Metals Tech

Scientists at UC San Diego and Brookhaven Laboratory in New York went searching for superconducting materials where researchers have had little luck before. Setting their sights on a diverse population of meteorites, they investigated the 15 pieces of comets and asteroids to find “Mundrabilla” and “GRA 95205″—two meteorites with superconductive grains. While meteorites—due to their […]

Space cooling and heating is a common need in most inhabited areas. In Europe, the energy consumed for air conditioning is rising, and the situation could get worse in the near future due to the temperature increase in different regions worldwide. The increasing cooling need in buildings, especially during the summer season, is satisfied by […]

A quantum internet could be used to send unhackable messages, improve the accuracy of GPS, and enable cloud-based quantum computing. For more than twenty years, dreams of creating such a quantum network have remained out of reach in large part because of the difficulty to send quantum signals across large distances without loss. Now, Harvard […]

Chiral superconductors are unconventional superconducting materials with distinctive topological properties, in which time-reversal symmetry is broken. Two of the first materials to be identified as chiral superconductors are UPt3 and Sr2RuO4. So far, experimental evidence for broken time-reversal symmetry in both these materials was based primarily on surface measurements collected at a magnetic field equal […]

Scientists have made a breakthrough in the development of a new generation of electronics that will require less power and generate less heat. It involves exploiting the complex quantum properties of electrons—in this case, the spin state of electrons. In a world first, the researchers—led by a team of physicists from the University of Leeds—have […]

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are emerging multi-functional materials that are gradually finding their way out of the research labs and into a myriad of real-world applications. For example, MOFs can store dangerous gasses, catalyze chemical reactions, deliver drugs in controlled fashion, and may even be used in rechargeable batteries and solar cells. A team of researchers […]

Ambitious targets have been set by the UK and Scottish governments to become net-zero carbon economies by 2050 and 2045 respectively. But a variety of initiatives will be required on the part of government, industry and society to achieve this target. Every industry will be required to have carbon reduction at the centre of what it does and rapidly […]

Polymers that are good conductors of electricity could be useful in biomedical devices, to help with sensing or electrostimulation, for example. But there has been a sticking point preventing their widespread use: their inability to adhere to a surface such as a sensor or microchip, and stay put despite moisture from the body. Now, researchers […]

The presence of toxic metals in water stemming from industrial sources makes treatment a tall order, with these polluted liquids capable of contaminating groundwater supplies for years or even decades thereafter. Scientists at Japan’s Nagoya University have come up with a new technology that may help stem the tide, using electrically charged nanocarbons to more […]

Similarly to how a picked lock gives away that someone has broken into a building, the stiffening of a structure surrounding cells in the human body can indicate that cancer is invading other tissue. Monitoring changes to this structure, called the extracellular matrix, would give researchers another way to study the progression of disease. But […]