Transparent wood could one day replace glass in windows. A process for turning it see-through also gives it heat-retaining powers, which could help regulate the temperature of buildings.

Céline Montanari at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and colleagues built on previous work which created transparent wood by removing a structural component called lignin from wood, allowing light to filter through.

For the next stage, the team soaked de-lignified birch wood in PEG (polyethylene glycol), a polymer that is also found in theatre smoke machines and toothpaste. When encapsulated in the wood panels, this makes it harder for heat to cross – whether you’re insulating a building against the cold outside, or trying to keep out summer heat.

The PEG is solid at room temperature, but melts at 30°C, although it remains locked in the wood structure.

“When we build we try to use a lot of glass, but it has a drawback of being a bad insulator, so there are large amounts of heat loss,” says Montanari. “Wood is really amazing, 10 times better at insulating, but it does not transmit light.”

The composite wood isn’t quite as good an insulator as natural wood, but is around four times better than high-end double glazing.

The material can also bear heavy loads and is biodegradable, making it easier to dispose of than concrete or glass.

The modified wood is still not perfectly clear – when the PEG is solid, the material has a white haze similar to frosted glass. But Montanari is confident these early challenges can be overcome by tweaking the chemistry or using different species of wood.

The work was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Bionic implants could one day be built with melanin, the pigment that gives skin and hair its colour. A new process boosts the substance’s electrical conductivity a billion-fold, making it suitable for use in implantable devices.

Clumps of eumelanin, a type of melanin, are typically made up of millions of disordered sheets layered on top of one another. By heating films made of the material in a vacuum, Paolo Tassini at the Laboratory for Nanomaterials and Devices in Italy and his colleagues found that the sheets reordered themselves into a parallel arrangement.

The process also shrank the films and dramatically improved their conductivity. This procedure is called annealing, and is more commonly used in industries such as metallurgy. It isn’t fully understood why it works.

Previous efforts using heat to alter eumelanin often destroyed it.

A conductive version of eumelanin could one day replace metals in bioelectronics and tissue interfaces, such as the brain implants used to treat epilepsy or Parkinson’s. Because we naturally produce the pigment, it is unlikely to elicit an immune reaction.

There are still some hurdles to overcome. Despite the boost in conductivity, the modified melanin is still half a billion times less conductive than copper.

What’s more, its conductivity drops when immersed in water, which isn’t an ideal property for an implantable electronic that will often get wet.

Three more pancakes in science

Social networks have developed a reputation as bitterly polarised places, populated with churlish arguments over clashing politics. Yet an analysis of millions of Wikipedia articles suggests that ideologically diverse groups can not only cooperate effectively, but also produce better work than homogenous groups. How did Wikipedia succeed where much of the online world failed?

To see how ideological opponents can find common ground, Misha Teplitskiy at Harvard University and his colleagues looked at the editors of Wikipedia articles on politics, science and social issues.

They scored the editors’ political leanings as -1 for the most liberal and +1 for the most conservative, based on whether they were predominantly editing articles on liberal or conservative subjects.

The most active editors were clustered around the ideological extremes and the more editors an article attracted, the more likely it was to attract them from both sides of the political spectrum. For example, the 11,813 editors who pored over Margaret Thatcher’s Wikipedia entry had an average score of 0.068.

By examining Wikipedia’s Talk pages, where editors discuss their thoughts about an article, the team found that the intense disagreement that happens between ideologically polarised editors often led to a more focused debate, with editors on both sides admitting the process had improved the final article.

Overall, larger groups had more civil discussions and articles with an unbalanced editorial bias showed more offensive language in the Talk page, which curtailed further discussion.

Rules for engagement

Part of Wikipedia’s successful bipartisanship is down to design. “On Twitter, if you don’t like the climate change debate, you can go off to your own echo chamber,” says Teplitskiy. “On Wikipedia, if you want to talk about climate change, there is only one place to do it.”

But healing the divide between ideological opponents isn’t as simple as putting them in the same room. You need people to work together towards a common goal, says Javier Sajuria at Queen Mary University of London. “When you have that, like the editing of a Wikipedia article, then you have a more constructive process,” he says.

The findings suggest that even ideologically opposed people can cooperate when working towards a meaningful goal, and that to make this happen both parties need to agree to a common set of rules, and have a clear arbitration process in place for when disagreements do flare up.

On social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, attempts to moderate 1 billion plus users have proven tricky, and lack Wikipedia’s clear processes for conflict resolution.

The freedom to use these sites unhindered and with little oversight is both the selling point and the problem. “My own view is you can’t engage with everybody,” says Teplitskiy. “If people are not willing to play by the rules of society there is not much you can do except exclude them.”

Less of a drag

To seize prey, squid rely on a battery of tough, serrated suckers at the end of their tentacles known as squid ring teeth (SRT). Now, researchers are finding that a protein in SRTs can be turned into fibres and films for making tough, flexible and biodegradable plastics.

An average sized squid only contains around 100 milligrams of SRT protein, but Melik Demirel at Pennsylvania State University and his team have genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to grow it. Meaning that much more of the protein can be produced.

Regular clothing fibres can be coated in SRT proteins to produce an extremely hard-wearing fabric, which can self-heal if damaged, with a bit of heat and pressure.

The usefulness of the proteins comes from their unusual molecular structure. The building blocks of the protein act on each other like oil and water, separating at the nanoscale.

This produces tightly coiled helices, flat sheets and disordered tangles, shapes that in turn give rise to the material’s properties at the macro scale.