Spaced-out nanotwins make for stronger metals

06-Nov-2018 - Researchers from Brown University and the Institute of Metals Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found a new way to use nanotwins -- tiny linear boundaries in a metal's atomic lattice that have identical crystalline structures on either side -- to make stronger metals. The ...

The behavior of water

New properties of H2O

15-Aug-2018 - A team of scientists has uncovered new molecular properties of water--a discovery of a phenomenon that had previously gone unnoticed. Liquid water is known to be an excellent transporter of its own autoionization products; that is, the charged species obtained when a water molecule (H2O) is split ...

THz spectroscopy could help Explain water's anomalies

29-Jun-2018 - Liquid water sustains life on earth, but its physical properties remain mysterious among scientific researchers. Recently, a team of Swiss researchers used existing THz spectroscopy techniques to measure liquid water's hydrogen bonding. Future efforts with this technique could one day help ...

New, simplified technique makes light metallic nanofoam

06-Nov-2017 - A simple method for manufacturing extremely low-density palladium nanofoams could help advance hydrogen storage technologies, reports a new study from the University of California, Davis. A nanofoam is what it sounds like -- a foamy version of some material, filled with very small pores. First ...

Studies of 'amorphous ice' reveal hidden order in glass

05-Oct-2017 - The waves at the bottom of old window panes are a reminder that solid glass behaves like a very slow-moving liquid. Now a new study challenges the notion that the atomic structure of glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid ­- at least for a certain kind of glass called "amorphous ice" ...

Aeroices: Newly discovered ultralow-density ice

07-Sep-2017 - Water has many ice phases that form under different pressure and temperature conditions. The effects of positive pressure have been explored extensively, with the results somewhat predictable: As the pressure increases, so does the density of the ice. Much less is known, however, about the ...

Cotton candy made of graphene

Ingredients: Sucrose and lasers

11-Jul-2017 - Nanotechnologists from Rice University and China's Tianjin University have used 3-D laser printing to fabricate centimeter-sized objects of atomically thin graphene. The research could yield industrially useful quantities of bulk graphene and is described in a new study. "This study is a first of ...

Using 3-D laser printing to print graphene foam

22-Jun-2017 - Nanotechnologists from Rice University and China's Tianjin University have used 3-D laser printing to fabricate centimeter-sized objects of atomically thin graphene. The research could yield industrially useful quantities of bulk graphene and is described in a new study. "This study is a first of ...

In Great Shape

22-Feb-2017 - In 2015 UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineer and materials scientist Jonathan Berger developed an idea that could change the way people think about high-performance structural materials. Two years later, his concept is paying research dividends. In a letter published in the journal Nature, ...

Machine learning method accurately predicts metallic defects

Research could accelerate development of new metallic materials for the aerospace industry

07-Feb-2017 - For the first time, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have built and trained machine learning algorithms to predict defect behavior in certain intermetallic compounds with high accuracy. This method will accelerate research of new advanced alloys and ...