Feature Channels: Materials Science

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Each year, the effects of corroding materials sap more than $1 trillion from the global economy. As certain alloys are exposed to extreme stress and temperatures, an oxide film begins to form, causing the alloys to break down even more quickly. What precisely makes these conditions so conducive for corrosion, however, remains poorly understood, especially in microelectromechanical devices. Chinese researchers have started to chip away at why these materials corrode under mechanical stress; they describe their work in the Journal of Applied Physics.

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Students develop a blood-clotting “super gel” that can be injected through a catheter but is hyper-absorbent enough to then swell with blood, blocking further bleeding.

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This spring, 77 students in Iowa State University’s second-year architecture studios designed, built and installed a 1,300-square-foot structure at Reiman Gardens for its “Forces of Nature” kinetic art exhibition, on display April 28 through Nov. 3.

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A team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Rochester have provided the first experimentally based mass-radius relationship for a hypothetical pure iron planet at super-Earth core conditions. This discovery can be used to evaluate plausible compositional space for large, rocky exoplanets, forming the basis of future planetary interior models, which in turn can be used to more accurately interpret observation data from the Kepler space mission and aid in identifying planets suitable for habitability.

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Accelerator scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are testing a new type of electron gun for a future generation of instruments that take snapshots of the atomic world in never-before-seen quality and detail, with applications in chemistry, biology, energy and materials science.

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Researchers solve a decades-old question: Is particle ordering responsible for the thickening of some industrial products when stirred rapidly? The answer brings us one step closer to solving complex industrial production problems.

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Magnesium ions move very fast to enable a new class of battery materials.

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Advances in nanotechnology have made it possible to control the size, shape, composition, elasticity and chemical properties of laboratory-made nanomaterials. Yet many of these materials do not to function as expected in the body. In a recent issue of Biointerphases, the team homes in on biomembranes -- the gatekeeping bilipid-layers and proteins surrounding cells. They explore the barriers a synthetic nanomaterial must breach to enter a cell and achieve its intended purpose.

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Research appearing today in Nature Communications finds useful new information-handling potential in samples of tin(II) sulfide (SnS), a candidate "valleytronics" transistor material that might one day enable chipmakers to pack more computing power onto microchips. 

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SLAC and its collaborators are transforming the way new materials are discovered. In a new report, they combine artificial intelligence and accelerated experiments to discover potential alternatives to steel in a fraction of the time.

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Scientists directly see how the atoms in a magnesium-based battery fit into the structure of electrodes.

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A team led by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a safer cladding for nuclear fuel rods.

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Nanomaterials expert Ganpati Ramanath, the John Tod Horton ’52 Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been named a fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS) “for developing creative approaches to realize new nanomaterials via chemically directed nanostructure synthesis and assembly and for tailoring interfaces in electronics and energy applications using molecular nanolayers.”

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Scientists mimic a worm’s lethal jaw to design and form resilient materials.

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Converting laser light into nuclear vibrations is key to switching a material’s properties on and off for future electronics.

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Scientists demonstrated that powerful acids heal certain structural defects in synthetic films.

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Novel engineered polymers assemble buckyballs into columns using a conventional coating process.

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Lasting just a few hundred billionths of a billionth of a second, these bursts offer new tool to study chemistry and magnetism.

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To conduct fusion research, scientists at the Department of Energy’s national laboratories have often had to develop entirely new technologies. In several cases, these technologies have gone on to be extremely useful in other areas, from electronics manufacturing to nuclear radiation detection.

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Five Columbia Engineering professors have won the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards this year. The grants, each totaling $500,000 over five years, are among the most competitive given by the NSF.

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A team of California researchers has developed a robotic gripper that combines the adhesive properties of gecko toes and the adaptability of air-powered soft robots to grasp a much wider variety of objects than the state of the art. Researchers will present their findings at the 2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation May 21 to 25 in Brisbane, Australia.

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Each year, the DOE Office of Science write profiles on past NSB competitors. These features include their memories of their high school adventures and information on their education and career accomplishments.

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The term “superfluid quasicrystal” sounds like something a comic-book villain might use to carry out his dastardly plans. In reality, it’s a new form of matter proposed by theoretical physicists at The University of Texas at Dallas in a recent study published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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A 21-year NSF-funded program that brings undergraduate students to UAB for a summer of materials research has been renewed with a grant from the NSF Division of Materials Research. The students come from underrepresented groups and from schools where research opportunities are limited.

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Quantum fluids may mix in very weird ways, according to new computer simulations of exotic states of matter known as Bose-Einstein condensates.

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Two materials scientists, Suzanne te Velthuis and Stephan Rosenkranz, have been named fellows of the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA).

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A research team led by the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed an economical and industrially viable strategy to produce graphene.

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In a study published April 2 in the journal Advanced Materials, a University at Buffalo-led research team describes how kirigami has inspired its efforts to build malleable electronic circuits.

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Typically, when a soundwave strikes a surface, it reflects back at the same fundamental frequency with a different amplitude. A new model, reported in the Journal of Applied Physics, shows that when a sound wave hits a nonlinear elastic metasurface, the incident fundamental frequency does not bounce back. Instead, the metasurface converts that energy into the wave’s second harmonic resonance. Developing this metasurface could help architects reduce noise from performance halls to cityscapes.

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Story tips: ORNL-led team cultivated a novel oral microbe in adults with periodontitis; ORNL partnered with FCA US and Nemak to develop a new cast aluminum alloy for engine cylinder heads, which could lead to better fuel efficiency; ORNL studies cast doubt on 40-year-old theory describing how plastic polymers behave during processing.

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Physicists have identified a new state of matter whose structural order operates by rules more aligned with quantum mechanics than standard thermodynamic theory.

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A major byproduct in the papermaking industry is lignosulfonate, a sulfonated carbon waste material, which is typically combusted on site, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere after sulfur has been captured for reuse.

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The U.S. Department of Energy is proud to announce the 29 university teams selected to compete in the third annual Cyber Defense Competition (CDC), taking place April 6–7, 2018.

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This is part of a series of profiles on past National Science Bowl competitors.

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Scientists have directly measured the increasing greenhouse effect of methane at the Earth’s surface for the first time. A research team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) tracked a rise in the warming effect of methane – one of the most important greenhouse gases for the Earth’s atmosphere – over a 10-year period at a DOE field observation site in northern Oklahoma.

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A slippery rough surface (SRS) inspired by both pitcher plants and rice leaves outperforms state-of-the-art liquid-repellent surfaces in water harvesting applications, according to a team of researchers at Penn State and University of Texas at Dallas.

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Electronic systems, such as electric vehicles and large data centers, generate a lot of power, which creates tremendous heat. An engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a unique evaporative cooling system using a membrane with microscopic pillars designed to remediate the heat, ultimately improving performance.

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The use of mineral admixtures in concrete produced with treated recycled concrete aggregate enhances both the mechanical and durability properties leading to sustainable development.

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It's called a nanoflower, but if you could brush your cheek against its microscopic petals, you would find them cool, hard, and...rusty. Common rust forms the inner skeleton of these lovely and intricate nanostructures, while their outer layer is a kind of plastic. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a straightforward way to make this type of conducting polymer with high surface area that is likely to be useful for energy transfer and storage applications.

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A team of scientists from across the U.S. has found a new way to create molecular interconnections that can give a certain class of materials exciting new properties, including improving their ability to catalyze chemical reactions or harvest energy from light.

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Materials inspired by disappearing Hollywood dinosaurs and real-life shy squid have been invented by UCI engineers, according to new findings in Science this Friday.

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A multi-institutional team of scientists describes a new technique that can meld ions from up to eight different elements to form what are known as high entropy alloyed nanoparticles.

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A team led by Berkeley Lab scientists has developed a process for creating ultrathin, self-assembling sheets of synthetic materials that can function like designer flypaper in selectively binding with viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. The new platform could potentially be used to inactivate or detect pathogens.

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Secretary of Energy Rick Perry visited the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory today, where he toured the site of a superconducting upgrade to the accelerator that powers the lab’s X-ray laser and met with employees in a town hall meeting.

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Optoelectronic engineers have manufactured a special type of LCD that is paper-thin, flexible, light and tough. With this, a newspaper could be uploaded onto a flexible paperlike display that could be updated as fast as the news cycles. It sounds futuristic, but scientists estimate it will be cheap to produce, perhaps only costing $5 for a 5-inch screen. The new optically rewritable LCD design was reported this week in Applied Physics Letters.

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Scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to print 3-D structures composed entirely of liquids. Using a modified 3-D printer, they injected threads of water into silicone oil — sculpting tubes made of one liquid within another liquid.

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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have published a new study that identifies the process by which holes get trapped in nanoparticles made of zinc oxide, a material of potential interest for solar applications because it absorbs ultraviolet light.

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Gary Prinz, assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Arkansas, has received a $500,000 Faculty Early Career Development award from the National Science Foundation to develop mathematical models to predict micro-level material fractures in steel alloys made by additive manufacturing, popularly referred to as 3-D printing. The research could lead to building components that are better able to resist the damaging effects of earthquakes.

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While the international nonproliferation community inspects known nuclear power reactors, a major concern is that nations could build smaller, secret reactors to produce materials for weapons. Now, University of Michigan researchers are involved in an effort to build a prototype of a detector that may one day identify undeclared sites from a neighboring country. The initiative, known as the Advanced Instrumentation Testbed (AIT), seeks to detect nearly-massless particles produced when a nuclear reactor is running. In addition to revealing the presence of secret reactors, these particles can signal when nuclear reactors are running or shut down. The on/off cycle can indicate whether reactors are being used to produce energy or plutonium, a metal that provides explosive power in nuclear weapons.

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This is the first in series of five planned profiles on past National Science Bowl competitors.