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Category: materials – Page 13

MIT engineers find a way to deliver drugs directly to the esophagus

There are few treatment options available for people with disorders of the esophagus. Delivering drugs directly to this part of the body is difficult, so patients are usually treated with systemic drugs, which can have unwanted side effects.

To overcome that challenge, MIT engineers developed a gel-like oral drug formulation that can coat the mucosal lining of the esophagus after being swallowed, allowing drugs to pass through the tissue.

The formulation, which includes a hydrogel and other key ingredients that promote rapid drug absorption, could be used to deliver antibodies including infliximab, used to treat a number of autoimmune diseases, or other types of antibodies or small-molecule drugs.

World’s First Photonic Time Crystal Can Reshape Light in Trillionths of a Second

A world-first photonic time crystal can reshape light almost instantly, opening a path toward ultrafast optical technology.

An international research team has created the first experimentally demonstrated all-optical photonic time crystal (PTC), a material whose optical behavior can be altered strongly and repeatedly over extremely short periods of time.

The work, carried out by scientists from École Polytechnique, Collège de France, and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), was published in Nature. The researchers used HZDR’s TELBE superradiant terahertz source to push the material into a previously unexplored form of light-matter interaction in the terahertz range.

Earth’s Inner Core Could Be Full Of Extreme Hydrogen Unlike Anything on The Surface

The Earth is akin to a rocky, molten-in-the-middle nesting doll – or perhaps a rotting, soft-centered onion, though the latter analogy affords our majestic planet much less dignity.

Although only several handfuls (39 fingers’ worth, to be exact) of people have alighted on the ocean’s deepest depths or upon the surface of the Moon, there’s one relatively nearby alien environment that no human will ever personally explore: the Earth’s core.

Approaching it, each Earthly layer differs in composition and increases in pressure and temperature, displaying unique material properties that become murkier the deeper we delve.

Plasmonic metamaterial time crystal

To achieve the ultra-fast changes needed, they hit the metamaterial with powerful laser pulses. This violently accelerated the material’s free-floating electrons, dynamically altering their energy and making their “effective mass” shift by up to 80% of their rest mass in fractions of a trillionth of a second. This massive, rapid shift forced the material into a time-crystal state.

A plasmonic metamaterial driven at terahertz frequencies achieves strong, ultrafast temporal modulation and shows a transition to the photonic time crystal regime with reduced plasmonic losses.

Scientists Who Uncovered Altermagnetism Win Major Physics Honor

A previously overlooked set of spin symmetries has revealed that magnetism does not fit neatly into just two categories.

For more than a century, physicists divided collinear magnets into two basic types. The discovery of altermagnetism has added a third, earning Professor Jairo Sinova of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Dr. Libor Šmejkal and Professor Tomas Jungwirth the 2026 Europhysics Prize from the European Physical Society (EPS) Condensed Matter Division.

One of Europe’s leading honors in condensed matter physics, the prize recognizes their work establishing altermagnetism as a previously unknown fundamental form of magnetic order alongside ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism. The finding has challenged a long-accepted picture of magnetism and created a research field with potential consequences for quantum materials, condensed matter physics and future information technologies.

New 3D thermal cloak hides heat from infrared cameras

True thermal invisibility would require a barrier that would split the heat flow, guide it around an object, and reunite it on the other side. The object inside would be protected from the external temperature gradient, while an observer outside would see the pattern expected from an uninterrupted material. In thermal terms, there would be no obvious object-shaped disturbance to detect. This is the trick the UIUC-led team says its new structure, detailed in the journal Nature Communications, can perform.

This mechanism could also prove useful for heat management applications, especially in modern electronics, where processors, power components, batteries, optical devices, and temperature-sensitive sensors are often cramped into compact spaces.

Now, thermal cloaking itself is not new. Researchers have previously demonstrated flat, or effectively two-dimensional thermal cloaks, bilayer devices, and even an ultrathin “stealth sheet” that can hide and fake heat signatures. However, most earlier experimental devices worked with circular, spherical, or extruded shapes, or performed properly only when heat arrived along a prescribed axis.

A Simple Twist Could Unlock a New Generation of Electronics

Scientists can now twist large oxide crystals into new materials with potentially powerful electronic properties.

A carefully chosen twist can transform how a material behaves. Researchers have now found a way to apply that principle to large sheets of crystalline oxides, opening a potential route toward electronic materials with structures and properties that can be designed with unusual precision.

The approach gives scientists control over the angle between two stacked oxide layers while creating strong chemical bonds where they meet. Unlike many earlier twistronic materials, the resulting structures can also be produced across areas large enough to be more relevant for practical devices.