Materials & Innovations

Monday materials fun: The disappearing glass

By / October 9, 2010

Any theories? (The creators, citoplasmas, do a lot of work in stop-action animation.)

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Materials stories that also may be of interest

By / October 8, 2010

At the end of each week, I end up with a list of a bunch of stories I started to write about, or started to investigate or didn’t even get…

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Tesla unveils new battery pack

By / October 7, 2010

The battery pack that will make Tesla’s upcoming Model S luxury sedan run.(Credit: San Jose Mercury News. Courtesy of Tesla.) Tesla Motors is most known for its all-electric sports car,…

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Video of the week – Aerogels: The materials science of empty space

By / October 6, 2010

This is a great introductory 54-minute video of a lecture presented earlier this year by Alex Gash and Dean Reese as part of Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s excellent Science on Saturday…

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5 new research sites to be built with $50M in NIST grants

By / October 5, 2010

Architect’s drawing of the planned Western Institute of Nanotechnology on Green Engineering anMetrology at UCLA. Credit: Stenfors Associates Architects. NIST waded through over 100 proposals over the past few months…

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Graphene clocks spin rate at 60M rpm

By / October 4, 2010

New Scientist reported that scientists at the University of Maryland at College Park have managed to clock a floating piece of graphene at an astounding rate of 60 million rpm,…

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Serendipity: Nano LEDs accidentally produced during NIST nanowire research

By / September 30, 2010

Graphic illustrates a single row of nanowires (cylinders with red tops) with fin-shapednanowalls extending outward. Credit: NIST. Speaking of ZnO nanowires, chemists at NIST who were perfecting new methods of…

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Inexpensive radial ZnO nanowire brushes ‘scrub’ toxic compounds from water

By / September 30, 2010

Low-magnification SEM image of the hierarchical nanostructure consisting of radially aligned ZnO nanowires grown on electrospun poly-l-lactide nanofibers. Inset: schematic representation of the hierarchical nanostructure. Credit: JACerS. In a story…

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Intriguing scientists and engineers among 2010 MacArthur ‘genius’ Fellows

By / September 29, 2010

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named 23 new MacArthur Fellows for 2010. Included in this list is John Dabiri whose work with fluid dynamics we’ve featured several…

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Scientists look to nature to develop carbide materials

By / September 23, 2010

A simple chemical process converts a leaf skeleton into iron carbide, which is magnetic and conducts electricity. (Image: Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces via Nanowerk.) Via Nanowerk, researchers…

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