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" You know what the old adage says about people living in glass houses. But how about people living in houses made of transparent wood? Lars Berglund, a researcher at Sweden&amp;#039;s Royal Institute of Technology, has just made wood you can see through by chemically stripping it of lignin, an organic polymer that shores up the cell walls in vascular plants and gives wood its brownish color. When combined with Plexiglas, this lignin-free wood is about 85 percent transparent. In addition, it retains its sturdy structure, so it is stronger than glass and can even bear loads. It also provides better insulation than a pane of plain old glass. &amp;quot;We have talked to a lot of architects, and they are very interested in using these panels in housing,&amp;quot; Berglund says. His team published the results of their year-long work in Biomacromolecules this March.\u00A0 For their experiment, the researchers took pieces of balsa wood one millimeter thick and removed the lignin in a process similar to the one used for making paper pulp. The main difference was that they used peracetic acid, which is milder and more environmentally friendly than chemical alternatives. &amp;quot;We wanted to preserve the structure of wood,&amp;quot; he explains. The team&amp;#039;s transparent composite is 35 percent wood and 65 percent Plexiglas. But Berglund hopes to get it up to 65 percent wood with the rest being bio-based polymer, so it&amp;#039;s all biodegradable. Of course, it&amp;#039;s one thing to succeed in the lab. It&amp;#039;s quite another to take a discovery and turn it into something that is both easy to mass produce and affordable to consumers. It&amp;#039;s not enough to fill large pores with polymers. The de-lignified wood would also need its nano-pores filled so the structure maintains its integrity. &amp;quot;To do this fast, and in an industrial process, will require some development,&amp;quot; Berglund admits. Once that issue has been solved, an even more &amp;quot;daring&amp;quot; goal, he says, would be to integrate transparent wood with transparent solar cells to create strong windows that also harvest energy.\u00A0 &amp;quot;That would be quite spectacular if it could work.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/design/a20330/the-wood-you-can-see-through/>