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Discovery by scientists at Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley could help find silicon’s successor in race against Moore’s Law.

In the search for new materials with the potential to outperform silicon, scientists have wanted to take advantage of the unusual electronic properties of 2D devices called oxide heterostructures, which consist of atomically thin layers of materials containing oxygen.

Scientists have long known that oxide materials, on their own, are typically insulating – which means that they are not electrically conductive. When two oxide materials are layered together to form a heterostructure, new electronic properties such as superconductivity – the state in which a material can conduct electricity without resistance, typically at hundreds of degrees below freezing – and magnetism somehow form at their interface, which is the juncture where two materials meet. But very little is known about how to control these electronic states because few techniques can probe below the interface.

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Continue reading “This AI Creates Dogs From Cats…And More!” »

Jacques Cousteau’s grandson is pushing for the construction of a real-life Sealab 2021. The proposed undersea laboratory is so foreign to our idea of marine studies that it’s being likened to a space station that’s also under the ocean.

The station is named Proteus, not for the changing nature of matter (like a new uncuttable material with the same name), but for the shepherd of the sea. By placing a station 60 feet underwater around the Caribbean island of Curacao, sponsoring Northeastern University says it can reduce divers’ high amount of overhead time and reduce the danger of nitrogen-induced health effects.

The magnetic properties of a chromium halide can be tuned by manipulating the non-magnetic atoms in the material, a team, led by Boston College researchers, reports in the most recent edition of Science Advances.

The seemingly counter-intuitive method is based on a mechanism known as an indirect exchange interaction, according to Boston College Assistant Professor of Physics Fazel Tafti, a lead author of the report.

An indirect interaction is mediated between two magnetic atoms via a non-magnetic atom known as the ligand. The Tafti Lab findings show that by changing the composition of these ligand atoms, all the magnetic properties can be easily tuned.

Apple, the world’s largest technology company by revenue, is already carbon neutral for its corporate facilities, a goal achieved in April 2020. However, the consumer electronics giant now intends to make every product and its entire supply chain – from manufacturing to transportation to end-of-life material recovery – net zero by 2030.

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The researchers also speculated about weaving some of the material into spacesuit fabric, New Scientist reports, but the main draw of their work is that damaged fungus shields would be able to grow back.

“What makes the fungus great is that you only need a few grams to start out,” Stanford researcher and study co-author Nils Averesch told New Scientist. “It self-replicates and self-heals, so even if there’s a solar flare that damages the radiation shield significantly, it will be able to grow back in a few days.”

As we welcome wireless technology into more areas of life, the additional electronic bustle is making for an electromagnetically noisy neighborhood. In hopes of limiting the extra traffic, researchers at Drexel University have been testing two-dimensional materials known for their interference-blocking abilities. Their latest discovery, reported in the journal Science, is of the exceptional shielding ability of a new two-dimensional material that can absorb electromagnetic interference rather than just deflecting back into the fray.

The material, called titanium carbonitride, is part of a family of two-dimensional materials, called MXenes, that were first produced at Drexel in 2011. Researchers have revealed that these materials have a number of exceptional properties, including impressive strength, high electrical conductivity and molecular filtration abilities. Titanium carbonitride’s exceptional trait is that it can block and absorb electromagnetic interference more effectively than any known material, including the metal foils currently used in most electronic devices.

“This discovery breaks all the barriers that existed in the electromagnetic shielding field. It not only reveals a shielding material that works better than copper, but it also shows an exciting, new physics emerging, as we see discrete two-dimensional materials interact with electromagnetic radiation in a different way than bulk metals,” said Yury Gogotsi, Ph.D., Distinguished University and Bach professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, who led the research group that made this MXene discovery, which also included scientists from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and students from Drexel’s co-op partnership with the Institute.

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There’s a factory in Europe that makes antimatter! It’s the rarest, most expensive, and potentially the most dangerous material on earth. Scientists don’t know why this material is so rare. Anti-atoms took 72 years after we discovered antimatter to make. Why?

Continue reading “Why This Stuff Costs $2700 Trillion Per Gram — Antimatter at CERN” »

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have created next-generation solar modules with high efficiency and good stability. Made using perovskites, these solar modules can maintain high performance for over 2000 hours. Their findings, reported 20 July 2020 in Nature Energy, have brightened prospects of commercialization.

Perovskites have the potential to revolutionize the solar technology industry. Flexible and lightweight, they promise more versatility than the heavy and rigid silicon-based cells currently dominating the market. But scientists must overcome some major hurdles before perovskites can be commercialized.

“There are three conditions that perovskites must meet: They must be cheap to produce, highly efficient and have a long lifespan,” said Professor Yabing Qi, head of the OIST Energy Materials and Surface Sciences Unit, who led this study.