Lifeboat Foundation

No human intervention is required.

A research team led by Yan Zeng, a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has built a new material research laboratory where robots do the work and artificial intelligence (AI) can make routine decisions. This allows work to be conducted around the clock, thereby accelerating the pace of research.

Research facilities and instrumentation have come a long way over the years, but the nature of research remains the same. At the center of each experiment is a human doing the measurements, making sense of data, and deciding the next steps to be taken. At the A-Lab set up at Berkeley, the researchers led by Zeng want to break the current pace of research by using robotics and AI.

The project was the result of a collaboration between NASA and Ohio State University and the new alloy is called GRX-810.

Silver, gold and copper nanowires are leading contenders for next-generation nanoscale devices, however greater understanding of how they work and improved production methods are needed before they can be widely used, explains a recent review in the journal Science and Technology of Advanced Materials.

“Metal nanowires are used for numerous applications, but our understanding of their mechanical properties remains elusive,” says Nurul Akmal Che Lah, engineer at Universiti Malaysia Pahang.

Lah and colleague Sonia Trigueros at the University of Oxford reviewed methods for synthesising and analysing silver, gold and copper nanowires for molecular-based electronics.

“Every day, Apple is innovating to make technology that enriches people’s lives, while protecting the planet we all share.”

In another major move to become greener, Apple announced plans to incorporate more recycled materials into its products, targeting 2025 to attain 100 percent recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries in a press release.

Further plans involving a shift to magnets made of recycled rare earth elements and printed circuit boards using 100 percent recycled tin soldering and gold plating were disclosed, giving all Earth lovers a reason to cheer.

Calculations motivated by the successful prediction of the nickelate phase diagram suggest that palladates might hit the sweet spot for high-temperature superconductivity.

Researchers have investigated how pores in a solid change its chemical reactions with other materials. The result could make steel production more environmentally friendly.

Graphene is found to exhibit a magnetoresistance dwarfing that of all known materials at room temperature—a behavior that may lead to new magnetic sensors and help decipher the physics of strange metals.

One might expect that, two decades after its discovery, graphene would have exhausted its potential for surprises. But the thinnest, strongest, most conductive of all materials has now added another record to its tally. A collaboration that includes graphene’s codiscoverer and Nobel laureate Andre Geim of the University of Manchester, UK, reports that graphene can have a room-temperature magnetoresistance—a magnetic-field-induced change in electrical resistivity—that’s 100 times larger than that of any known material [1]. Graphene’s giant magnetoresistance could lead to novel magnetic-field sensors but also offer an experimental window into exotic quantum regimes of electrical conduction that might be related to the mysterious “strange metals.”

Magnetoresistance, which occurs both in bulk materials and multilayer structures, found a killer app in magnetic-field sensors such as those used to read data from magnetic memories. Researchers have long been interested in the limits of this phenomenon, which has led to discoveries of “giant,” “colossal,” and “extraordinary” forms of magnetoresistance. The associated materials exhibit resistivity changes of up to 1,000,000% when exposed to magnetic fields of several teslas (T). The largest effects, however, require extremely low temperatures that can only be reached with impractical liquid-helium cooling systems.

After amazing us with its incredible strength, flexibility and thermal conductivity, graphene has now chalked up another remarkable property with its magnetoresistance. Researchers in Singapore and the UK have shown that, in near-pristine monolayer graphene, the room-temperature magnetoresistance can be orders of magnitude higher than in any other material. It could therefore provide both a platform for exploring exotic physics and potentially a tool for improving electronic devices.

\r \r.

Magnetoresistance is a change in electrical resistance on exposure to a magnetic field. In the classical regime, magnetoresistance arises because the magnetic field curves the trajectories of flowing charges by the Lorentz force. In traditional metals, in which conduction occurs almost solely through electron motion, magnetoresistance quickly saturates as the field increases because the deflection of the electrons creates a net potential difference across the material, which counteracts the Lorentz potential. The situation is different in semimetals such as bismuth and graphite, in which current is carried equally by electrons and positive holes. Opposite charges flowing in opposite directions end up being deflected the same way by the magnetic field, so no net potential difference is generated and the magnetoresistance can theoretically grow indefinitely.

RIKEN physicists have created an exotic quantum state in a device with a disk-like geometry for the first time, showing that edges are not required. This demonstration opens the way for realizing other novel electronic behavior. Their findings are published in Nature Physics.

Physics has long moved on from the three classic states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. A better theoretical understanding of quantum effects in crystals and the development of advanced experimental tools to probe and measure them has revealed a whole host of exotic states of matter.

A prominent example of this is the topological insulator: a kind of crystalline solid that exhibits wildly different properties on their surfaces than in the rest of the material. The best-known manifestation of this is that topological insulators conduct electricity on their surfaces but are insulating in their interiors.