Feature Channels: Materials Science

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Graphene, a strong, lightweight carbon honeycombed structure, only one atom thick, holds great promise for energy research and development. Recently scientists with the Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures, and Transport Energy Frontier Research Center, led by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, revealed graphene can serve as a proton-selective permeable membrane, providing a new basis for streamlined and more efficient energy technologies such as improved fuel cells.

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An atomically thin membrane with microscopically small holes may prove to be the basis for future hydrogen fuel cell, water filtering and desalination membranes, according to a group of 15 theorists and experimentalists, including three theoretical researchers from Penn State.

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Drexel University researchers, along with colleagues at Aix-Marseille University in France, have discovered a high performance cathode material with great promise for use in next generation lithium-sulfur batteries that could one day be used to power mobile devices and electric cars.

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Taking their inspiration from the way nature designed fish scales, a multinational research team has developed a new, flexible material with superior anti-penetration properties. It could one day be used to make bulletproof clothing, space suits and more.

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Problems producing biofuels, the role of gas hydrates in energy production and how to supply clean, safe water are the topics of three plenary talks at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, taking place March 22-26 in Denver.

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Researchers from Cornell University have synthesized a new thin-film catalyst for use in fuel cells. In a paper published March 10 in the journal APL Materials, from AIP Publishing, the team reports the first-ever epitaxial thin-film growth of Bi2Pt2O7 pyrochlore, which could act as a more effective cathode -- a fundamental electrode component of fuel cells from which positive current flows through an external circuit delivering electric power.

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Construction crews may someday use a plant molecule called lignin in their asphalt and sealant mixtures to help roads and roofs hold up better under various weather conditions and make them more environmentally friendly. The research will be presented today at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Scientists have developed a new, simple way to cook rice that could cut the number of calories absorbed by the body by more than half, potentially reducing obesity rates, which is especially important in countries where the food is a staple.

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Chlorine, a disinfectant used in most wastewater treatment plants, may be failing to eliminate pharmaceuticals from wastes. As a result, trace levels get discharged from the treatment plants into waterways. Now, scientists are reporting that chlorine treatment may encourage the formation of new, unknown antibiotics that could enter the environment, potentially contributing to the problem of antibiotic resistance. They will present the research at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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One person’s trash literally could become another’s high-tech treasure, according to researchers who have developed a way to turn discarded packing peanuts into components for rechargeable batteries that could outperform the ones we use currently. They will report on the process for the first time today at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Chocolate has many health benefits — it can potentially lower blood pressure and cholesterol and reduce stroke risk. But just as connoisseurs thought it couldn’t get any better, there’s this tasty new tidbit: Researchers have found a way to make the treat even more nutritious –– and sweeter. They will describe their research here today at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Press Conference Schedule

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Taking vitamin D supplements could slow or even reverse the progression of less aggressive, or low-grade, prostate tumors without the need for surgery or radiation, a scientist will report today at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Since HIV emerged in the ‘80s, drug “cocktails” transformed the deadly disease into a manageable one. But the virus is adept at developing resistance to drugs, and treatment regimens require tweaking that can be costly. Now scientists at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society are announcing new progress toward affordable drugs that could potentially thwart the virus’s ability to resist them.

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A new weapon in the war against type 2 diabetes is coming in an unexpected form: fat. Researchers have discovered a new class of potentially therapeutic lipids, called FAHFAs, that are at low levels in people with insulin resistance, a risk factor for diabetes. FAHFAs improved glucose metabolism and insulin secretion in diabetic mice. The team will describe their approach at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Saccharin, the artificial sweetener that is the main ingredient in Sweet ‘N Low®, Sweet Twin® and Necta®, could do far more than just keep our waistlines trim. According to new research, this popular sugar substitute could potentially lead to the development of drugs capable of combating aggressive, difficult-to-treat cancers with fewer side effects.

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Laura Kiessling, Ph.D., will present new findings that could exploit differences between human and microbial carbohydrates to fight infections during today’s “The Fred Kavli Innovations in Chemistry Lecture” at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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A plastic used in filters and tubing has an unusual trait: It can produce electricity when pulled or pressed. This ability has been used in small ways, but now researchers are coaxing fibers of it to make even more electricity for a wider range of applications from green energy to “artificial muscles.” They will report progress on a novel form of this plastic at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Poop could be a goldmine — literally. Surprisingly, treated solid waste contains gold, silver and other metals, as well as rare elements such as palladium and vanadium that are used in electronics and alloys. Researchers will describe their efforts to identify and recover the metals at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Microbes may just be the next diet craze. Researchers have programmed bacteria to generate a molecule that, through normal metabolism, becomes a hunger-suppressing lipid. Mice that drank water laced with the programmed bacteria ate less, had lower body fat and staved off diabetes — even when fed a high-fat diet — offering a potential weight-loss strategy for humans. The team will describe their approach at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Water-borne algal blooms from farm fertilizer runoff can destroy aquatic life and clog rivers and lakes, but scientists will report today that they are working on a way to clean up these environmental scourges and turn them into useful products. The algae could serve as a feedstock for biofuels, and the feedstock leftovers could be recycled back into farm soil nutrients.

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Squid are the ultimate camouflage artists, blending almost flawlessly with their backgrounds so that unsuspecting prey can’t detect them. Using a protein that’s key to this process, scientists have designed “invisibility stickers” that could one day help soldiers disguise themselves, even when sought by enemies with tough-to-fool infrared cameras.

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Increasing natural gas production could provide a bridge to a lower carbon future. However, methane that is leaked into the atmosphere from this process could speed global warming and climate change. And there is controversy over just how much methane is lost. Researchers today will present new methods to determine methane’s leakage rate and problems inherent in discovering and assessing leakage at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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The sweet taste and smell of antifreeze tempts children and animals to drink the poisonous substance, resulting in thousands of accidental poisonings in the United States every year. But today researchers will describe a new, nontoxic product based on a common food additive that could address this health issue and help the environment at the same time.

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More than a year into Colorado’s experiment legalizing marijuana, labs testing the plants are able for the first time to take stock of the drug’s potency and contaminants – and openly paint a picture of what’s in today’s weed. At the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, one such lab will present trends — and some surprises — that its preliminary testing has revealed about the marijuana now on the market.

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Scientists will report in a presentation today that they have turned to the opossum to develop a promising new and inexpensive antidote for poisonous snake bites. They predict it could save thousands of lives worldwide without the side effects of current treatments. The presentation will take place here at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

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While the pattern for making a wearable fabric battery has already been laid out, it’s now time to select the threads that will turn a textile into an energy storage device. That process is being driven by Drexel University doctoral student Kristy Jost, who’s threaded her way into the forefront of research on conductive yarns.

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The burgeoning field of nanotechnology, nanoscience at prestigious U.S. national laboratories and the worldwide promotion of chemistry are the topics of three special Presidential Symposia planned for the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Scientists at the Critical Materials Institute have developed a two-step recovery process that makes recycling rare-earth metals easier and more cost-effective.

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Just weeks after the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, achieved first light, a team of scientists at the X-Ray Powder Diffraction (XPD) beamline tested a setup that yielded data on thermoelectric materials. The work was part of the commissioning activities for the XPD beamline, a process that fine-tunes the settings of beamline equipment to ready the facility for first scientific commissioning experiments in mid-March on its way to full user operations later in the year.

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Phosphorus, a highly reactive element commonly found in match heads, tracer bullets, and fertilizers, can be turned into a stable crystalline form known as black phosphorus. In a new study, researchers from the University of Minnesota used an ultrathin black phosphorus film—only 20 layers of atoms—to demonstrate high-speed data communication on nanoscale optical circuits.

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A material might melt or snap in half. And for engineers, knowing when and why that might happen is crucial information. Now, a Florida State University researcher has laid out an overarching theory that explains why certain materials act the way they do.

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Superconductor materials are prized for their ability to carry an electric current without resistance, a valuable trait crippled or lost when electrons swirl into tiny tornado-like formations called vortices. To keep supercurrents flowing at top speed, scientists have figured out how to constrain troublesome vortices by trapping them within extremely short, ultra-thin nanowires.

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By loading magnetic nanoparticles with drugs and dressing them in biochemical camouflage, Houston Methodist researchers say they can destroy blood clots 100 to 1,000 times faster than a commonly used clot-busting technique.

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Two new three-year research projects are supporting the role of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) as a leading center for studying exotic new materials that could enable future innovative electronic and photonic applications. SIMES is a joint institute of Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

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Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have revealed previously unobserved behaviors in nanrods that suggest new rules for the behavior of nanorod ensembles and new insights into how to increase heat-transfer efficiency in a nanoscale system.

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Graphene – a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon with highly desirable electrical properties, flexibility and strength – shows great promise for future electronics, advanced solar cells, protective coatings and other uses, and combining it with other materials could extend its range even further.

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Although most materials slightly expand when heated, there is a new class of rubber-like material that not only self-stretches upon cooling; it reverts back to its original shape when heated, all without physical manipulation.

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Incredibly tough, slightly stretchy spider silk is a lightweight, biodegradable wonder material with numerous potential biomedical applications. But although humans have been colonizing relatively placid silkworms for thousands of years, harvesting silk from territorial and sometimes cannibalistic spiders has proven impractical. Instead, labs hoping to harness spider silk's mechanical properties are using its molecular structure as a template for their own biomimetic silks.

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Researchers have created a broad color palette of electrochromic polymers, materials that can be used for sunglasses, window tinting and other applications that rely on electrical current to produce color changes. The materials could allow sunglasses that change from clear to colored in seconds, at the push of a button.

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By combining micro-imprinting and electro-spinning techniques, researchers at Shanghai University’s Rapid Manufacturing Engineering Center have developed a vascular graft composed of three layers for the first time. This tri-layered composite has allowed researchers to utilize separate materials that respectively possess mechanical strength and promote new cell growth - a significant problem for existing vascular grafts that have only consisted of a single or double layer.

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A team of NYU physicists has developed a method to monitor the properties of microscopic particles as they grow within a chemical reaction vessel, creating new opportunities to improve the quality and consistency of a wide range of industrial and consumer products.

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Engineers have shone new light on an emerging family of solar-absorbing materials that could clear the way for cheaper and more efficient solar panels and LEDs. The materials, called perovskites, are particularly good at absorbing visible light, but had never been thoroughly studied in their purest form: as perfect single crystals. Using a new technique, researchers grew large, pure perovskite crystals and studied how electrons move through the material as light is converted to electricity.

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Virginia Tech’s Pablo Tarazaga, an expert in the field of smart materials, has received a prestigious 2015 Air Force Young Investigator Award, valued at $449,600 over a three-year period. Tarazaga, a mechanical engineer, is one of only 57 scientists and engineers in the U.S. to receive this honor.

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Experiments conducted by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have uncovered a way of controlling friction on ionic surfaces at the nanoscale using electrical stimulation and ambient water vapor.

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Nature packs away carbon in chalk, shells and rocks made by marine organisms that crystallize calcium carbonate. Now, research suggests that the soft, organic scaffolds in which such crystals form guide crystallization by soaking up the calcium like an “ion sponge,” according to new work in Nature Materials. Understanding the process better may help researchers develop advanced materials for energy and environmental uses, such as for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory show that etching a nanoscale texture onto silicon creates an antireflective surface that works as well as state-of-the-art thin-film multilayer antireflective coatings for solar cells.

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By zapping ordinary metals with femtosecond laser pulses researchers from the University of Rochester in New York have created extraordinary new surfaces that efficiently absorb light, repel water and clean themselves. The multifunctional materials could find use in durable, low maintenance solar collectors and sensors.

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Scientists at the University of Rochester have used lasers to transform metals into extremely water repellent, or super-hydrophobic, materials without the need for temporary coatings.

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An international team of researchers says climate change, the loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, and altered biogeochemical cycles like phosphorus and nitrogen runoff have all passed beyond levels that put humanity in a “safe operating space.” Civilization has crossed four of nine so-called planetary boundaries as the result of human activity, according to a report published today in Science by the 18-member research team.