To make the wood clear, a process detailed in the journal Biomacromolecules, it is treated in a chemical bath to strip away the lignin, the molecule that gives wood its colour. This leaves behind a colourless scaffold, but it's rather soft, so this is treated with a transparent polymer, which gives the material its strength. The team's next step is to scale up the manufacturing process.

The team's research, interestingly, was followed by a very similar research paper by researchers at the University of Maryland, published in the journal Advanced Materials.