Think of the salt layer as one of those glass blocks used to build bathroom walls.

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Less successful but still profitable is Pittsburgh Corning, a joint venture with PPG Industries, that makes foam glass insulation and architectural glass blocks.

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David Sanderson, a physicist at the Scottish universities' research and reactor centre, says that while this would need heavy investment (and a lot of workers), plutonium can be mixed with waste and vitrified into storable glass blocks, so making it unusable in bombs if any terrorists managed to steal some.

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E-Town, it has the sweeping asphalt vistas of a suburban office park, around blocks of reflective-glass buildings, occupied by Nokia, Bosch, and other corporations.

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What was regarded as cheap and tacky, like the stained glass front door, had a renaissance after modernist architecture and its tower blocks were deemed a failure.

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His colored glass cubes demonstrate the flexibility of design today: The pieces, reminiscent of children's building blocks, can be mounted on top of each other to make shelves or placed sideways to form coffee tables.

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