Graphite, long thought mundane, hides a shocking secret — it can become a superconducting magnet when cooled and configured just right. This breaks fundamental assumptions in physics.
Category: materials – Page 6
Your ketchup will see you now: Solid-phase properties reveal when yield stress fluids start to flow
Pounding on the bottom of a glass bottle of ketchup is one of life’s small annoyances. Getting that sweet, red concoction from its solid phase to a liquid takes too long when you’re hungry and could even require messy strategies with a butter knife.
Now a team of scientists has shown that determining the point where the solid transitions to a liquid can be predicted from the properties of the solid phase alone. The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
The new work focuses on yielding, a phenomenon where a solid-like material starts to behave like a liquid. “This behavior occurs constantly all around us, from desserts like custards that smoothly flow onto your spoon to personal care products like toothpaste that are easily squeezed out of tubes but hold their shape on your toothbrush,” Ryan Poling-Skutvik of the University of Rhode Island in the United States told Phys.org.
Exploiting the full potential of multiferroic materials for magnetic memory devices
As the digital world demands greater data storage and faster access times, magnetic memory technologies have emerged as a promising frontier. However, conventional magnetic memory devices have an inherent limitation: they use electric currents to generate the magnetic fields necessary to reverse their stored magnetization, leading to energy losses in the form of heat.
This inefficiency has pushed researchers to explore approaches that could further reduce power consumption in magnetic memories while maintaining or even enhancing their performance.
Multiferroic materials, which exhibit both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties, have long been considered potential game changers for next-generation memory devices.
Citrus derivative makes transparent wood 100 percent renewable
Five years after introducing see-through wood building material, researchers in Sweden have taken it to another level. They found a way to make their composite 100 percent renewable – and more translucent – by infusing wood with a clear bio-plastic made from citrus fruit.
Since it was first introduced in 2016, transparent wood has been developed by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology as one of the most innovative new structural materials for building construction. It lets natural light through and.
The key to making wood into a transparent composite material is to strip out its lignin, the major light-absorbing component in wood. But the empty pores left behind by the absence of lignin need to be filled with something that restores the wood’s strength and allows light to permeate.
High-entropy nanoribbons offer cost-effective solution for harsh environments
An SMU-led research team has developed a more cost-effective, energy-efficient material called high-entropy oxide (HEO) nanoribbons that can resist heat, corrosion and other harsh conditions better than current materials.
These HEO nanoribbons— featured in the journal Science —can be especially useful in fields like aerospace, energy, and electronics, where materials need to perform well in extreme conditions.
And unlike high entropy materials that have been created in the past, the nanoribbons that SMU’s Amin Salehi-Khojin and his team developed can be 3D-printed or spray-coated at room temperature for manufacturing components or coating surfaces. This makes them more energy-efficient and cost-effective than traditional high-entropy materials, which typically exist as bulk structures and require high-temperature casting.