MIT researchers have just unveiled a new computer method that could help build bridges with up to 90 percent less material.
Category: materials
Concrete that stores a day of electricity
In 2023, researchers at MIT and Harvard showed that ordinary cement, water, and a small amount of carbon black can be combined into a material that stores electricity, not in a battery embedded in the structure, but in the hardened concrete itself. As the cement hydrates, it consumes water and leaves a network of fine pores behind. The hydrophobic carbon black migrates into these spaces and self-assembles into a percolating, fractal-like electron-conducting network threaded through the calcium-silicate-hydrate (C-S-H) matrix. Soaked in an electrolyte and paired across a thin separator, two such electrodes form an electric double-layer capacitor, a supercapacitor, that stores charge electrostatically across an enormous internal surface area. The more interfacial surface inside the block, the more charge it holds. By the researchers’ calculation, a foundation-scale block of roughly 45 cubic metres, a cube about 3.5 metres across, could store on the order of 10 kilowatt-hours, comparable to a household’s average daily electricity use, while still bearing structural load. A 2025 follow-up reported a roughly tenfold increase in energy density, shrinking the volume needed for the same storage. This remains laboratory-scale work, demonstrated so far in small cells and prototypes, not a deployed foundation. Open questions include cycle life, self-discharge, and real-world scaling. References Chanut, N., Stefaniuk, D., Weaver, J. C., Zhu, Y., Shao-Horn, Y., Masic, A., & Ulm, F.-J. (2023). Carbon–cement supercapacitors as a scalable bulk energy storage solution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(32), e2304318120. Stefaniuk, D., Weaver, J. C., Ulm, F.-J., & Masic, A. (2025). High energy density carbon–cement supercapacitors for architectural energy storage. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(40), e2511912122. PHENOMICA — contemplative, precise science, one phenomenon at a time. #science #materialscience #supercapacitor #energystorage #concrete …
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Glass cells of atoms offer a new path to smarter, cheaper sensors
More accurate navigation systems and improved wireless communications may not come from traditional electronics, but rather from atoms. Researchers at Penn State and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new way to build tinier, smarter glass sensors filled with highly precise and stable atoms.
The team’s work, published this week (June 18) in Microsystems and Nanoengineering, centers on a manufacturable, silicon-free version of traditional bulky “vapor cells”—sealed chambers that contain cesium and rubidium atoms—that are commonly used in precision measurement systems, in a gas state. These atoms can act as highly precise sensors because, unlike manufactured components, atoms are fundamentally identical.
“Using atoms for sensing is advantageous because the physics of individual atoms is very well understood, and all the atoms are equal,” said Daniel Lopez, co-lead author of the paper, Liang Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Penn State and director of the Nanofabrication Lab at the Materials Research Institute (MRI). “That gives you a level of precision that’s very hard to achieve with traditional microfabricated devices.”
Novel crystal strategy delivers near-perfect zero thermal expansion from 11 K to 893 K
Almost every material expands when heated. Well-known examples include railroad tracks and concrete roadways, which feature visible expansion gaps to accommodate this effect. However, thermal expansion poses a far more acute challenge for extremely precise technologies, such as lasers and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, where even minute dimensional changes can compromise precision.
Scientists have long sought to develop materials that maintain dimensional stability across a wide temperature range.
Now, a team led by Prof. Lin Zheshuai from the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry (TIPC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has designed a material with an exceptionally broad zero-thermal-expansion temperature window.
Hope for spinal injuries as pigs walk again after experimental gel treatment for severed spinal cords
In humans and other mammals, spinal cord injuries can be devastating, leading to permanent loss of movement, sensation and bladder control. When severed axons (the long fibers that carry messages between nerve cells) cannot regrow, a dense scar forms, preventing nerve signals from passing the injury site.
But the situation is different for some primitive invertebrates, which can rapidly reconnect severed nerves by fusing them. Inspired by this natural phenomenon, scientists led by Michael Lebenstein-Gumovski at the Sklifosovsky Institute for Emergency Medicine in Russia report that they have successfully reconnected severed spinal cords in pigs, enabling them to walk again.
When a spinal cord is completely cut, the two severed ends naturally pull away from each other. In microscopic roundworms, for example, the nerve ends automatically find each other and fuse together. The researchers realized that to recreate a natural fusion process like this, they needed a material to fill the empty space and hold the two ends together.
Special Spin State Triggered by Curved Surface
The field of magnonics aims to take advantage of spin waves, which are waves of precessing spins that can propagate in certain magnetic materials. A spin wave containing many equally spaced frequencies—called a magnon frequency comb (MFC)—would be especially useful for information processing and magnetic-field detection. Unfortunately, generating such waves is complicated. Now Peng Yan and his colleagues at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China have shown theoretically that MFCs could be produced by simply creating a tiny bump in a thin magnetic layer [1].
Creating an MFC in a magnetic material usually entails creating an intricate pattern or “texture” of spin orientations in a small region—such as a spin vortex—and irradiating those spins with monochromatic microwaves. To avoid the complexities of spin textures, Yan and his colleagues propose introducing a bump in a few-nanometer-thick magnetic film. Previous research showed that material curvature can affect spin waves, for example, by modifying the frequency–wavelength relationship.
Exploiting another curvature effect, the theorists showed that a bump between 4 and 64 nm high can spontaneously create a set of spin waves that remain restricted to the bump region. Irradiating the bump with microwaves of a specific frequency then excites these waves and launches an MFC that travels away from the bump. Adjusting the height of the bump changes the spacing of the comb frequencies. Team member Hao Zhao says that in addition to possibly making MFCs more widely available, the work shows the potential for using geometry to manipulate spin waves in new ways.
Quantum waves reveal one-sided motion marking elusive critical states
Sound waves, light waves and other types of waves, generally spread freely through space and over time. In 1958, physicist Philip W. Anderson first described a phenomenon via which irregularities or other sources of disorder in materials would prevent waves from propagating freely, which is now known as Anderson localization.
In quantum systems, one can observe quantum states that are spread throughout a system (i.e., extended), confined to a small region (i.e., localized) or somewhere between the two (i.e., critical). Critical quantum states have so far proved to be very difficult to identify and study using Anderson’s localization theory.
Researchers at the International Quantum Academy and Southern University of Science and Technology in China recently set out to further explore critical quantum states in a quantum processor based on superconducting qubits.
Tiny water droplets transmutate aniline into pyridine in ambient and catalyst-free conditions
Aniline can now be transformed into pyridine without adding any catalysts, oxidants or toxic reagents. In a recent study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers achieved skeletal editing, involving the reorganization of the carbon-nitrogen bonds within an aromatic ring, by turning an aqueous solution of aniline into a mist of microdroplets.
During its millisecond-long airborne lifespan, aniline underwent rapid molecular rearrangement, inserting nitrogen into the aromatic ring and forming pyridine, driven by the uniquely active air-water interface in microdroplets. The green, reagent-free reaction converted up to 80% of the starting material into the product under ambient conditions, eliminating the added energy cost often required to carry out such conversion reactions.
By testing droplets of different sizes, charges and acidity levels, researchers found that the reaction is boosted at the droplet’s interface, a zone that is rich in protons and highly polarized. The smaller the droplet, the larger its reactive surface area relative to its volume, and the better the reaction outcome.
Ultra-fast light-shaping technology could be ‘game-changer’ for future imaging
Scientists have developed a new type of “virtual” metasurface—capable of controlling light in ways traditional lenses and optics can’t—which they say is superior to the current approach, which relies on ultrathin engineered materials. The Nottingham Trent University team says the work will help fully optimize metasurface potential for a range of real-world applications and paves the way for a move from physical to virtual platforms in nanotechnology.
Metasurfaces are many times thinner than a human hair and can bend and focus light, change its color and steer it in different directions, meaning they can replace bulky optical elements in small devices such as lenses, mirrors and filters.
While they are powerful, however, the materials and dimensions of physical metasurfaces are fixed—once built, they can’t change their shape, which can limit how useful they are in real-world technologies.