Life is at the heart of much of our material world. We make two-by-four beams from wood, ethanol from corn, and textiles from cotton. But bricks? Researchers have now created a form of concrete that not only comes from living creatures but—given the right inputs—can turn one brick into two, two into four, and four into eight. While the new material won’t build self-assembling houses anytime soon, it could soon lead to building components that can heal themselves when damaged. The living concrete could even offer Mars-bound astronauts a way to build structures from local materials plus a few adventurous microbes.
The new concrete is the latest addition to the burgeoning field of engineered living materials (ELM), in which organisms—typically bacteria—are added to inanimate materials to enable them to sense, communicate, and even respond to their environments. In recent years, researchers have created ELMs that sense pressure, kill dangerous bacteria, and sense light. But those materials are usually thin films grown atop structural supports.
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