From Baby Teeth to Aerogel: Take a Tour of a Library of Materials

In a glass-fronted building tucked down a side street of University College London is a library unlike any other. This is not a collection of books, but of stuff: It's a M​aterials Library.

There are nearly 3,000 different materials arranged in jars like an old-school apothecary, or just strewn across a work surface to play with. A bucket full of coal left over from a workshop on carbon invites users to take a piece home.

Materials in the collection include the everyday, including blocks of wood and a jar of sugar, and more technical oddities such as gecko tape, a super-strong adhesive that imitates the sticking properties of gecko feet, or aerogel, a glass foam made by NASA that holds the title of world's lighte​st solid.

Zoe Laughlin is co-founder of the Institute of Making, where the library is housed, and curator of the materials. She told me the library started as a personal collection of curiosities. "Essentially it was a room with stuff in," she said. It opened in its current form in 2013.

Pass through the library, and the Institute of Making contains a large workspace at the back where members from UCL can get making. Tools range from lathes and saws to sewing machines, laser cutters, 3D printers, a potter's wheel, and an oven that Laughlin informs me is for making anything but lunch.

The effect is of a large hackspace but more organised; Laughlin describes it as her dream garden shed. When I visit, the whole place smells of a mix of wood and something rubbery.

At one table, Institute of Making technician Rich Gamester is painstakingly scratching details into a clay model of a gigantic butterfly egg. He'll eventually turn this into a mould and cast a translucent silicon version to act as a teaching aid for London Zoo.

Upstairs, UCL biomedical engineering student Laura Dempsey is laser cutting small neoprene patches she'll use to attach fibre optics onto people's heads for brain imaging.

The library is equally eclectic and it's clear that a lot of the catalogued materials have been selected largely by whim or curiosity. "It is a point of view; it's not trying to be un-subjective," Laughlin explained.

There's a dead bumblebee, and Laughlin's own baby teeth; a deformed roll of sellotape and a bar of Mint Aero.

The only way objects are ordered is by the time they entered the library, which is designated by a unique reference number. Laughlin doesn't see a particular value in classifying objects in conventional categories like "natural" and "unnatural"—"It's just different degrees of synthesis"—and in the new Materials Library app she designed, you can search by any keyword.

She types in "poo" and comes up with a washable artificial grass for use by dogs, and a fascinating self-healing concrete that contains bacteria and food. When a small crack appears in the concrete, the water that seeps in awakens the bacteria, which eats the food and excretes a substance that repairs the crack.

Laughlin doesn't mind if things get broken or change over time, like a block of chocolate that risks melting in the sunlight that strikes its display case, or a rusty iron drill bit that is slowly oxidising back to ore. She's as interested in these processes as she is in the materials themselves.

"Damage is a revealer of materiality—how things break will tell you what a thing's like," she said. She encouraged me to pick the materials up, smelling the sappy fragrance of natural rubber and testing the comparable weights of identical blocks of aluminium (light) and tungsten (surprisingly heavy).

Some objects, however, have to remain behind a barrier; one cabinet contains ​Prince Rupert's Drops, globules of glass that look like giant sperm and are liable to explode at the lightest touch. Owing to the tensile stress across the glass, it can withstand a smash to the larger blob, but will shatter if the tail end catches a slight vibration. The shelf is covered in a light dusting of broken glass.

Laughlin is loathe to pick any favourites from her collection, but proffers a jar full of tiny ceramic balls that is immensely satisfying to jam your fingers into, and another of zinc sticks that creak when you bend them and snap to reveal intricate crystalline patterns.

Were any materials she wanted, I asked, that she didn't yet have?

"We'd like a gold bar."

This story is part of The Building Blocks of Everything, a series of science and technology stories on the theme of materials. Check out more here: http://motherboard.tv/building-blocks-of-everything