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Category: materials

Gyromorphs combine liquid and crystal traits to enhance light-based computers

Researchers have been developing computers that deploy light (photons) rather than electricity to power storage and calculations. These light-based computers have the potential to be more energy efficient than traditional computers while also running calculations at greater speeds.

However, a major challenge in the production of light-based computers—still in their infancy—is successfully rerouting microscopic light signals on a computer chip with minimal loss in . This is fundamentally a materials-design problem. These computers require a to block additional light from all incoming directions—what’s known as an “isotropic bandgap material”—in order to maintain signal strength.

Scientists at New York University report the discovery of gyromorphs—a material that combines the seemingly incompatible properties of liquids and crystals and that performs better than any other known structure in blocking light from all incoming angles.

MIT’s Magic-Angle Graphene Just Changed Superconductivity

MIT researchers uncovered clear evidence of unconventional superconductivity in magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene.

Their new measurement system revealed a sharp, V-shaped superconducting gap — proof of a new pairing mechanism unlike that in traditional superconductors. This breakthrough sheds light on quantum behaviors in ultra-thin materials and could accelerate the quest for room-temperature superconductivity.

Superconductors: Nature’s Perfect Conductors.

Asymmetric stress engineering advances current-carrying performance of iron-based superconducting wires

A collaborative research team led by Prof. Ma Yanwei from the Institute of Electrical Engineering (IEE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has shattered records in the current-carrying performance of iron-based superconducting wires.

Their breakthrough, enabled by a novel strategy to engineer high-density flux pinning centers via an asymmetric stress field, is published in Advanced Materials.

The Steady High Magnetic Field Facility (CHMFL), the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of CAS, played a pivotal role in this achievement, with its water-cooled magnet WM5 providing critical experimental support for validating the wires.

Newly developed knitting machine makes solid 3D objects

A new prototype of a knitting machine creates solid, knitted shapes, adding stitches in any direction—forward, backward and diagonal—so users can construct a wide variety of shapes and add stiffness to different parts of the object.

Unlike traditional knitting, which yields a 2D sheet of stitches, this proof-of-concept machine—developed by researchers at Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University—functions more like a 3D printer, building up solid shapes with horizontal layers of stitches.

“We establish that not only can it be done, but because of the way we attach the stitch, it will give us access to a lot of flexibility about how we control the material,” said François Guimbretière, professor of information science at Cornell. “The expressiveness is very similar to a 3D printer.”

Scientists Finally Confirm True 1D Electronic Properties in a Material

A sophisticated analysis of experimental ARPES data confirmed that the electronic properties of each chain are truly one-dimensional, and calculations further predict an exciting phase transition. For the first time, researchers at BESSY II have successfully shown that a material can exhibit trul

“This Is From a Meteorite”: Scientist Stunned by Water Inside 400-Million-Year-Old Plant

The research, led by Zachary Sharp, a professor in UNM’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study centers on horsetails, a family of hollow-stemmed plants that have survived on Earth for more than 400 million years.

The researchers found that water moving through these plants experiences such a powerful natural purification process that its oxygen isotope composition closely matches that of meteorites and other materials from beyond our planet.

“It’s a meter-high cylinder with a million holes in it, equally spaced. It’s an engineering marvel,” Sharp said. “You couldn’t create anything like this in a laboratory.”

AI model identifies high-performing battery electrolytes by starting from just 58 data points

In an ideal world, an AI model looking for new materials to build better batteries would be trained on millions or even hundreds of millions of data points.

But for emerging next-generation battery chemistries that don’t have decades of research behind them, waiting for new studies takes time the world doesn’t have.

“Each experiment takes up to weeks, months to get ,” said University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow Ritesh Kumar. “It’s just infeasible to wait until we have millions of data to train these models.”

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