Science Alert October 20, 2022 By bringing pure water into contact with an alloy of sodium and potassium researchers in Czech Republic converted pure water metallic. They extruded a small blob of sodium-potassium alloy, which is liquid at room temperature, from a nozzle and added a thin film of pure water using vapor deposition. Upon contact, the electrons and metal cations flowed into the water from the alloy. Not only did this give the water a golden shine, but it also turned the water conductive. They confirmed this using optical reflection spectroscopy and synchrotron X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Their study not […]
‘Smart plastic’ material is step forward toward soft, flexible robotics and electronics
Science Daily October 13, 2022 An organized combination of stiff and elastic domains within a single material can synergistically tailor bulk mechanical properties. Researchers at UT Austin have developed a rapid, facile, and environmentally benign method to pattern strong and stiff semicrystalline phases within soft and elastic matrices using stereo-controlled ring-opening metathesis polymerization of an industrial monomer, cis-cyclooctene. Dual polymerization catalysis dictates polyolefin backbone chemistry, which enabled patterning of compositionally uniform materials with seamless stiff and elastic interfaces. Visible light–induced activation of a metathesis catalyst resulted in the formation of semicrystalline trans polyoctenamer rubber, outcompeting the formation of cis polyoctenamer […]
Stability in asymmetry: Scientists extend qubit lifetimes
Science Daily October 13, 2022 An international team of researcher (US – University of Chicago, MIT, Northwestern University, Argonne National Laboratory, UK) demonstrated how the spin coherence in optically addressable molecular qubits can be controlled through engineering their host environment. By inserting chromium (IV)-based molecular qubits into a nonisostructural host matrix, they generated noise-insensitive clock transitions, through a transverse zero-field splitting, that are not present when using an isostructural host. This led to spin-coherence times of more than 10μs for optically addressable molecular spin qubits in a nuclear and electron-spin-rich environment. they modeled the dependence of spin coherence on transverse […]
Thinnest ferroelectric material ever paves the way for new energy-efficient devices
Phys.org October 19, 2022 In many materials the ferroelectric behavior is suppressed at the few-nanometer scale. A team of researchers in the US (UC Berkeley, State University of Pennsylvania, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) found that ferroelectricity emerges in zirconium dioxide when it is grown extremely thin, approximately 1-2 nanometers in thickness. Notably, the ferroelectric behavior continues to its near-atomic-scale thickness limit of roughly half a nanometer. This approach to exploit three-dimensional centrosymmetric materials deposited down to the two-dimensional thickness limit, particularly within this model fluorite-structure system that possesses unconventional ferroelectric size effects, offers substantial promise for electronics, […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of October 14, 2022
01. Physicists probe ‘astonishing’ morphing properties of honeycomb-like material 02. Advanced fabric that can cool a wearer down and warm them up 03. Battery tech breakthrough paves way for mass adoption of affordable electric car 04. The battery that runs 630 km on a single charge 05. Getting it to stick: Designing optimal core-shell MOFs for direct air capture 06. Materials science engineers work on new material for computer chips 07. A new method to enable efficient interactions between photons 08. A new process to build 2D materials made possible by quantum calculations 09. New technique to trap soundwaves and […]
Advanced fabric that can cool a wearer down and warm them up
Nanowerk October 11, 2022 Textiles incorporated with phase changing materials (PCMs) can bridge the supply and demand for energy by absorbing and releasing latent heat. The integration of solar heating and the Joule heating function supplies multidriving resources, facilitates energy charging and storage, and expands the service time and application scenarios. Researchers in Japan have developed a fibrous membrane-based textile by designing the hierarchical core–sheath fiber structure for trimode thermal management. Coaxial electrospinning allows an effective encapsulation of PCMs, with high heat enthalpy density enabling the membrane to buffer drastic temperature changes in the clothing microclimate. The favorable photothermal conversion […]
Battery tech breakthrough paves way for mass adoption of affordable electric car
Science Daily October 12, 2022 Using massive batteries to alleviate range anxiety is ineffective for mainstream EV adoption due to the limited raw resource supply and high cost. Fast charging enables downsizing of EV batteries for both affordability and sustainability, without causing range anxiety. However, fast charging of energy-dense batteries remains a challenge. A team of researchers in the US (Pennsylvania State College, State College (PA)) combined materials based on asymmetric temperature modulation with a thermally stable dual-salt electrolyte to achieve charging of a 265 Wh kg−1 battery to 75% (or 70%) state of charge in 12 (or 11) minutes for more […]
The battery that runs 630 km on a single charge
Science Daily October 6, 2022 Anode-free Li metal batteries can increase energy density beyond that of standard lithium-ion batteries. The absence of Li reservoir generates unwarranted volume expansion, permitting electrolyte depletion and rapid cathode capacity consumption. To address this issue researchers in South Korea developed an anode-free Li metal battery with an ion-conductive layer coated with Cu current collector Ag/L in typical carbonate-based electrolytes. The ion-conducting layer causes stable solid electrolyte interphase development and allows for minimal volume expansion when utilizing stable Li hosts. Via density functional theory calculation and experimental measurements and analysis, they demonstrated the beneficial effect of […]
California Quakes Mysteriously Preceded by Shifts in Earth’s Magnetic Field
Science Alert October 10, 2022 Magnetic field changes as earthquake precursors have been the subject of numerous studies and some controversy. Infrequent large earthquakes and sparse magnetometer coverage along fault zones complicate statistical analysis. A team of researchers in the US (Google Research, industry) analyzed ground-based magnetic time-series measurements before 19 earthquakes in California drawing from over 330,000 site-days of measurement spanning a decade. They applied a pre-specified statistical analysis with two key ideas – combining signals from nearby sites via spectral cross-power, and then looking for large spikes in frequency domain 0.016–25 Hz. They used the machine learning concept […]
Getting it to stick: Designing optimal core-shell MOFs for direct air capture
Phys.org October 11, 2022 MOFs utilize porous membranes to capture large volumes of gasses and can be designed via computational modeling rather than traditional trial-and-error. However, adsorbents designed to strongly bind CO2 nearly always bind H2O strongly. A team of researchers in the US (University of Pittsburgh, DOE) has a direct air capture (DAC) strategy to remove carbon dioxide from the air using core–shell MOF design, where a high-CO2-capacity MOF “core” is protected from competitive H2O-binding via a MOF “shell” that has very slow water diffusion. They considered a high-frequency adsorption/desorption cycle that regenerates the adsorbents before water can pass […]