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Category: materials – Page 9

MIT engineers whip up a more breathable hydrogel

For all their sticky, stretchy, and protective properties, hydrogels lack one key trait: breathability. If worn for too long, a bandage or patch can trap moisture and sweat, which can irritate tissues and reduce the effectiveness of any device that a hydrogel adheres.

Now MIT engineers have come up with a recipe for a hydrogel that is both hydrated and aerated, or permeable to air. The new material is just as soft, stretchy, and robust as conventional hydrogels, but a network of tiny tunnels running through the gel allows air to pass through.

The aerated hydrogel can be worn for longer periods of time compared to conventional hydrogels, without causing skin irritation. It can also reduce sweat buildup, even during exercise. In experiments, volunteers wore wireless heart monitors that were attached to their chest with the new breathable hydrogel. After working out regularly for 10 days, the volunteers showed no signs of skin irritation, and the heart monitors maintained clear readings.

Physicists finally build a quantum material predicted more than a decade ago

Researchers have achieved a major milestone by creating a long-sought two-dimensional quantum material and confirming its unusual conducting edge states. The ability to control these states through strain could make the material a promising platform for future room-temperature quantum electronics.

A new route to electrically controlled helimagnetic structures

Advanced magnetic memory and spintronic devices rely on the ability to control magnetic states using electricity. Today, such technologies work by manipulating relatively simple magnetic structures found in ferromagnets, where all the magnetic moments point the same way. However, researchers are becoming increasingly interested in controlling more complex magnetic systems because these could offer higher information density and improved efficiency.

Helimagnets are a prime example of such systems. In these materials, the magnetic moments form spiral or helical patterns that wind through the material. The direction in which these magnetic patterns propagate plays an important role in determining the material’s electrical and magnetic behavior.

However, researchers had not established a reliable way to reversibly control the orientation of helical magnetic structures using an electric current, and current-driven techniques developed for ferromagnets do not directly carry over to helimagnetic systems.

Neutron imaging reveals how water limits CO₂ storage in recycled concrete

The construction sector faces two problems at once: it emits large amounts of CO₂ and produces vast quantities of concrete waste. But what if part of that waste could be used to trap carbon instead of ending up as rubble?

That is the idea behind accelerated carbonation.

Crushed recycled concrete can be exposed to CO₂-rich gas, allowing carbon dioxide to react with the old cement paste and become locked into stable mineral compounds. In principle, this could help reduce the environmental impact of construction while giving demolition waste a second life.

Quantum material opens new path for studying unusual electronic behavior

The work lays the foundation to build a new platform to explore phenomena that could power devices capable of transporting and grouping electrical signals and quantum states in ways not traditionally achievable without relying on optical or engineered systems. The team detailed its findings in a paper published in Science Advances.

Non-Hermitian physics refers to systems that exhibit behaviors not found in conventional physical models, explained Morteza Kayyalha, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Penn State and corresponding author on the paper. These systems can display unusual behaviors, such as enhanced responses to perturbations and external stimuli. They can also demonstrate the non-Hermitian skin effect, where quantum states—which researchers can use to predict the physical properties of a material—become concentrated near a specific boundary or point in the material, rather than spreading uniformly throughout.

Catching hydrogen in the act: Tracking the absorption process over time

If you’re looking for hydrogen on the elemental chart, it won’t take you long to find it. It is right there at the beginning, the lightest possible material. One electron, one proton, one neutron. Simple, minimalistic, the Marie Kondo of the elemental chart, but with enormous potential in terms of possible technological applications.

A very prominent example interests every single one of us: Let’s look into the daytime sky.

If we think of the sun as a furnace, then hydrogen atoms are the coal ingots.

Metallic rutile oxides break the rules of cooling

Physicists have long puzzled over a strange contradiction inside a family of minerals called rutile oxides. These materials all share the same crystal structure—but while some of them, like titanium dioxide, are firmly insulating, others, like ruthenium dioxide, conduct electricity like a metal. So far, physicists have had little idea of why this happens.

In a new study published in Physical Review B, researchers led by Kaushik Sen at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi traced the answer back to phonons: the tiny vibrations that ripple through a material’s atomic lattice.

Their discovery reveals that metallic rutile oxides develop a fundamentally different relationship between electrons and phonons as they cool—settling a long-running scientific dispute along the way.

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