01/04/2021

'Glass Strips' showcase the diversity of glass materials.

Imagem: “Tirinhas de Vidro”

Look around you: cell phone screen, glasses, eyeglasses… How many items are made of different types of glass? In everyday life, we use the name in the singular, but scientific research points to the existence of more than 500,000 types of vitreous materials. With the aim of bringing scientific content closer to the general public, researchers from CeRTEV (Center for Teaching, Research and Innovation in Glass) at UFSCar launched the “Glass Strips” project, a series of comics and manga available on a blog , Instagram , and a Facebook page of the same name.

“Just here, where I’m working, I can easily see fifteen different types of glass. It’s a constant challenge to draw attention to this, because people think there’s only one type of material. But there are bioglasses, glasses for implants in the human body, for nuclear power plants, optical fibers, ionic conductors. An infinite number of types that can let light through but not heat, self-cleaning glasses… We want to disseminate this information,” explains Edgar Zanotto , coordinator of the project and member of the Board of Directors of IMPA. The researcher received the Admiral Alvaro Alberto Award for Science and Technology in 2012.

The comic strip series “Tirinhas de Vidro” tells the story of the characters Nick and Bia. Both are university students conducting scientific research at CeRTEV. In the strips, they narrate the daily life of a laboratory. To date, 21 strips and four manga have been published on social media. The material is illustrated by Adriana Iwata, a science journalism fellow at CeRTEV, with support from FAPESP.

“Often scientists underestimate the importance of disseminating information to the general public, but it is important to popularize science. This stage of the work, of 'digesting' scientific articles restricted to specialized, hermetic literature, and transforming them into understandable language, is also extremely important,” says Zanotto .

Research on glass is advancing in different directions. Now, scientists are working with artificial intelligence algorithms for the discovery and analysis of new glass materials.

Want to know more about the field? Discover "Glass Strips" !