It’s magic fairytale time, everybody. While the tech world is busy inventing flexible glass for foldable phones, researcher Junyong Zhu from the Forest Products Laboratory in co-collaboration with colleagues from the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado has developed a transparent wood material that may find its way to smartphone displays of tomorrow.
The team of researchers used balsa wood as a base material, which was then subjected to a room-temperature oxidizing bath that makes it almost transparent. Then the wood is filled with a synthetic polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), making it glass-like transparent.
