There’s a known rule-breaker among materials, and a new discovery by an international team of scientists adds more evidence to back up the metal’s nonconformist reputation. According to a new study led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and at the University of California, Berkeley, electrons in vanadium dioxide can conduct electricity without conducting heat.

The findings, to be published in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal Science, could lead to a wide range of applications, such as thermoelectric systems that convert waste heat from engines and appliances into electricity.

For most metals, the relationship between electrical and thermal conductivity is governed by the Wiedemann-Franz Law. Simply put, the law states that good conductors of electricity are also good conductors of heat. That is not the case for metallic vanadium dioxide, a material already noted for its unusual ability to switch from an insulator to a metal when it reaches a balmy 67 degrees Celsius, or 152 degrees Fahrenheit.

Researchers have created carbon nanosheets for use as supercapacitors with waste hemp fibres, and can do this at 1/1000th of the cost of graphene!

University of Chicago scientists are part of an international research team that has discovered superconductivity—the ability to conduct electricity perfectly—at the highest temperatures ever recorded.

This device helps builders create high quality concrete via Carmix Metalgalante.

A recent French study indicates that the ancient Romans may have figured out how to deal with earthquakes by simply deflecting the energy of the waves using structures that resemble metamaterials. These are materials which can manipulate waves (electromagnetic or otherwise) in ways which are normally deemed impossible, such as guiding light around an object using a special pattern.

In a 2012 study, the same researchers found that a pattern of 5 meter deep bore holes in the ground was effective at deflecting a significant part of artificially generated acoustic waves. One of the researchers, [Stéphane Brûlé], noticed on an aerial photograph of a Gallo-Roman theater near the town of Autun in central France that its pattern of pillars bore an uncanny resemblance to this earlier experiment: a series of concentric (semi) circles with the distance between the pillars (or holes) decreasing nearer the center.

Further research using archaeological data of this theater site confirmed that it did appear to match up the expected pattern if one would have aimed to design a structure that could successfully deflect the acoustic energy from an earthquake. This raises the interesting question of whether this was a deliberate design choice, or just coincidence.

The ancient, now-dormant volcano on which the island of Bermuda sits formed in a completely unique way, scientists have discovered. The finding not only solves a long-standing mystery about the island’s volcanic origins, but it also describes a new way volcanoes form.

In studying a rock core sample taken from Bermuda, drilled from 1972, geoscientists have discovered the first direct evidence that material from deep within Earth’s mantle transition zone —a layer rich in water, crystals and melted rock — can percolate to the surface to form volcanoes.

Researchers have long known that volcanoes form when tectonic plates converge, or as a result of mantle plumes that rise from the core-mantle boundary to make hotspots at Earth’s crust.