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Category: materials – Page 143

The fungus has been traditionally used as a fire starter.

A fungus called tinder fungus that grows on the bark of rotting beech and birch trees has been used as a fire starter for a long time, but it may just have a new use: the creation of plastics.

Researchers at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland proceeded to analyze the internal structure of the fungus, formally called Fomes fomentarius, to understand its strong yet lightweight consistency.

Dhoxax/iStock.

Humans have used the material to feed fires for centuries. But it recently piqued the interest of the scientific community as a replacement for certain plastics, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

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Researchers at Harvard University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Arizona State University, and other institutes in the United States have recently observed an antiferromagnetic metal phase in electron-doped NdNiO3 a material known to be a non-collinear antiferromagnet (i.e., exhibiting an onset of antiferromagnetic ordering that is concomitant with a transition into an insulating state).

“Previous works on the rare-earth nickelates (RNiO3) have found them to host a rather exotic of magnetism known as a ‘noncollinear antiferromagnet,’” Qi Song, Spencer Doyle, Luca Moreschini and Julia A. Mundy, Four of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org.

“This type of magnet has unique potential applications in the field of spintronics, yet rare-earth nickelates famously change spontaneously from being metallic to insulating at the exact same temperature that this noncollinear antiferromagnet phase turns on. We wanted to see if we could somehow modify one of these materials in a way so that it remained metallic, but still had this interesting magnetic phase.”

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Excerpt from album: Leviathan Device. Label: Cyclic Law. Release date: 2011. Country: Canada.

http://www.cycliclaw.com/

http://www.discogs.com/Triangular-Ascension-Leviathan-Device/release/2742614

I hold no rights! If the owner/owners of this material would deem that this upload violates any copyright law, please inform me immediately and I will remove the said material/materials.
Only for personal and non-profit use!

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The days of ripping off a Band-Aid could soon be in the past, with scientists creating a new affordable, flexible electronic covering that not only speeds and wirelessly monitors healing but performs a disappearing act by being harmlessly absorbed into the body when its job is done.

“Although it’s an electronic device, the active components that interface with the wound bed are entirely resorbable,” said Northwestern University’s John A. Rogers, who co-led the study. “As such, the materials disappear naturally after the healing process is complete, thereby avoiding any damage to the tissue that could otherwise be caused by physical extraction.”

Electronic bandages are an emerging but by no means new technology, with earlier developments into bacteria-killing patches, motion-powered covers and even forays into smart dressings. But this dressing is the first bioresorbable bandage of its kind, delivering electrotherapy to wounds to accelerate healing by up to 30 per cent, and relaying data on the injured site’s condition to allow monitor of it from afar. The Northwestern scientists believe it could be a game-changer for diabetics and others who face serious complications from frequent and slow-healing sores.

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The bones of the face and skull can be affected due to a wide range of conditions, including cleft palate defects, traumatic injuries, cancer, and bone loss from dentures. Although bone replacements are routinely used to regenerate the missing tissue, they are vulnerable to bacterial infection. In a new study, researchers investigated whether manuka honey, made from tea trees, can be used to resist bacterial infection and promote bone growth.

Bone implants account for 45% of all hospital-contracted infections, impeding healing. Typically, these implants are made from biomaterials that contain extracellular matrix components—molecules that provide structural support to cells. However, researchers commonly use metal implants or synthetic polymers to study defects and infections. Therefore, there is a gap in the understanding of how biomaterials behave in response to infection.

“Imagine a metal versus something soft and porous that is made up of extracellular matrix components. They have very different characteristics,” said Marley Dewey, a former graduate student in the Harley lab and the first author of the paper. “Using our scaffolds, this is the first paper to look at how these materials become infected.”

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Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have created a new type of quantum material whose atomic scaffolding, or lattice, has been dramatically warped into a herringbone pattern.

The resulting distortions are “huge” compared to those achieved in other materials, said Woo Jin Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC who led the study.

“This is a very fundamental result, so it’s hard to make predictions about what may or may not come out of it, but the possibilities are exciting,” said SLAC/Stanford Professor and SIMES Director Harold Hwang.

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A supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy some 8.5 billion years way has ripped apart a nearby star, producing some of the most luminous jets ever seen.

When stars and other objects stray too close to a supermassive black hole they are destroyed by the black hole’s immense gravity.

These occurrences, known as tidal-disruption events (TDEs), result in a circling disk of material that is slowly pulled into the black hole and very occasionally, as in the case of supermassive black hole AT2022cmc, ejecting bright beams of material travelling close to the speed of light.

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Researchers at Purdue University have discovered new waves with picometer-scale spatial variations of electromagnetic fields which can propagate in semiconductors like silicon. The research team, led by Dr. Zubin Jacob, Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Physics and Astronomy (courtesy) published their findings in APS Physics Review Applied in a paper titled, “Picophotonics: Anomalous Atomistic Waves in Silicon.”

“The word microscopic has its origins in the length scale of a micron which is a million times smaller than a meter. Our work is for light matter interaction within the picoscopic regime which is far smaller, where the discrete arrangement of atomic lattices changes light’s properties in surprising ways.” says Jacob.

These intriguing findings demonstrate that natural media host a variety of rich light-matter interaction phenomena at the atomistic level. The use of picophotonic waves in semiconducting materials may lead researchers to design new, functional optical devices, allowing for applications in quantum technologies.

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Advances in computing power over the decades have come thanks in part to our ability to make smaller and smaller transistors, a building block of electronic devices, but we are nearing the limit of the silicon materials typically used. A new technique for creating 2D oxide materials may pave the way for future high-speed electronics, according to an international team of scientists.

“One way we can make our transistors, our , work faster is to shrink the distance electrons have to travel between point A and B,” said Joshua Robinson, professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State. “You can only go so far with 3D materials like silicon—once you shrink it down to a nanometer, its properties change. So there’s been a massive push looking at new materials, one of which are 2D materials.”

The team, led by Furkan Turker, graduate student in the Department of Materials Sciences, used a technique called confinement hetroepitaxy, or CHet, to create 2D oxides, materials with special properties that can serve as an atomically thin insulating layer between layers of electrically conducting materials.

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