Feature Channels: Materials Science

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New porous catalyst with ultra-small fins facilitates molecular transport

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Owners of electric multicookers may be able to add another use to its list of functions, a new study suggests: sanitization of N95 respirator masks.

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UC San Diego researchers formulated polyurethane foams, made from algae oil, to meet commercial specifications for midsole shoes and the foot-bed of flip-flops. Their latest result, in a series of recent research publications, offers a complete solution to the plastics problem—at least for polyurethanes.

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Groundbreaking approach in high-resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy has been judged to be one of the 10 best microscopy innovations in the 2020 Microscopy Today Innovation Award competition.

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Argonne scientists use temperature data to tune — and fix — defects in 3D-printed metallic parts.

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A media comprised of a sandwich of materials, tested by Sandia National Laboratories, is being manufactured into N95-like respirators that could be used in local medical facilities. The project originated from the urgent need for personal protective equipment when the COVID-19 outbreak began.

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If builders could incorporate solar harvesting into the siding of a building, the amount of energy from the grid that a structure would need may significantly decrease. In research published recently in Renewable Energy, a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, led by Diana-Andra Borca-Tasciuc, a professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering, demonstrated the potential of wedge-shaped luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs). These efficient modular solar units could easily be hung on the side of a building.

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A team of 25 students who formed Warwick Moto are designing, building and developing an electric superbike which was due to race this summer

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Deep beneath the surface of the Salton Sea, a shallow lake in California’s Imperial County, sits an immense reserve of critical metals that, if unlocked, could power the state’s green economy for years to come. These naturally occurring metals are dissolved in geothermal brine, a byproduct of geothermal energy production. Now the race is on to develop technology to efficiently extract one of the most valuable metals from the brine produced by the geothermal plants near the Salton Sea: lithium.

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A notable characteristic of several neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, is the formation of harmful plaques that contain aggregates--also known as fibrils--of amyloid proteins.

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Real-time measurements captured by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory provide missing insight into chemical separations to recover cobalt, a critical raw material used to make batteries and magnets for modern technologies.

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Scientists have developed a machine learning technique for materials research at the atomic and molecular scales. The technique visualizes and quantifies the atomic and molecular structures in three-dimensional samples in real time. It is designed primarily to identify and characterize microstructures in 3D samples.

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ORNL Story Tips: Pandemic impact, root studies, neutrons confirm, lab on a crystal and modeling fusion

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Researchers from Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source and Center for Nanoscale Materials are utilizing nano- and micro-scale imaging to better understand the chemical processes behind the formation of cement.

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In a paper published this week in the journal Physical Review A, the researchers lay out a theoretical scenario in which two players, playing cooperatively against the dealer, can better coordinate their strategies using a quantumly entangled pair of systems.

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Cornell University engineers have found that photovoltaic wafers in solar panels with all-perovskite structures outperform photovoltaic cells made from state-of-the-art crystalline silicon, as well as perovskite-silicon tandem cells, which are stacked pancake-style cells that absorb light better.

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The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has licensed two additive manufacturing-related technologies that aim to streamline and ramp up production processes to Knoxville-based Magnum Venus Products, Inc., a global manufacturer of fluid movement and product solutions for industrial applications in composites and adhesives.

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More studies at the interface of battery materials, along with increased knowledge of the processes at work, are unleashing a surge of knowledge needed to more quickly address the demand for longer-lasting portable electronics, electric vehicles and stationary energy storage for the electric grid.

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A material composed of two one-atom-thick layers of carbon has grabbed the attention of physicists worldwide for its intriguing — and potentially exploitable — conductive properties.

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The Department of Energy has awarded $60 million to a new solar fuels initiative – called the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA) – led by Caltech in close partnership with Berkeley Lab. LiSA will build on the foundational work of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP).

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University of Minnesota researchers have electrically transformed the abundant and low-cost non-magnetic material iron sulfide, also known as “fool’s gold,” into a magnetic material that could be the first step in creating valuable new materials for more energy-efficient computer memory devices.

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A multi-institution team has used positron beams to probe the nature of radiation effects, providing new insight into how damage is produced in iron films.

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Researchers collaborated to create a software program to accelerate discovery and design of new materials for applications allowing for a far more comprehensive understanding of materials from atomistic to mesoscopic scale than ever before.

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Fermilab scientist Robert Ainsworth has won a $2.5 million Department of Energy Early Career Research Award to study different ways of ensuring stability in high-intensity proton beams. By studying how certain types of beam instabilities emerge and evolve under different conditions, his team can help sharpen scientists' methods for correcting them or avoiding them to begin with.

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The American Institute of Physics is accepting nominations for the 2020 John Torrence Tate Medal for International Leadership in Physics. The deadline to apply is Oct. 1, 2020. The Tate medal was established in 1959 and is awarded every two years to non-U.S. citizens for their leadership, research contributions and service to the international physics community. The award consists of a certificate of recognition, a bronze medal and a $10,000 prize.

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The goal of room temperature superconductivity took a small step forward with a recent discovery by a team of Penn State physicists and materials scientists.

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An ORNL team developed CrossVis, an open-source, customizable visual analytics system that analyzes numerical, categorical and image-based data while providing multiple dynamic, coordinated views of these and other data types.

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Scientists at Argonne and the University of Chicago have developed a method paving the way to using quantum computers to simulate realistic molecules and complex materials. They tested the method on a quantum simulator and IBM quantum computer.

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When the Shewanella oneidensis bacterium “breathes” in certain metal and sulfur compounds anaerobically, the way an aerobic organism would process oxygen, it produces materials that could be used to enhance electronics, electrochemical energy storage, and drug-delivery devices. The ability of this bacterium to produce molybdenum disulfide — a material that is able to transfer electrons easily, like graphene — is the focus of research published in Biointerphases by a team of engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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Many compact systems using mid-infrared technology continue to face compatibility issues when integrating with conventional electronics. Black phosphorus has garnered attention for overcoming these challenges thanks to a wide variety of uses in photonic circuits. Research published in Applied Physics Reviews highlights the material’s potential for emerging devices ranging from medical imaging to environment monitoring, assessing progress in different components of the chips, from light detection to laser emission.

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New research by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Northwestern Engineering expands the understanding of origami structures, opening possibilities for mechanical metamaterials to be used in soft robotics and medical devices.

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Selective laser sintering is one of the most widely used processes in additive manufacturing, but it is limited to printing with a single material at a time. Columbia engineers have used their expertise in robotics to develop a new approach to overcome this limitation: By inverting the laser so that it points upwards, they’ve invented a way to enable SLS to use—at the same time—multiple materials.

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In a new study, a team led by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory has made discoveries concerning a potential new, higher-capacity anode material, which would allow lithium-ion batteries to have a higher overall energy capacity.

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Tingyi Gu, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware, has been selected for the Army Research Office Young Investigator Program. This prestigious award goes to early-career researchers pursuing fundamental research in areas relevant to the Army. Gu is studying materials that exploit the interface between light and electronics for potential use in lasers, displays, memory and more.

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Concrete sewer pipes around the world are most likely to fail either because their concrete is not strong enough or because they can’t handle the weight of trucks that drive over them, a new study indicates.

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Researchers from MIPT and their colleagues from Ural Federal University have combined optical and acoustic approaches and found that incorporating titanium atoms into barium hexaferrite leads to an unexpected substructure forming in the crystal lattice. The resulting material is promising for ultrafast computer memory applications. The findings were published in Scientific Reports.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) named three National Laboratory scientists as DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientists Fellows

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Partners celebrate the site dedication of the Integrated Engineering Research Center and the groundbreaking for the PIP-II cryoplant building.

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In a ceremony at Argonne, leaders from the Department of Energy joined the lab in breaking ground on two new beamlines that will enable new innovations in many different scientific fields.

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Pioneering materials scientist James De Yoreo receives Distinguished Scientist Fellow award. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science bestows one of its highest honors on PNNL materials scientist.

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As the Covid-19 shutdowns and stay-at-home orders brought much of the world's travel and commerce to a standstill, people around the world started noticing clearer skies as a result of lower levels of air pollution.

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Brazilian researchers demonstrated a new chemical approach for producing biodiesel from domestic cooking oil waste by using hydroxide lithium mixed with either sodium hydroxides or potassium hydroxides as catalysts. Their work, published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, could enable future studies related to the use of lithium from waste lithium ion batteries. The work marks one of the first times lithium has been used for such purposes.

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Lithium-ion batteries contain salts rich in fluorine, which decompose in humid air to toxic, highly corrosive hydrogen fluoride. The hazardous nature of this substance makes recycling more difficult and more expensive. A research project entitled "Fluoribat" is now being launched at Empa to solve this problem. This could help to make the life cycle of a rechargeable battery less expensive and at the same time safer.

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A new finding about the fundamental chemistry of two-dimensional materials called MXenes will change the way researchers work with them, and open up new areas of applications, according to researchers at Missouri S&T.MXenes are ceramics that make up one of the largest families of 2-D conductive materials. Their conductivity makes them candidates for use in energy storage, sensing and optoelectronics.

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The LCLS-II upgrade project will increase the X-ray laser's power by thousands of times, producing a million pulses per second compared to 120 per second today. Now, the first phase of the upgrade has come into operation, producing an X-ray beam for the first time using newly installed undulators. The full upgrade is due to be completed within the next two years.

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Researchers at Berkeley Lab, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, have developed a new battery material that could enable long-range electric vehicles that can drive for hundreds of miles on a single charge, and electric planes called eVTOLs for fast, environmentally friendly commutes.

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A new device that relies on flowing clouds of ultracold atoms promises potential tests of the intersection between the weirdness of the quantum world and the familiarity of the macroscopic world we experience every day.

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Copper that was once bound with oxygen is better at converting carbon dioxide into renewable fuels than copper that was never bound to oxygen, according to scientists at Berkeley Lab and Caltech.

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Scientists built a machine learning model that can rapidly predict how atoms absorb x-rays for materials science research.

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What if your clothing expressed your personality or culture – and could communicate with your cellphone or smart home?