April 14, 2020: An international team of scientists has created carbon nanolattices constructed from closed-cell plate-architectures that are stronger than diamonds as a ratio of strength to density.
April 20, 2020: To address plastic pollution plaguing the world's seas and waterways, Cornell University chemists have developed a new polymer that can degrade by ultraviolet radiation, according to research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
April 22, 2020: New research from North Carolina State University finds that radiation detectors making use of single crystal gallium oxide allow for monitoring X-ray radiation in near-real time. The researchers found that there was a linear increase in current passing out of the gallium oxide relative to the level of X-ray exposure. In other words, the higher the level of X-ray radiation exposure, the higher the increase in current from the gallium oxide.
April 27, 2020: The United States Army has a new type of multi-polymer filament for commonly used desktop 3D printers. This advance may save money and facilitate fast printing of critical parts at the point of need.
April 28, 2020: Neutron imaging, a powerful nondestructive testing (NDT) method, can see through complex materials and catch flaws and defects that would otherwise go unnoticed, such as cracks and voids in energetic materials, ceramic remnants in turbine blades and structural weaknesses in composites and 3D-printed components.
April 28, 2020: Rutgers University engineers have created a highly effective way to paint complex 3D-printed objects, such as lightweight frames for aircraft and biomedical stents that could save manufacturers time and money and provide new opportunities to create “smart skins” for printed parts.
April 27, 2020: An international team of scientists that includes researchers from ITMO University has developed a new light-emitting composite material based on perovskite nanocrystals, with air and water resilient optical characteristics, for the purpose of creating miniature light sources with improved output capacity.
April 29, 2020: A Purdue University-led research team has found a way to make halide perovskites stable enough by inhibiting the ion movement that makes them rapidly degrade, unlocking their use for solar panels as well as electronic devices. The discovery also means that halide perovskites can stack together to form heterostructures that would allow a device to perform more functions.
April 30, 2020: Scientists in the University of Maryland, A. James Clark School of Engineering have reinvented a 26,000-year-old manufacturing process into an innovative approach to fabricate ceramic materials that has promising applications for solid-state batteries, fuel cells, 3D printing technologies and beyond.
May 1, 2020: Twenty-first century X-ray technology has allowed scientists to peer back through time at the production of the armor worn by the crew of Henry VIII's warship, the Mary Rose. X-ray analysis of artefacts from the warship sheds new light on their construction and conservation. The team included Emeritus Prof Mark Dowsett, his partners in Ghent and used XRD facilities in the Warwick RTP as well as the XMaS beamline.
May 13, 2020: A new study proposes a microscopy type of optical imaging for realizing the X-ray imaging of atomic nuclei (ANXRI) by integrating aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), the bremsstrahlung generation of X-ray photons, and the EDS receiving and mapping of the photons. ANXRI successfully images atomic nuclei in three different types of materials, including nanoporous gold (NPG) coated with Pd and Pt, NPG without Pd or Pt, and SrTiO3.
May 15, 2020: A new research facility that could provide a major boost to innovation in materials science research across the U.K. is being launched by scientists at the University of Sheffield. The new laboratory–the first of its kind in the U.K.–will explore how materials can be improved to benefit energy industries and boost Britain’s post-COVID-19 recovery.
May 18, 2020: A new way of creating carbon fibers—which are typically expensive to make—could one day lead to using these lightweight, high-strength materials to improve safety and reduce the cost of producing cars, according to a team of researchers. Using a mix of computer simulations and laboratory experiments, the team found that adding small amounts of the 2D graphene to the production process both reduces the production cost and strengthens the fibers.
May 18, 2020: Far below the Earth’s surface, about 1,800 miles deep, lies a roiling magmatic region sandwiched between the solid silicate-based mantle and molten iron-rich core: The core-mantle boundary. Learning how liquid silicates behave at these extreme temperatures and pressures has been a longstanding challenge in the geosciences.
May 18, 2020: Tantalum disulfide is a mysterious material. According to textbook theory, it should be a conducting metal, but in the real world it acts like an insulator. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science have taken a high-resolution look at the structure of the material, revealing why it demonstrates this unintuitive behavior.
May 19, 2020: An international team of researchers were able to get a novel material to increase the frequency of a terahertz radiation flash by a factor of seven: a first step for potential IT applications.
May 19, 2020: Researchers have discovered a new kind of rubber and catalyst that together can be used with low energy consumption to make flexible, repairable, sustainable objects – including car tires. The new rubber material, made from cheap and plentiful industrial waste products sulfur, canola cooking oil and dicyclopentadiene (DCPD) from petroleum refining, can be completely repaired and returned to its original strength in minutes–even at room temperature–with an amine catalyst.
May 19, 2020: Scientists have discovered that the transport of electronic charge in a metallic superconductor containing strontium, ruthenium and oxygen breaks the rotational symmetry of the underlying crystal lattice. Scientists previously observed this peculiar behavior—characterized by electrons preferentially traveling along one direction, decoupled from the host crystal structure—in other materials whose ability to conduct electricity without energy loss cannot be explained by standard theoretical frameworks.
May 19, 2020: A significant chunk of the world’s history is facing an existential threat. U.S. government deeds, recordings of Indigenous Australians and photographs of English seaside life spanning three decades are just some of the historical documents recorded on acetate film that are suffering irreversible damage due to what’s known as vinegar syndrome.
