May 20, 2020: A study by a team of researchers from Canada and Italy recently published in Nature Materials could usher in a revolutionary development in materials science, leading to big changes in the way companies create modern electronics.
June 2, 2020: Rice University scientists and engineers show boron nitride’s promise for composites, biomedical applications. They report the first real-time imaging of individualized boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) via stabilization with a rhodamine surfactant and fluorescence microscopy.
June 03, 2020: Universal first-principles approach will accelerate the identification and design of materials for quantum information science and other spintronics applications.
June 4, 2020: Most of the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars today depend, to some degree, on cobalt. As the market for energy storage grows, the search is on for battery chemistries that rely on cobalt far less, or not at all. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Argonne National Laboratory are developing a technology that centers on manganese, one of Earth's most abundant metals.
June 11, 2020: A study finds simple changes in road resurfacing practices could improve gas mileage for heavy vehicles and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The study examined state-by-state data on climate conditions, road lengths, materials properties and road usage, and modeled different scenarios for pavement resurfacing practices.
June 11, 2020: A perennial problem faced by researchers in any field is making their work accessible and meaningful to non-experts. Art of Science 2020, organized by the Stanford Materials Research Society, creates a space for Stanford scientists from all disciplines to encounter their research creatively by translating their work into a piece of art.
Jun 15, 2020: X‐ray absorption spectroscopy is a viable way to connect experimental and theoretical results in determining the correlation between stoichiometry and the efficiency of multi-alkali antimonides in emitting electrons.
June 16, 2020: Kazan Federal University, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, Russia), and Khalikov Institute of Archeology (Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, Kazan, Russia) are working together to study the physical properties of the coins found on the territory of former Volga Bulgaria.
June 17, 2020: Recent devastating fires in the Amazon rain forest and the Australian bush highlight the need to detect forest fires at early stages, before they blaze out of control. Current methods include infrared imaging satellites, remote sensing, watchtowers and aerial patrols, but by the time they sound the alarm, it could be too late. Now researchers have developed self-powered ''paper chips'' that sense early fires and relay a signal.
June 17, 2020: Bose-Einstein condensates are often described as the fifth state of matter: At extremely low temperatures, gas atoms behave like a single particle. The exact properties of these systems are notoriously difficult to study. In the journal "Physical Review Letters", physicists from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Ludwig Maximilian University Munich have proposed a new theory to describe these quantum systems more effectively and comprehensively.
June 17, 2020: A new technique, using motion capture technology, developed by University of Minnesota researchers, allows 3D printing of hydrogel-based sensors directly on organs, like the lungs, that change shape or distort due to expanding and contracting.
June 17, 2020: A long-sought-after black phosphorus (BP) allotrope of nitrogen has been synthesized at high pressure and high temperature. The discovery of BP-structured nitrogen opens up the possibility of searching for new high energetic materials with clean decomposition products and layer-structured 2D nitrogen.
June 17, 2020: Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have observed a black hole hurling hot material into space at close to the speed of light. The black hole has a mass of about 6.5 billion times that of the sun and is located about 55 million light years from Earth.
June 18, 2020: A new study by materials science engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that, in the important ceramic material silicon carbide, carbon atoms collect at grain boundaries when the material is exposed to radiation. The finding could help engineers better understand the properties of ceramics and could aid in fine-tuning a new generation of ceramic materials.