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Category: materials

Water-repelling surfaces reveal surprising charging effects

Materials that repel water are used in countless applications, including industrial separation processes, routine laboratory pipetting, and medical devices. When water touches these surfaces, the interface where they meet tends to acquire a small electrical charge—an effect that is ubiquitous, yet poorly understood. KAUST researchers have now studied this in detail and their findings could have broad implications. The findings are published in the journal Langmuir.

“This is not a niche laboratory curiosity,” says Yinfeng Xu, a Ph.D. student who led the experimental work in Himanshu Mishra’s laboratory. “This phenomenon plays a role in environmental processes such as dew droplets and raindrops; in industrial operations involving sprays, condensates, or emulsions; and in modern microfluidic and liquid-handling systems used in laboratories worldwide.”

Stitching precise patterns—with lasers

Just as embroiderers, with needle and thread, can transform plain fabric into an intricate pattern, engineers can use lasers and polymers to create flexible, complex structures that could transform life-saving sensing technology. An interdisciplinary team at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering has developed a new manufacturing strategy that reveals where and how laser-induced graphene (LIG) forms on polymers.

The research opens new opportunities for flexible microelectrodes and neurochemical biosensors.

“Miniaturizing Laser-Induced Graphene for Biosensors by Spatial Control of Initiation and Side-Selective Microfabrication on Commercial Polymers” was selected as a cover feature in Issue 7 of the Advanced Materials Technologies, published in April 2026.

Scientists Discover Strange Property of Rice and Turn It Into a Smart Material

Rice behaves in an unexpected way under pressure. When compressed quickly, it becomes weaker, but under slow pressure it stays strong. This insight is helping scientists develop a new material that could be used in “soft” robots that automatically adjust stiffness, as well as protective gear that responds to how fast an impact occurs.

Using this property, researchers created a new type of “metamaterial,” an engineered structure designed to exhibit behaviors not found in natural materials.

Engineers introduce first synthetic charged domain wall in 2D material

In a first for the field, materials scientists from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have interfaced two materials to artificially generate a highly conductive ferroelectric charged domain wall. Led by associate professor of materials science and engineering Arend van der Zande and graduate student Shahriar Muhammad Nahid (now a postdoc at Stanford) and published in Advanced Materials, their approach highlights the versatility of charged domain walls in 2D materials and may be used in the future development of neuromorphic devices and reconfigurable electronics.

2D materials are valued for their utility in molecular-scale systems, which are used to create new kinds of memory and molecular electronic architectures. While most materials must be grown naturally layer by layer, 2D materials can be stacked like building blocks to create arbitrary structures.

One emerging 2D material of interest is indium selenide (α-In2Se3), a layered semiconductor that is also ferroelectric. Ferroelectric materials exhibit spontaneous and mutable electric polarization—something that piqued the interest of van der Zande and Pinshane Huang, professor of materials science and engineering.

What makes a good proton conductor?

A number of advanced energy technologies — including fuel cells, electrolyzers, and an emerging class of low-power electronics — use protons as the key charge carrier. Whether or not these devices will be widely adopted hinges, in part, on how efficiently they can move protons.

One class of materials known as metal oxides has shown promise in conducting protons at temperatures above 400 degrees Celsius. But researchers have struggled to find the best materials to increase the proton conductivity at lower temperatures and improve efficiency.

Now, MIT researchers have developed a physical model to predict proton mobility across a wide range of metal oxides. In a new paper, the researchers ranked the most important features of metal oxides for facilitating proton conduction, and demonstrated for the first time how much the flexibility of the materials’ oxide ions improves their ability to transfer protons.

Quantum twisting microscope reveals electron-electron interactions in graphene at room temperature

An international team of researchers built a highly sensitive quantum microscope and used it to directly observe, for the first time at room temperature, how electrons subtly interact with each other in graphene—confirming a decades-old theoretical prediction with remarkable precision. The research is published in the journal Nano Letters. The team was led by Dmitri Efetov, Professor of Experimental Solid State Physics at LMU München’s Faculty of Physics and MCQST co-coordinator for Research Area Quantum Matter.

In recent years, “moiré materials”—atomically thin, two-dimensional layered structures such as graphene—have emerged as one of the most exciting frontiers in condensed matter physics. By stacking these atomic layers with a slight rotational misalignment, researchers create interference patterns that fundamentally reshape how electrons move. This simple twist can unlock entirely new quantum phases, including superconductivity and correlated insulating states, making moiré systems a powerful platform for exploring emergent physical phenomena.

Studying these systems, however, has traditionally come with significant technical hurdles. Conventional devices must be assembled with extreme precision, relying on fixed twist angles, painstakingly assembled with precision often better than a tenth of a degree. Even then, imperfections such as strain and disorder can obscure the underlying physics.

Framework unifies the classical and quantum Mpemba effects

Physicists have developed a new theoretical framework which unifies a wide array of seemingly unrelated “Mpemba effects”: counterintuitive cases where systems driven further from equilibrium relax faster than those closer to it. Reporting their results in Physical Review X, researchers led by John Goold at Trinity College Dublin show that both classical and quantum versions of the effect can be understood using the same underlying logic—resolving a long-standing conceptual puzzle.

In 1963, 13-year-old Tanzanian student Erasto Mpemba noticed that when he placed an ice cream mixture in the freezer while it was still hot, it froze faster than the other, initially cooler mixtures in the freezer. His observation was later confirmed in 1969 through a study involving Mpemba, together with physicist Denis Osborne.

Since then, effects analogous to the Mpemba effect have been observed in transitions ranging from crystallizing polymers to transitions in magnetic materials. Yet despite close experimental scrutiny, the mechanisms underlying the effect remained elusive.

Scientists Say Washing Dishes With a Sponge Has a Concerning Side Effect

Kitchen sponges shed microplastics, but water use drives most environmental harm. Real-world and lab data show reducing water consumption has the greatest impact. Kitchen sponges may look harmless, but each scrub can release tiny plastic fragments that slip unnoticed down the drain. These micropl

Holographic storage approach packs more data into the same space by encoding three properties of light

Researchers have developed a holographic data storage approach that stores and retrieves information in three dimensions by combining three properties of light—amplitude, phase and polarization. By allowing more data to be stored in the same space, the new approach could help advance efforts to meet the growing global demand for data storage.

Holographic data storage uses laser light to store digital information inside a material. Instead of recording data only on a surface, like a hard drive or optical disk, it stores many overlapping light patterns throughout the volume of the material, allowing much higher storage density and faster data transmission.

“In conventional holographic data storage, data encoding typically uses one light dimension such as amplitude or phase alone, or, at most, combines two of these dimensions,” said research team leader Xiaodi Tan from Fujian Normal University in China.

XRISM clocks hot wind of galaxy M82 at 2 million mph

For the first time, astronomers have directly measured the speed of superheated gas billowing from a cauldron of stellar activity at the heart of M82, a nearby galaxy undergoing an extraordinary burst of star formation. The material is moving more than 2 million miles (over 3 million kilometers) per hour and appears to be the primary force driving a cooler, well-studied, galaxy-scale wind.

Researchers made the calculations using data from the Resolve instrument aboard the XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) spacecraft.

“The classic model of starburst galaxies like M82 suggests that shock waves from star formation and supernovae near the center heat gas, kick-starting a powerful wind,” said Erin Boettcher, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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