Spanish researchers have discovered that two iron artifacts from a hoard of precious treasure that dates back to the Late Bronze Age — before man started the widespread smelting of iron — contain iron from meteorites estimated to be around 1 million years old.
The researchers’ findings, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Trabajos de Prehistoria last year, detail the chemical composition of what looks to be a portion of an iron bracelet or ring and half of a hollow iron sphere covered with fine gold filigree.
LG Chem is building a $3 billion battery cathode factory for EVs in Tennessee – and it just inked a multi-billion dollar deal with GM.
LG Chem has secured a long-term cathode material supply contract with General Motors (GM) worth $19 billion. The contract will commence in 2026 – when the factory is expected to come online – and run until 2035.
Ultium Cells, a joint venture between LG Energy Solution and GM, will primarily use the NCMA (nickel, cobalt, manganese, aluminum) cathode materials made at LG’s Tennessee factory.
Sensors that monitor infrastructure, such as bridges or buildings, or are used in medical devices, such as prostheses for the deaf, require a constant supply of power. The energy for this usually comes from batteries, which are replaced as soon as they are empty. This creates a huge waste problem. An EU study forecasts that in 2025, 78 million batteries will end up in the rubbish every day.
A new type of mechanical sensor, developed by researchers led by Marc Serra-Garcia and ETH geophysics professor Johan Robertsson, could now provide a remedy. Its creators have already applied for a patent for their invention and have now presented the principle in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
Certain sound waves cause the sensor to vibrate “The sensor works purely mechanically and doesn’t require an external energy source. It simply utilizes the vibrational energy contained in sound waves,” Robertsson says.
Football players (and anyone else who takes hard hits) may want to breathe a sigh of relief.
In recent research, engineers at the University of Colorado of Boulder and Sandia National Laboratories have developed a new design for padding that can withstand big impacts. The team’s innovations, which can be printed on commercially available 3D printers, could one day wind up in everything from shipping crates to football pads—anything that helps to protect fragile objects, or bodies, from the bumps of life.
The team described the technology in a paper recently published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.
In a new study, scientists have investigated the newly discovered class of altermagnetic materials for their thermal properties, offering insights into the distinctive nature of altermagnets for spin-caloritronic applications.
Magnetism is an old and well-researched topic, lending itself to many applications, like motors and transformers. However, new magnetic materials and phenomena are being studied and discovered, one of which is altermagnets.
Altermagnets exhibit a unique blend of magnetic characteristics, setting them apart from conventional magnetic materials like ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. These materials exhibit properties observed in both ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, making their study enticing.
Black holes have two fundamental properties: their mass (how much they weigh) and their spin (how quickly they rotate). Determining either of these two values tells scientists a great deal about any black hole and how it behaves. In the past, astronomers made several other estimates of Sgr A*’s rotation speed using different techniques, with results ranging from Sgr A* not spinning at all to it spinning at almost the maximum rate.
The new study suggests that Sgr A* is, in fact, spinning very rapidly, which causes the spacetime around it to be squashed down. The illustration shows a cross-section of Sgr A* and material swirling around it in a disk. The black sphere in the center represents the so-called event horizon of the black hole, the point of no return from which nothing, not even light, can escape.
Looking at the spinning black hole from the side, as depicted in this illustration, the surrounding spacetime is shaped like a football. The faster the spin the flatter the football.
A coating that can hide objects in plain sight, or an implant that behaves exactly like bone tissue—these extraordinary objects are already made from “metamaterials.” Researchers from TU Delft have now developed an AI tool that not only can discover such extraordinary materials but also makes them fabrication-ready and durable. This makes it possible to create devices with unprecedented functionalities. They have published their findings in Advanced Materials.
The properties of normal materials, such as stiffness and flexibility, are determined by the molecular composition of the material, but the properties of metamaterials are determined by the geometry of the structure from which they are built. Researchers design these structures digitally and then have it 3D-printed. The resulting metamaterials can exhibit unnatural and extreme properties. Researchers have, for instance, designed metamaterials that, despite being solid, behave like a fluid.
“Traditionally, designers use the materials available to them to design a new device or a machine. The problem with that is that the range of available material properties is limited. Some properties that we would like to have just don’t exist in nature. Our approach is: tell us what you want to have as properties and we engineer an appropriate material with those properties. What you will then get is not really a material but something in-between a structure and a material, a metamaterial,” says Professor Amir Zadpoor of the Department of Biomechanical Engineering.
A coating that can hide objects in plain sight, or an implant that behaves exactly like bone tissue. These extraordinary objects are already made from metamaterials. Researchers from TU Delft have now developed an AI tool that not only can discover such extraordinary materials but also makes them fabrication-ready and durable. This makes it possible to create devices with unprecedented functionalities.
They published their findings in Advanced Materials (“Deep Learning for Size-Agnostic Inverse Design of Random-Network 3D Printed Mechanical Metamaterials”).
The properties of normal materials, such as stiffness and flexibility, are determined by the molecular composition of the material, but the properties of metamaterials are determined by the geometry of the structure from which they are built. Researchers design these structures digitally and then have it 3D-printed. The resulting metamaterials can exhibit unnatural and extreme properties. Researchers have, for instance, designed metamaterials that, despite being solid, behave like a fluid.
Researchers achieve EV battery breakthrough with silicon-based materials and gel electrolytes, moving closer to a 1,000-kilometer range on a single charge.
A LK99 researcher from Hubei, China, said that his paper might not be released before the Lunar New Year because of patent issues, announced the main findings of the paper, which detected three specific magnetic pointing superconductivity in the samples. He also described improved synthesis methods.
The LK99 researcher from Hubei, China, who said that the paper might not be released before the Lunar New Year because of patent issues, announced the main findings of the paper, which detected three specific magnetic pointing superconductivity in the samples. pic.twitter.com/7ytSWO0zN2
