news 2024

A fully edible robot could soon end up on our plate if we overcome some technical hurdles, say scientists involved in RoboFood - an project which aims to marry robots and food. Robots and food have long been distant worlds: Robots are inorganic, bulky, and non-disposable; food is organic, soft, and biodegradable.

Normally, thermal radiation is a product of randomness, described by the laws of statistical physics. TU Wien and the University of Manchester show that it can also be controlled. When a piece of metal is made to glow, its colour depends solely on its temperature. The material, the geometry, the structure of its surface - none of these details matters.

The technique characterizes a material's electronic properties 85 times faster than conventional methods. Boosting the performance of solar cells, transistors, LEDs, and batteries will require better electronic materials, made from novel compositions that have yet to be discovered. To speed up the search for advanced functional materials, scientists are using AI tools to identify promising materials from hundreds of millions of chemical formulations.

Researchers discover an iron-containing material in the outer enamel of rodent teeth that could also make human teeth more resistant   Rodents such as beavers, nutrias (coypu) , squirrels and rats have particularly strong, elongated front teeth that grow continuously over the course of their lives. Using state-of-the-art imaging techniques, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart have now elucidated the tooth structure of various rodent species at the nanometre scale.

The University of Manchester's National Graphene Institute has spearheaded an international team to engineer a novel approach for controlling thermal emission, detailed in a paper published in Science . This breakthrough offers new design strategies beyond conventional materials, with promising implications for thermal management and camouflage technologies.

Smaller than a coin, this optical device could enable rapid prototyping on the go. Imagine a portable 3D printer you could hold in the palm of your hand. The tiny device could enable a user to rapidly create customized, low-cost objects on the go, like a fastener to repair a wobbly bicycle wheel or a component for a critical medical operation.

The work could lead to ultra-efficient electronics and more. MIT physicists and colleagues have created a five-lane superhighway for electrons that could allow ultra-efficient electronics and more. The work, reported in the May 10 issue of Science , is one of several important discoveries by the same team over the past year involving a material that is a unique form of graphene.

They are popping up on roofs and car parks all'over the world: photovoltaic panels are becoming increasingly important in the race for renewable energy. This technology, based on the conversion of solar energy - photons - into electrical energy, sees a fast development of its performance. A postdoctoral researcher at the Uni intends to further improve them with a revolutionary structure dedicated to thin-film solar cells.

Scientists at McGill University are uncovering revolutionary solutions for electric vehicle batteries, which could cut manufacturing costs by 20%. The global shift towards electric vehicles is gaining momentum, but extracting battery materials has major environmental consequences and high costs. Recently, two groundbreaking studies by scientists at McGill University have paved the way for the development of more economical and environmentally-friendly lithium-ion batteries - used in the manufacture of electric vehicles.

McGill researchers unlock game-changing alternatives for electric vehicle batteries, potentially reducing manufacturing costs by 20 per cent The global shift to electric vehicles is gaining momentum, yet the extraction of battery materials has a significant environmental footprint that comes with high costs.

Materials scientists and engineers would like to know precisely how electrons interact and move in new materials and how the devices made with them will behave.

The unexpected finding could be important for designing spacecraft shielding or in high-speed machining applications. Metals get softer when they are heated, which is how blacksmiths can form iron into complex shapes by heating it red hot. And anyone who compares a copper wire with a steel coat hanger will quickly discern that copper is much more pliable than steel.

Researchers from TU Delft and Brown University have engineered string-like resonators capable of vibrating longer at ambient temperature than any previously known solid-state object - approaching what is currently only achievable near absolute zero temperatures. Their study, published in Nature Communications , pushes the edge of nanotechnology and machine learning to make some of the world's most sensitive mechanical sensors.

An EPFL research project has developed a method based on machine-learning to quickly and accurately search large databases, leading to the discovery of 14 new materials for solar cells. As we integrate solar energy into our daily lives, it has become important to find materials that efficiently convert sunlight into electricity.

The material could be made as a thin coating to analyze air quality in industrial or home settings over time. Most systems used to detect toxic gases in industrial or domestic settings can be used only once, or at best a few times. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a detector that could provide continuous monitoring for the presence of these gases, at low cost.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have, for the first time, made visible how electrons form vortices in a material at room temperature. Their experiment used a quantum sensing microscope with an extremely high resolution. When an ordinary electrical conductor - such as a metal wire - is connected to a battery, the electrons in the conductor are accelerated by the electric field created by the battery.

By analysing images made of coloured dots created by quantum simulators, researchers have studied a special kind of magnetism. In the future this method could also be used to solve other physics puzzles, for instance in superconductivity. Up close it looks like lots of coloured dots, but from a distance one sees a complex picture rich in detail: Using the technique of pointillism, in 1886 George Seurat created the masterpiece ,,A Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte".

A team of materials scientists at the University of Leoben is working on improving medical implants with the help of additive manufacturing. Their research work was recently published in the journal "Advanced Functional Materials". Dipl.-Ing. Sepide Hadibeik, Dr. Florian Spieckermann and Jürgen Eckert from the Department of Materials Science at the University of Leoben, in cooperation with the Swiss Advanced Manufacturing Center in Biel, have used an advanced process for the additive manufacturing of metallic glasses for the first time.

In the ongoing quest to make electronic devices ever smaller and more energy efficient, researchers want to bring energy storage directly onto microchips, reducing the losses incurred when power is transported between various device components. To be effective, on-chip energy storage must be able to store a large amount of energy in a very small space and deliver it quickly when needed - requirements that can't be met with existing technologies.

News from Some materials are transparent to light of a certain frequency. When such light is shone on them, electrical currents can still be generated, contrary to previous assumptions. Scientists from Leipzig University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have managed to prove this. "This opens new paradigms for constructing opto-electronic and photovoltaic devices, such as light amplifiers, sensors and solar cells," says Inti Sodemann Villadiego, Professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Leipzig University.