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Category: materials – Page 3

Bike locks or lightweight armour that cannot be cut by any tool, even angle grinders or high-pressure water jets, sound like an unattainable dream.

They could be remarkably close, however, thanks to a new ‘non-cuttable’ material developed by engineers at Durham University and the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany.

Researchers took inspiration from shells to create the strong and lightweight material, named Proteus after the shape-changing mythical god. Another unusual inspiration was grapefruit, which have very high impact resistance – when dropped from a height, for example – with very lightweight peel.

The material resists cutting by turning the force of a cutting tool back on itself. It is made of ceramic spheres encased in a cellular aluminium structure, similar to the organic tiles interlinked by biopolymers in abalone sea creatures.

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A research team has discovered ferroelectric phenomena occurring at a subatomic scale in the natural mineral brownmillerite.

The team was led by Prof. Si-Young Choi from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Semiconductor Engineering at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology), in collaboration with Prof. Jae-Kwang Lee’s team from Pusan National University, as well as Prof. Woo-Seok Choi’s team from Sungkyunkwan University. The work appears in Nature Materials.

Electronic devices store data in memory units called domains, whose minimum size limits the density of stored information. However, ferroelectric-based memory has been facing challenges in minimizing domain size due to the collective nature of atomic vibrations.

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Modern computer chips generate a lot of heat—and consume large amounts of energy as a result. A promising approach to reducing this energy demand could lie in the cold, as highlighted by a new Perspective article by an international research team coordinated by Qing-Tai Zhao from Forschungszentrum Jülich. Savings could reach as high as 80%, according to the researchers.

The work was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Joachim Knoch from RWTH Aachen University and researchers from EPFL in Switzerland, TSMC and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) in Taiwan, and the University of Tokyo. In the article published in Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering, the authors outline how conventional CMOS technology can be adapted for cryogenic operation using and intelligent design strategies.

Data centers already consume vast amounts of electricity—and their are expected to double by 2030 due to the rising energy demands of artificial intelligence, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The computer chips that around the clock produce large amounts of heat and require considerable energy for cooling. But what if we flipped the script? What if the key to energy efficiency lay not in managing heat, but in embracing the cold?

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A research team has discovered how to make a promising energy-harvesting material much more efficient—without relying on rare or expensive elements. The material, called β-Zn4Sb3, is a tellurium-free thermoelectric compound that can convert waste heat into electricity.

In their study published in Advanced Science, scientists used advanced neutron scattering techniques to peek inside the crystal and found something surprising: tiny heat vibrations (called phonons) were being disrupted by “rattling” atoms inside the structure. This phenomenon, known as avoided crossing, dramatically slowed down how heat travels through the material.

Thanks to this effect, the material’s dropped to extremely low levels—great news for . Even better, the researchers found that the single-crystal version of this material also conducts electricity better than its polycrystalline counterpart, reaching a high power conversion efficiency of 1.4%.

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Ultrasound is more tissue-friendly and less absorbed by the body, making it a reliable option for powering implantable and skin-adherent devices. As a result, ultrasonic energy is emerging as a next-generation solution for wireless charging.

A flexible, biocompatible solution

A research team led by Dr. Sunghoon Hur from the Electronic and Hybrid Materials Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), along with Professor Hyun-Cheol Song of Korea University, has developed a biocompatible ultrasonic receiver that maintains consistent performance even when bent.

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Magnets and superconductors go together like oil and water—or so scientists have thought. But a new finding by MIT physicists is challenging this century-old assumption.

In a paper appearing in the journal Nature, the physicists report that they have discovered a “chiral superconductor”—a material that conducts electricity without resistance, and also, paradoxically, is intrinsically magnetic. What’s more, they observed this exotic superconductivity in a surprisingly ordinary material: graphite, the primary material in pencil lead.

Graphite is made from many layers of graphene—atomically thin, lattice-like sheets of carbon atoms—that are stacked together and can easily flake off when pressure is applied, as when pressing down to write on a piece of paper. A single flake of graphite can contain several million sheets of graphene, which are normally stacked such that every other layer aligns. But every so often, graphite contains tiny pockets where graphene is stacked in a different pattern, resembling a staircase of offset layers.

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