UK company Concrete Canvas created Concrete Cloth, a concrete-impregnated material that's flexible and becomes hard only when wet. The fabric can be molded into various shapes, letting people erect a sturdy building with little more time and effort than they would a tent. In addition to fulfilling your end-of-the world needs, the Concrete Cloth has current military and humanitarian uses as barracks, emergency shelters, and food storage.

Concrete Cloth won the Material of the Year Award from Material ConneXion, which supports innovation in materials science. But there were plenty of impressive runners up, including a superstrong biofiber made from carrots, a sponge that soaks up oil but not water, a 3D printer that can print objects made from multiple materials, and a lightweight fiber that can stop bullets.

Fishing Rods From Carrot Sticks and Canvas Made of Concrete?! Seven Amazing Materials [Fast Company via Neatorama]

A release describing the new microfiber explains:

Taking a cue from the millions of hairs covering a gecko's toes, researchers squeezed 42 million hard plastic microfibers onto each square centimeter of material and loaded it with various weights. They found that on a smooth, clean, vertical surface, two square centimeters of the synthetic adhesive could hold 400 grams (0.88 pounds). At the same time, the adhesive easily lifts off with minimal force and no residue . . . Previous research on gecko-like adhesives has focused on the strength of the adhesion . . . However, that the ease of attachment and detachment are equally important when developing a material that can practically be used for scaling vertical walls and ceilings.

What sets this new gecko-inspired adhesive apart from the others created thus far is that it is directional, only "sticking" when it slides along a smooth surface, not when it is pressed down. "This difference is critical because if you're climbing up vertical surfaces, you can't afford to use a lot of energy pressing down into the surface to stick," said [UC Berkeley EECS professor Ron] Fearing. "Using force to attach also requires force to detach. A gecko running uphill may be attaching and detaching its feet 20 times a second, so it'd get very tired if it had to work hard to pull its feet off at every step." The microfibers, made of polypropylene, are 20 microns long, or one-fifth the thickness of a sheet of paper, with a diameter of 0.6 microns, or one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair.

New Adhesive Mimics Gecko Toe Hairs [Eurekalert]

Microscopy nerds and beam geeks, rejoice! It's TEAM, the coolest damn microscope you'll ever see. A beam of energy pulses through it and, with new error-correcting tech, is able to reduce image noise normally associated with electron microscopes that measure atomic structures. Images courtesy of DOE's National Center for Electron Microscopy.

Debut of TEAM 0.5 [Eurekalert]