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Chinese scientists have devised a technique to coat everyday materials like paper and plastic with liquid metal, potentially creating “smart devices.” The method, which involves adjusting pressure rather than using a binding material, successfully enables the liquid metal to adhere to surfaces, a previously challenging task due to high surface tension.

Everyday materials such as paper and plastic could be transformed into electronic “smart devices” by using a simple new method to apply liquid metal to surfaces, according to scientists in Beijing, China. The study, published June 9 in the journal Cell Reports.

<em>Cell Reports</em> is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that published research papers that report new biological insight across a broad range of disciplines within the life sciences. Established in 2012, it is the first open access journal published by Cell Press, an imprint of Elsevier.

A historical dream team of five master sculptors, including Michelangelo, Rodin and Takamura, have trained artificial intelligence (AI) to design a sculpture dubbed “the Impossible Statue”, now on show in a Swedish museum.

“This is a true statue created by five different masters that would never have been able to collaborate in real life,” said Pauliina Lunde, a spokeswoman for Swedish machine engineering group Sandvik that used three AI software programs to create the artwork.

Shaking up traditional conceptions about creativity and art, the stainless steel statue depicts an androgynous person with the lower half of the body covered by a swath of material, holding a bronze globe in one hand.

How do you stay strong and not get rattled? Here’s the answer.

Take a lattice—a flat section of a grid of uniform cells, like a window screen or a honeycomb—and lay another, similar lattice above it. But instead of trying to line up the edges or the cells of both lattices, give the top grid a twist so that you can see portions of the lower one through it. This new, third pattern is a moiré, and it’s between this type of overlapping arrangement of lattices of tungsten diselenide and tungsten disulfide where UC Santa Barbara physicists found some interesting material behaviors.

“We discovered a new state of matter—a bosonic correlated insulator,” said Richen Xiong, a graduate student researcher in the group of UCSB condensed matter physicist Chenhao Jin, and the lead author of a paper that appears in the journal Science.

According to Xiong, Jin and collaborators from UCSB, Arizona State University and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan, this is the first time such a material—a highly ordered crystal of bosonic particles called excitons—has been created in a “real” (as opposed to synthetic) matter system.

Would you rather run into a brick wall or into a mattress? For most people, the choice is not difficult. A brick wall is stiff and does not absorb shocks or vibrations well; a mattress is soft and is a good shock absorber. Sometimes, in designing materials, both of these properties are needed. Materials should be good at absorbing vibrations, but should be stiff enough to not collapse under pressure. A team of researchers from the UvA Institute of Physics has now found a way to design materials that manage to do both these things.

Publishing.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.

The race is on to engineer alternatives to traditional building materials that either perform better or tread more lightly on the planet. From super-strong plastics to fungus columns, we’ve rounded up 10 materials that could be the future of construction.

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The first demonstration of a functional microchip integrating atomically thin two-dimensional materials with exotic properties heralds a new era of microelectronics. The world’s first fully integrated and functional microchip based on exotic two-dimensional materials has been fabricated at KAUST.

The material can self-heal in just 24 hours when warmed to 158°F or in about a week at room temperature.

Stanford professor Zhenan Bao and his team have invented a multi-layer self-healing synthetic electronic skin.

This is according to a report by Fox News published on Friday.

Continue reading “Scientists invent self-healing robot skin that mimics the real thing” »

Scientists have developed an advanced technique for 3D printing that is set to revolutionize the manufacturing industry.

The group, led by Dr. Jose Marques-Hueso from the Institute of Sensors, Signals & Systems at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has created a new method of 3D printing that uses near-infrared (NIR) light to create complex structures containing multiple materials and colors.

They achieved this by modifying a well-established 3D printing process known as stereolithography to push the boundaries of multi-material integration. A conventional 3D printer would normally apply a blue or UV laser to a liquid resin that is then selectively solidified, layer by layer, to build a desired object. But a major drawback of this approach has been the limitations in intermixing materials.