Materials Science

A Tulane University study finds gold surface atoms spontaneously reorganize into a denser pattern that blocks oxygen reactions by a billion to a trillion times.

UT Austin researchers built a 3D-printable material from billions of jammed water droplets that filters ions like human tissue, with uses from soft robotics to lithium recovery.

Researchers embedded engineered Bacillus subtilis spores in polycaprolactone plastic that, once activated, breaks the material down to its building blocks in six days without forming microplastics.

ORNL, Ohio State, and Amphenol researchers show an electric field can boost heat conduction in a relaxor ferroelectric ceramic by close to 300 percent, far beyond prior 5-10 percent gains.

A machine-learning screening pipeline predicted two new superconductors, YRu3B2 and LuRu3B2, which Rice University then synthesized and confirmed.

Jyväskylä and Aalto researchers grew strained bilayer tin telluride on niobium diselenide, producing protected conducting edge states in a band gap over 0.2 eV.

Researchers self-assembled custom 14-sided silver nanoparticles into superlattices that freeze a transitional phase between FCC and BCC metal structures, and report deep-strong light-matter coupling at room temperature.

University of Hong Kong team shows ultrathin polycrystalline diamond membranes generate voltage when bent, overturning the century-old classification of diamond as non-piezoelectric.

Teams at Imperial College London, University of Michigan, and Tufts University transformed natural silk threads into plastic-like materials that outperform metal alloys, resist punctures like carbon-fiber composites, and polarize terahertz light for potential 6G telecommunications use.

Using atomic-resolution spectroscopy on Ni3In, researchers from Rice and Weizmann experimentally confirmed compact molecular orbitals as the drivers of flat-band quantum criticality.

WashU engineers used synthetic biology to create SAM — a protein fiber combining mussel, spider silk, and amyloid sequences — that dissolves in formic acid within seconds and can be remade into equally strong fibers across multiple recycling cycles.

Using multi-slice electron ptychography on a PMN-PT alloy, MIT-led researchers directly imaged a hierarchy of polar and chemical structures, finding that polarization regions are much smaller than leading simulations predicted.