While it can take years of focused laboratory work to determine how to make the highest quality materials for use in electronic and photonic device applications, researchers at North Carolina State University developed an autonomous system that can identify how to synthesize “best-in-class” materials in hours or days.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have discovered a way to make ceramics tougher and more resistant to cracking, by building them with a blend of metal atoms with more electrons in their outer shell, unlocking the potential to enable ceramics to handle higher levels of force and stress than before.
MIT physicists have metaphorically turned graphite, or pencil lead, into gold by isolating five ultrathin flakes stacked in a specific order. The resulting material can then be tuned to exhibit three important properties never before seen in natural graphite. “It is kind of like one-stop shopping,” says Long Ju, an assistant professor in the Department […]
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, along with paleontologists from Spain and Poland, have utilized fossil records to create a soft robotic model of Pleurocystitid. This marine organism, which lived about 450 million years ago, is thought to be among the earliest echinoderms that could move using a muscular stem. The research seeks […]
The way light interacts with naturally occurring materials is well-understood in physics and materials science. But in recent decades, researchers have fabricated metamaterials that interact with light in new ways that go beyond the physical limits imposed on naturally occurring materials. A metamaterial is composed of arrays of “meta-atoms,” which have been fabricated into desirable […]
