By replicating biological machinery with non-biological components, scientists have created artificial cells that convert light into chemical energy.
With its deep expertise in materials research, materials design, and energy storage technologies, Berkeley Lab is working on better battery alternatives. Gerbrand Ceder, a battery researcher in the Materials Science Division, details four battery echnologies being studied by Berkeley Lab scientists that could make a big difference in the future.
Mayo Clinic and W. L. Gore & Associates Inc., a global materials science company, have formed a joint venture to advance the development of implantable cell therapies to treat debilitating conditions with no cure. Avobis Bio will combine Mayo Clinic's clinical and cell expertise and Gore’s expertise in material sciences to address some of the most challenging medical issues.
A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and The Ohio State University has developed a soft polymer material, called magnetic shape memory polymer, that uses magnetic fields to transform into a variety of shapes. The material could enable a range of new applications from antennas that change frequencies on the fly to gripper arms for delicate or heavy objects.
A roar of approval rang out at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory upon the announcement in October that John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino had won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. On December 10th in Stockholm, they received this highly coveted prize for their major contributions to the invention of the lithium-ion battery, which is a long-standing major focus of research at Argonne.
Penn State researchers have developed a novel method that could enable the widespread use of silicon-based anodes, which allow electricity to enter a device, in rechargeable lithium ion batteries.
Microplastics are receiving a lot of attention lately due to its difficulty in removal from the environment.
A research team has reported seeing, for the first time, atomic scale defects that dictate the properties of a new and powerful semiconductor. The study, published earlier this month in the journal Physical Review X, shows a fundamental aspect of how the semiconductor, beta gallium oxide, controls electricity.
A Rutgers-led team of engineers has developed an automated way to produce polymers, making it much easier to create advanced materials aimed at improving human health. The innovation is a critical step in pushing the limits for researchers who want to explore large libraries of polymers, including plastics and fibers, for chemical and biological applications such as drugs and regenerative medicine through tissue engineering.
Thanks to a newly developed laser spectrometer, Empa researchers can for the first time show which processes in grassland lead to nitrous oxide emissions. The aim is to reduce emissions of this potent greenhouse gas by gaining a better understanding of the processes taking place in the soil.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab are the first to use cryo-EM (cryogenic electron microscopy), a Nobel Prize-winning technique originally designed to image proteins in solution, to image atomic changes in a synthetic soft material.
Kristi Kiick, Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Delaware, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the organization announced today.
Experiments at SLAC and Stanford probe the normal state more accurately than ever before and discover an abrupt shift in the behavior of electrons in which they suddenly give up their individuality and behave like an electron soup.
Alessandra Colli wants airplane engines to function flawlessly and rockets to be reliable. She's developing a strategy to leverage Brookhaven Lab’s materials-science capabilities to improve the structure and function of the many metallic components that go into these complex devices.
Slightly bending semiconductors made of organic materials can roughly double the speed of electricity flowing through them and could benefit next-generation electronics such as sensors and solar cells, according to Rutgers-led research. The study is published in the journal Advanced Science.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Maryland, have demonstrated a novel and groundbreaking way to additively print gallium nitride (GaN) — a material that can be used to produce semiconductor power devices as well as radio-frequency components and light-emitting diodes – using a combination of liquid and gas. Their work was detailed in "A pathway to compound semiconductor additive manufacturing," published recently in the journal MRS Communications.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have invented a way to observe the movements of electrons with powerful X-ray laser bursts just 280 attoseconds, or billionths of a billionth of a second, long.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a novel approach aimed at addressing perovskite's durability problem: encasing the perovskite inside a double-layer protection system made from plastic and silica.
A recent study gives researchers an easier way of finding Weyl semimetals and manipulating them for potential spintronic devices.
In two new papers, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have turned to the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to dramatically accelerate battery discovery.
The Materials Research Society (MRS) congratulates MRS Bulletin Editor Gopal R. Rao, recently named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
A team developed a method to apply pulsed-electron beams to image the beam-sensitive material with atomic resolution.
In preparation for another lunar landing, NASA is investing $2 million in cutting-edge thermal technology to be developed by a team of researchers from Texas A&M, Boeing and Paragon.
SLAC theorists have observed strange metallicity in a well-known model for simulating and describing the behavior of materials with strongly correlated electrons, which join forces to produce unexpected phenomena rather than acting independently.
A recent Columbia Engineering study demonstrates a new way to tune the properties of 2D materials simply by adjusting the twist angle between them. The researchers built devices consisting of monolayer graphene encapsulated between two crystals of boron nitride and, by adjusting the relative twist angle between the layers, they were able to create multiple moiré pattern—“the first time anyone has seen the full rotational dependence of coexisting moiré superlattices in one device.”
The award honors Dmitri Zakharov's contributions to environmental transmission electron microscopy at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab have revealed how atomic defects emerge in transition metal dichalcogenides, and how those defects shape the 2D material’s electronic properties. Their findings could provide a versatile yet targeted platform for designing 2D materials for quantum information science.
Two high school students developed software to analyze images of diatoms—algae that produce silicon for constructing cell walls—to determine the differences between wild and genetically modified strains of these organisms. This work was instrumental to a research team interested in optimizing diatoms for biomineralization, the process of making materials from biological systems.
The metallic thin films with 3-D interlocking nanostructures could be used in catalysis, energy storage, and biomedical sensing.
Empa scientist Mark Schubert and his team are using the many opportunities offered by machine learning for wood technology applications. Together with Swiss Wood Solutions, Schubert develops a digital wood-selection- and processing strategy that uses artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence can be used to predict molecular wave functions and the electronic properties of molecules. This innovative AI method developed by a team of researchers at the University of Warwick, the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Luxembourg, could be used to speed-up the design of drug molecules or new materials.
DHS S&T has awarded $197,292.00 to Factom, Inc. based in Austin, Texas, to develop a blockchain security system that agencies can use to create and verify identities and help detect fraud involving imports, such as raw materials.
A team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University made the first experimental observation of a material phase that had been predicted but never seen.
In the Wong Laboratory for Nature Inspired Engineering, housed within the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Materials Research Institute, researchers have developed a method that dramatically reduces the amount of water needed to flush a conventional toilet, which usually requires 6 liters.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science announced allocations of supercomputer access to 47 science projects for 2020—awarding 60 percent of the available time on some of the nation’s most powerful supercomputers, with the ultimate goal of accelerating discovery and innovation. In 2020, 14 projects will run on Theta and 39 projects on Summit, where six of these projects will receive an allocation on both systems.
Argonne scientists have discovered an intriguing new behavior in a two-dimensional material at the atomic level as it is stretched and strained, like it would be in an actual flexible device.
The world of aerospace increasingly relies on carbon fiber reinforced polymer composites to build the structures of satellites, rockets and jet aircraft. But the life of those materials is limited by how they handle heat. A team of FAMU-FSU College of Engineering researchers from Florida State University’s High-Performance Materials Institute is developing a design for a heat shield that better protects those extremely fast machines.
In a new paper published as an “Editors’ Suggestion” in Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has demonstrated that lead – a metal so soft that it is difficult to machine at ambient conditions – responds similarly to other much stronger metals when rapidly compressed at high pressure.
DHS S&T has awarded $198,642 to Transmute Industries, Inc. based in Austin, TX to develop a proof-of-concept application for CBP to support increased transparency, automation and security in processing the importation of raw materials such as steel, timber and diamonds raw goods entering the United States.
A team of researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley has successfully demonstrated how machine-learning tools can improve the stability of light beams’ size for science experiments at a synchrotron light source via adjustments that largely cancel out unwanted fluctuations.
By blasting a frustrated mixture of materials with quick pulses of laser light, researchers transformed a superlattice into a supercrystal, a rare, repeating, three-dimensional structural much larger than an ordinary crystal. Using machine learning techniques, they studied the underlying structure of this sample at the nanoscale level before and after applying the laser pulse treatment.
Researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark, are pioneering a novel technique to solve highly elaborate magnetic structures using neutrons at the Spallation Neutron Source. Their aim is to develop the technique to establish a baseline approach that can be adapted to a broad class of magnetic materials with different structures.
Nature has published a new review co-authored by Argonne analyst Linda Gaines. The review evaluates the state of EV battery recycling today and what’s needed to build a more sustainable future.
Designing the components so a cyanide detector can be mass produced requires expertise in injection molding—and going with a local company has major advantages for researchers.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab have designed an affordable ‘flow battery’ membrane that could accelerate renewable energy for the electrical grid.
A new study helps to solve the mystery of missing plastic fragments at sea. Scientists selected microplastics prevalently found on the ocean surface and irradiated them with a solar simulator system. They found that simulated sunlight increased the amount of dissolved carbon in the water, making those tiny plastic particles tinier. Direct, experimental proof of the photochemical degradation of marine plastics remains rare. This work provides novel insight into the removal mechanisms and potential lifetimes of a select few microplastics.
Scientists designed and connected two different artificial cells to each other to produce molecules called ATP (adenosine triphosphate).
Feng Wang is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California – Berkeley and a faculty scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The future of materials science covers a smorgasbord of applications: batteries that self-repair, wind turbines robust enough to withstand the extreme forces put on them, or long-lasting devices that only require replacing small parts every so often. Before getting to these applications, these basic science questions need to be answered. These questions are one reason the Department of Energy (DOE) supports research in this area at universities and national laboratories around the country.
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