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Category: materials – Page 2

An Asteroid’s Billion-Year-Old Secret Is a “Genuine Surprise” to Scientists

A group of scientists, including researchers from the University of Tokyo, has found evidence that liquid water once moved through the body of the asteroid that eventually gave rise to the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu. Remarkably, this activity occurred more than a billion years after the asteroid originally formed.

The discovery comes from the study of tiny rock fragments collected by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The results challenge the long-standing belief that water-related processes on asteroids happened only during the earliest stages of solar system history. This new understanding could influence models of how Earth itself was formed.

Although scientists have developed a fairly detailed picture of how the solar system came together, important questions remain. One of the biggest mysteries is how Earth acquired such an abundance of water. For decades, researchers have suspected that carbon-rich asteroids, such as Ryugu, which were created from ice and dust in the outer regions of the solar system, played a major role in supplying that water. Ryugu was visited by the Hayabusa2 mission in 2018, marking the first time a spacecraft both studied such an asteroid directly and returned samples to Earth. These precious materials are now helping researchers address some of the most fundamental questions about the origins of our planet.

Tiny Quantum Dots Could Transform How We See in the Dark

Scientists have created eco-friendly “quantum inks” that can replace toxic metals in infrared detectors. The breakthrough could make night vision faster, cleaner, and more accessible to a wider range of industries.

Toxic Metals vs. Infrared Innovation

Manufacturers of infrared cameras are facing a growing challenge. Many of the materials used in today’s detectors, including toxic heavy metals, are now restricted under environmental regulations. As a result, companies often find themselves forced to choose between maintaining performance or meeting compliance standards.

Scientists Unlock New Way To Control Exotic Light Waves in 2D Materials

A research team has discovered how to finely control Dirac plasmon polaritons in topological insulator metamaterials, overcoming long-standing challenges in the terahertz range. In today’s world of advanced nanotechnology, the ability to control light at extremely small scales is essential for br

Building better batteries with amorphous materials and machine learning

Lithium-ion batteries power most electronics, but they have limited energy density—they can store only a certain amount of energy per mass or volume of the battery.

“In order to store even more energy with the same mass or volume, you will have to explore alternative energy storage technologies,” says Sai Gautam Gopalakrishnan, Assistant Professor at the Department of Materials Engineering, IISc.

Gopalakrishnan and his team have studied how to boost the movement of ions in , which can have a higher energy density.

Physicists realize time-varying strong coupling in a magnonic system

Time-varying systems, materials with properties that change over time, have opened new possibilities for the experimental manipulation of waves. Contrarily to static systems, which exhibit the same properties over time, these materials break so-called temporal translation symmetry. This in turn prompts the emergence of various fascinating phenomena, including time reflection, refraction and diffraction.

Scientists Discover “Virtual Charges” That Exist Only When Light Hits

A study led by Politecnico di Milano, recently published in Nature Photonics, highlights the crucial role of virtual charges in insulating materials. One of the biggest challenges in modern physics and photonics is understanding how materials behave when struck by extremely brief flashes of light

Coexisting magnetic states in 2D material promise major energy savings in memory chips

It is anticipated that within just a few decades, the surging volume of digital data will constitute one of the world’s largest energy consumers. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have made a breakthrough that could shift the paradigm: an atomically thin material that enables two opposing magnetic forces to coexist—dramatically reducing energy consumption in memory devices by a factor of 10.

This discovery could pave the way for a new generation of ultra-efficient, reliable memory solutions for AI, and advanced data processing.

The article, “Coexisting Non-Trivial Van der Waals Magnetic Orders Enable Field-Free Spin-Orbit Torque Magnetization Dynamics” has been published in Advanced Materials.

AI system learns from many types of scientific information and runs experiments to discover new materials

Materials science experiments can also face reproducibility challenges. To address the problem, CRESt monitors its experiments with cameras, looking for potential problems and suggesting solutions via text and voice to human researchers.

The researchers used CRESt to develop an electrode material for an advanced type of high-density fuel cell known as a direct formate fuel cell. After exploring more than 900 chemistries over three months, CRESt discovered a catalyst material made from eight elements that achieved a 9.3-fold improvement in power density per dollar over pure palladium, an expensive precious metal. In further tests, CRESTs material was used to deliver a record power density to a working direct formate fuel cell even though the cell contained just one-fourth of the precious metals of previous devices.

The results show the potential for CRESt to find solutions to real-world energy problems that have plagued the materials science and engineering community for decades.

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