CERN’s “irradiation station” will investigate the effect of radiation on commercial materials, such as lubricants and gaskets, that are used regularly in accelerator beamlines and other radiation environments.
While automated manufacturing is ubiquitous today, it was once a nascent field birthed by inventors such as Oliver Evans, who is credited with creating the first fully automated industrial process, in flour mill he built and gradually automated in the late 1700s. The processes for creating automated structures or machines are still very top-down, requiring humans, factories, or robots to do the assembling and making.
However, the way nature does assembly is ubiquitously bottom-up; animals and plants are self-assembled at a cellular level, relying on proteins to self-fold into target geometries that encode all the different functions that keep us ticking. For a more bio-inspired, bottom-up approach to assembly, then, human-architected materials need to do better on their own. Making them scalable, selective, and reprogrammable in a way that could mimic nature’s versatility means some teething problems, though.
Continue reading “Reprogrammable materials selectively self-assemble” »
Field-effect transistors (FETs) are transistors in which the resistance of most of the electrical current can be controlled by a transverse electric field. Over the past decade or so, these devices have proved to be very valuable solutions for controlling the flow of current in semiconductors.
To further develop FETs, electronics engineers worldwide have recently been trying to reduce their size. While these down-scaling efforts have been found to increase the device’s speed and lower the power consumption, they are also associated with short-channel effects (i.e., unfavorable effects that occur when an FET’s channel length is approximately equal to the space charge regions of source and drain junctions within its substrate).
These undesirable effects, which include barrier lowering and velocity saturation, could be suppressed by using 2D semiconductor channels with high carrier mobilities and ultrathin high–k dielectrics (i.e., materials with high dielectric constants). Integrating 2D semiconductors with dielectrics with similar oxide thicknesses has been found to be highly challenging.
UCLA / Flexible Research Group.
The study was published today in the journal Science Robotics.
“Approximately 200,000 times thinner than human hair.”
New energy-efficient devices are made possible by the thinnest ferroelectric material ever created, thanks to the University of California Berkeley and Argonne National Laboratory.
As a result of this development, intriguing material behavior at small scales could reduce energy demands for computing, revealed ANL.
This work studies how a lattice of tunable beams can learn desired behaviors and what factors affect mechanical learning.
Bouncy castle inspires inventor to develop a method for constructing inflatable concrete homes.
Company delivers 15-minute inflatables to building sites and then pumps concrete into them to produce a building in one hour.
The shells of some mollusk species have compact helical structures that researchers propose develop from the self-assembly of a liquid-crystalline material.
New structures maintain the properties of high-pressure materials outside the high-pressure vessels in which they were formed.
Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
The innovative materials, known as thermoformable ceramics, were created by “accident” in a lab but had potential applications, including more effective and long-lasting heat sinks.
