• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Martian Cities Could One Day Be Built From Potatoes And Dust

March 21, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Scientists in the UK have developed a new type of concrete that might one day be used to build settlements elsewhere else in the Solar System. By combining potato starch with material simulating the dust of Mars or the Moon, they created something much stronger than regular concrete.

This so-called “StarCrete” made of Martian dust has a compressive strength of 72 megapascals (MPa), which is over twice that of regular concrete. When the material was made with the fake Moon dust it became even stronger, reaching 91 Mpa.

Advertisement

The team from the University of Manchester has been working on how to make concrete with local resources on the Moon and Mars, requiring very little extra material brought from Earth. Their previous work showed that concrete could be made by using the blood or urine of astronauts. For the sake of future explorers, they have now moved on to potatoes.

“Since we will be producing starch as food for astronauts, it made sense to look at that as a binding agent rather than human blood,” project lead Dr Aled Roberts, Research Fellow at the Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub, said in a statement. 

“Also, current building technologies still need many years of development and require considerable energy and additional heavy processing equipment which all adds cost and complexity to a mission. StarCrete doesn’t need any of this and so it simplifies the mission and makes it cheaper and more feasible.”

That’s not the only consideration, though. “And anyway, astronauts probably don’t want to be living in houses made from scabs and urine!” Roberts added.

A sample of the incredibly strong StarCrete. Image Credit: Aled Roberts

A sample of the incredibly strong StarCrete. Image Credit: Aled Roberts

There is something else that astronauts produce that might actually make it even stronger: magnesium chloride, a salt found in tears. But don’t worry, if it’s starting to sound like future Martian cities are going to be built on the literal blood, sweat, and tears of space travelers, magnesium chloride is normally found on the surface of Mars.

The team estimates that 25 kilograms of dehydrated potato starch is needed to make 213 bricks. If you were to build the average three-bedroom house you’d need about 35 times that amount. Roberts and his team have created a start-up called DeakinBio to not just improve StartCrete for space but also for potential use on Earth as it could be a greener alternative to concrete.

The production of this ubiquitous material is responsible for 8 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. This is due to the high temperatures needed to produce it. StarCrete can be made in a regular oven or even a microwave, making it more energy efficient.

The study is published in the journal Open Engineering.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Golf – Stomach bug-stricken Rahm soldiers on with eye on Ryder Cup
  2. Britain to say Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland are too harmful to retain
  3. Hearts From COVID-19 Patients Still Safe For Organ Transplant
  4. South Park Creators Use ChatGPT To Co-Write Episode About AI

Source Link: Martian Cities Could One Day Be Built From Potatoes And Dust

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • How To Fake A Fossil: Find Out More In Issue 36 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • Is It True Earth Used To Take 420 Days To Orbit The Sun?
  • One Of The Ocean’s “Most Valuable Habitats” Grows The Only Flowers Known To Bloom In Seawater
  • World’s Largest Digital Camera Snaps 2,104 New Asteroids In 10 Hours, Mice With 2 Dads Father Their Own Offspring, And Much More This Week
  • Simplest Explanation For “Anomalous” Signals Coming From Underneath Antarctica Ruled Out
  • “Lizard Shampoo” And Pagan Texts Suggest “Dark Age” Medicine Wasn’t So Dark After All
  • Japanese Macaques May Mourn Their Dead – As Long As They’re Not Maggot-Infested
  • This Is What You’d Hear If You Listened To Voyager’s Golden Record NASA Sent To Interstellar Space
  • RFK Jr’s New Vaccine Advisors Just Recommended Fall Flu Vaccines – But There’s A Catch
  • Controversial World-First Project To Create Human DNA From Scratch Takes First Steps
  • Humans Weren’t The First Species To Travel Around The Moon. They Lost This Race To An Unexpected Animal
  • When You Hack A Shark, You’re Exploiting A Glitch Billions Of Years In The Making
  • Wellness Whales, A New Blood Type, And A DJ Set From Space
  • Hate Flying Ants? We Used To Have Ones The Size Of Hummingbirds
  • ‘Tis The Season To See Titan Cast A Shadow On Saturn – Especially If You Are In America
  • World’s Bravest Vets Put Full Metal Dental Crown On A Bear For The First Time
  • “Spider Rain”: The Bizarre Phenomenon That’ll Send Arachnophobes Into A Spin
  • Scientists Gave Mice A Human “Language Gene” And Something Curious Unfolded
  • Surveillance Of People Is More “Pervasive And Normalised” Than Previously Thought, Endangering Our Privacy
  • US Sees 90 Percent Drop In Heart Attack Deaths Over Last 50 Years
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version