Lifeboat Foundation

A recent study, affiliated with South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has reported a scalable synthetic strategy to fabricate low-resistance edge contacts to atomic transistors using a thermally stable 2D metal, namely PtTe₂.

Developing cheaper, smaller, and better-performing semiconductors with materials other than silicon (Si), is expected to gain momentum, thanks to a recent study from UNIST. This will aid in reducing the space between semiconductors and metals within semiconductor devices to ∼1 nm, which could help maintain high performance.

Published in the August 2022 issue of Nature Communications, this study has been jointly led by Professor Soon-Yong Kwon and Professor Zonghoon Lee in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST.

The new type of home could address housing shortages.

On Monday, the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC) unveiled the first 3D-printed house made entirely out of bio-based materials called BioHome3D, according to a press release by the institution.

Fully recyclable and highly insulated

Continue reading “First ever 100 percent bio-based 3D-printed home unveiled” »

A team of scientists led by crystallographers from St Petersburg University has succeeded in synthesizing an analog of the Earth’s most structurally complex mineral, ewingite, in a laboratory. The findings of the research are published in Materials.

Ewingite is a mineral that was discovered in the mid-2010s in the abandoned Plavno uranium mine located in the Czech Republic. It is the most complex mineral known to exist on Earth. Moreover, because of the specific thermodynamic conditions required for its formation, the mineral is considered to be very rare.

The researchers managed to synthesize an analog with a composition and crystal structure similar to that of natural ewingite through a combination of low-temperature hydrothermal synthesis and room-temperature evaporation.

Tiny magnetic whirlpools could transform memory storage in high performance computers.

Magnets generate invisible fields that attract certain materials. A common example is refrigerator magnets. Far more important to our everyday lives, magnets also can store data in computers. Exploiting the direction of the magnetic field (say, up or down), microscopic bar magnets each can store one bit of memory as a zero or a one—the language of computers.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory want to replace the bar magnets with tiny magnetic vortices. As tiny as billionths of a meter, these vortices are called skyrmions, which form in certain magnetic materials. They could one day usher in a new generation of microelectronics for memory storage in high performance computers.

Circa 2015 face_with_colon_three

Scientific Reports volume 5, Article number: 12,488 (2015) Cite this article.

face_with_colon_three circa 2014.

What is graphene? Why has it taken researchers so long to discover it? Is it truly the material of the future?

This is the first time scientists have observed vessels form with such a close resemblance to the complicated structure of naturally occurring blood vessels.

An international research collaboration headed by the University of Sydney has created technology that allows for the production of materials that mirror the structure of living blood vessels, with major implications for the future of surgery.

Preclinical research showed that once the manufactured blood vessel was transplanted into mice, the body accepted it and new cells and tissue began to develop in the appropriate locations, thereby converting it into a “living blood vessel.”

Has Madam Pomfrey’s Skele-Gro finally made its way to the muggle world?

What’s more, it can simultaneously capture information about the orientation, or “polarization,” of the waves in real-time, which existing devices cannot.

This information can be used to characterize materials that have asymmetrical molecules or to determine the surface topography of materials.