Anti-Dust Tech Paves Way for Self-Cleaning Surfaces
Dust is a common fact of life, and it's more than just a daily nuisance—it can get into machinery and equipment, causing loss of efficiency or breakdowns. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin partnered with North Carolina-based company Smart Material Solutions Inc. to develop a new method to keep dust from sticking to surfaces. The result is the ability to make many types of materials dust resistant, from spacecraft to solar panels to household windows. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: University of Texas at Austin
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Tapered Optical Fiber Addresses Challenge Posed by Brillouin Scattering
When optical beams, consisting of photons, travel through fibers, they cause vibrations that generate acoustic waves, consisting of phonons. The phenomenon, called Brillouin scattering, has been harnessed by researchers to optomechanically "couple" acoustic waves with light waves. This coupling allows information carried by photons to be transduced, or converted, to the phonons, which travel nearly a million times more slowly than light waves. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Wendao Xu
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Train Derailments Get More Headlines, But Truck Crashes Involving Hazardous Chemicals Are More Frequent and Deadly
Less than two weeks after train cars filled with hazardous chemicals derailed in Ohio and caught fire, a truck carrying nitric acid crashed on a major highway outside Tucson, Arizona, killing the driver and releasing toxic chemicals into the air. The Arizona hazmat disaster shut down Interstate 10, a major cross-country highway, and forced evacuations in surrounding neighborhoods. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
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New Corrosion Protection That Repairs Itself
Skyscrapers, bridges, ships, airplanes, cars—everything humans make or build sooner or later decays. This makes the fight against corrosion expensive. All countries together invest around 3.5% of annual global gross domestic product in corrosion protection, which amounts to some 4,000 billion dollars: a huge market—and a gigantic problem. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Marco D'Elia / ETH Zurich
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Researchers Create Nanoscale, Ultra-Fast, User-Friendly Microscopy
Semiconductors are foundational components of modern energy, communication, and myriad other technologies. Research on tailoring the underlying nanostructure of semiconductors for optimizing device performance has been ongoing for decades. Now researchers have developed an easy-to-use, time-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) for measuring the movement of electrons in nanostructures at high temporal and spatial resolution, in a manner that will be invaluable for optimizing nanostructure performance. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: University of Tsukuba
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Perovskites, a 'Dirt Cheap' Alternative to Silicon, Just Got a Lot More Efficient
Silicon, the standard semiconducting material used in a host of applications—computer central processing units (CPUs), semiconductor chips, detectors, and solar cells—is an abundant, naturally occurring material. However, it is expensive to mine and to purify. Perovskites—a family of materials nicknamed for their crystalline structure—have shown extraordinary promise in recent years as a far less expensive, equally efficient replacement for silicon in solar cells and detectors. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Chloe Zhang
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NASA's Chandra Discovers Giant Black Holes on a Collision Course
Astronomers have discovered the first evidence for giant black holes in dwarf galaxies on a collision course. This result from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has important ramifications for understanding how the first wave of black holes and galaxies grew in the early universe. Collisions between the pairs of dwarf galaxies identified in a new study have pulled gas towards the giant black holes they each contain, causing the black holes to grow. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/M. Micic et al.; Optical: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/ AURA Press Image, Caption, and Videos.
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Solid-State Battery: New Material Class with Excellent Ion Conductivity
A research team has discovered a material class with above-average conductivity. This is a decisive step forward in the development of high-performance solid-state batteries. Investigations made an essential contribution to the discovery. The batteries of the future will have to satisfy high expectations: They will have to be lighter and perform better, have longer service lives, be safer and also less error-prone. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Technical University Munich
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How a Thin-Film Copper Sandwich Is Transforming Electronics
As devices get smaller and more powerful, the risk of them overheating and burning out increases substantially. Despite advancements in cooling solutions, the interface between an electronic chip and its cooling system has remained a barrier for thermal transport due to the materials' intrinsic roughness. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Carnegie Mellon University, College of Engineering
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The Perfect Pour: Model Predicts Beer Head Features
From creating drinks with distinctive looks to providing aromas for connoisseurs, beer foam is big business. The complex interplay between the components of a beer, the vessel from which it's poured, and the glass it's poured into has garnered plenty of attention from researchers, brewers, and drinkers. A new study looks to provide the most accurate predictions for how a beer will foam. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Tizian Bauer and Wenjing Lyu
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Using AI to Unlock the Mystery of El Nino's Impact on Droughts and Floods
For centuries, fishermen in Peru have noticed a connection between warmer than usual ocean waters—what is now known as the El Niño phenomenon—and droughts and floods on land. But making accurate hydrologic predictions about El Niño's impact on regional weather patterns—and even understanding the complex El Niño phenomenon itself—has stymied climate scientists for decades. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-35968-5
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A Counterintuitive Way to Make Stronger Alloys
Humans have been mixing metals to create more useful materials for thousands of years. The Bronze Age, which started around 3300 BC, was characterized by the use of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin which is stronger than either metal alone. Now, researchers have discovered a counterintuitive way to make a much more recent invention—nanograined alloys, featuring nano-sized grains of the alloying element—even stronger. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media Credits: Yanjun Li / NTNU
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Make Them Thin Enough, and Antiferroelectric Materials Become Ferroelectric
Antiferroelectric materials have electrical properties that make them advantageous for use in high-density energy storage applications. Researchers have now discovered a size threshold beyond which antiferroelectrics lose those properties, becoming ferroelectric. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Advanced Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202210562
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Quantum Dots with Finely-Tuned Spherical Defects Could Enhance Nonlinear Optics
Quantum dots are semiconductor particles measuring just a few nanometers across, which are now widely studied for their intriguing electrical and optical properties. Through new research, it has been shown how quantum dots containing spherical defects can significantly enhance their nonlinear optical properties. By fine-tuning these defects, researchers could tightly control the frequency and brightness of the light emitted by quantum dots. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: K. Hasanirokh, L. H. Abbud
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ChatGPT Offers Unseen Opportunities to Sharpen Students' Critical Skills
As gloomy predictions foretell the end of homework, education institutions are hastily revising their policies and curricula to address the challenges posed by AI chatbots. It is true that the emergence of chatbots does raise ethical and philosophical questions. Yet, through their interactions with AI, people will inevitably enhance skills that are crucial in our day and age: language awareness and critical thinking. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Shutterstock
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Developing Fabrics That Change Shape When They Heat Up
New textiles developed at Aalto University change shape when they heat up, giving designers a wide range of new options. In addition to offering adjustable esthetics, responsive smart fabrics could also help monitor people's health, improve thermal insulation, and provide new tools for managing room acoustics and interior design. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Pedro Silva / Aalto University
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Physicist Discusses the Forces Responsible for a Good Hockey Slap Shot
Hockey fans everywhere love a good slap shot. It is one of the most widely used tools in the game, responsible for some of the sport's most memorable moments. It's a skill perfected by all the top goal-scorers, including Northeastern's Aidan McDonough and Alina Mueller, who lead their teams into their respective Beanpot finals. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
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Colorado Ponders Storing Carbon in Defunct Oil and Gas Wells
From Colorado's high desert to the wooded hills of Pennsylvania, millions of oil and gas wells sit deserted, plunging thousands of feet into the earth. Many haven't been plugged, some leak greenhouse gases. In Colorado, lawmakers are considering a solution that would give these wells a new, redemptive purpose: deep receptacles to trap carbon for millennia. READ FULL ARTICLE.
Media credits: AP Photo/Thomas Peipert
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Society of Vacuum Coaters | PO Box 10628, Albuquerque, NM 87184
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