Collaborate Disseminate
A serendipitous discovery at Stanford revealed the properties of a material that changes form when exposed to flame. The finding holds promise for a spray coating that could protect homes from fire over four times as long as current solutions.Continue … Continue reading Wildfire survival: Morphing aerogel could be key to saving structures
Many quantum effects can only be produced at extremely cold temperatures, which limits how useful they would be in real-world settings. Now, researchers at Princeton have demonstrated a strange quantum state taking place in a material at room temperatu… Continue reading Strange material demonstrates exotic quantum state at room temperature
Researchers at EPFL have discovered a material that seems to be able to “remember” all of its past encounters with stimuli, such as electrical currents. The compound could come in handy for better data storage and processing.Continue ReadingCategory: M… Continue reading First material found to “remember” its own history
Normally metals and insulators sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of conductivity, but researchers have discovered a material that can switch between those states freely, even at room temperature. The material, a compound of manganese and sulfide (MnS2… Continue reading Weird compound jumps from conductor to insulator and back under pressure
Graphene just keeps getting weirder. Engineers at ETH Zurich have now managed to tweak the overachieving material so that some parts of a flake can be an electrical insulator while other areas act as a superconductor, just nanometers apart. The team de… Continue reading Magic angle makes graphene simultaneously superconducting and insulating
If there are two classes of matter that electronics people can agree on, its conductors and insulators. Electrically, conductors and insulators don’t have much in common. The same has held true in the quantum physics world until some research at …read more
Continue reading Unknown Quantum Effect Makes Insulator Oscillate
By definition metals and insulators are very different – but now Princeton physicists have accidentally discovered an unexpected quantum behavior in an insulator that was thought to be unique to metals. The find suggests a brand new type of quantum par… Continue reading New quantum particle may have been accidentally discovered
Kevlar and Twaron are famously tough materials, but there’s a bit of a trade-off to be made between strength, heat resistance and weight. Now, researchers have created a new nanofiber version of the material that’s just as strong, but much more insulat… Continue reading Nanofiber material tough as Kevlar but 20 times more heat-resistant
They don’t call graphene a “wonder material” for nothing – it’s ultra-thin, ultra-strong, and has some weird electrical properties. MIT researchers previously found a particularly strange pattern emerged in “twisted” graphene structures, and now they’v… Continue reading Twisted graphene gets weirder at a “magic angle”