"Transparent Wood" Could Build the Greenhouses of the Future

Inspired by a technique first developed by botanists during the 1990s, materials scientists in the past few years have been making an almost oxymoronic-sounding material: transparent wood. While the biologists, who were studying the structure of wood, needed only small pieces, materials scientists have proposed applications like load-bearing windows and have focused on scaling up the technique. "Transparent wood" is a wood/polymer composite created by delignifying wood and filling its fluid micr...