found in a junk shop in Australia, and the other was dug up in Portobello Market, west London, by Laughlin's sister. Under ultraviolet light the bowls glow bright yellow, and they are radioactive enough to register on a Geiger counter. They don't contain enough uranium to cause a threat to human life, but they still provoke a frisson of anxiety: indeed, the negative associations of the element has meant they are now museum pieces rather than glassware for the home. The Materials Library is holding an open day on April 27 2013, 1pm-4pm; see instituteofmaking.org.uk for more details