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Category: materials – Page 17

The ancient peoples of the Philippines and of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) may have built sophisticated boats and mastered seafaring tens of thousands of years ago—millennia before Magellan, Zheng He, and even the Polynesians.

In a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Ateneo de Manila University researchers Riczar Fuentes and Alfred Pawlik challenge the widely-held contention that technological progress during the Paleolithic only emerged in Europe and Africa.

They point out that much of ISEA was never connected to mainland Asia, neither by land bridges nor by ice sheets, yet it has yielded evidence of early human habitation. Exactly how these peoples achieved such daring ocean crossings is an enduring mystery, as organic materials like wood and fiber used for boats rarely survive in the .

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Researchers at UC Santa Barbara and TU Dresden are pioneering a new approach to robotics by creating a collective of small robots that function like a smart material.

According to Matthew Devlin, a former doctoral researcher in the lab of UCSB mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes and lead author of a paper published in Science, researchers have developed a method for robots to behave more like a material.

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Researchers have developed COK-47, a solid lubricant that outperforms traditional options by leveraging water molecules to reduce friction.

This advanced material consists of ultra-thin titanium oxide sheets that create a low-friction tribofilm in humid conditions, making it highly durable and effective.

Revolutionizing Lubricants with Cutting-Edge Research.

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Scientists have developed a way to 3D-print high-performance thermoelectric materials, promising a major leap in cooling technology. This breakthrough could cut costs, reduce waste, and improve efficiency, challenging conventional manufacturing.

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It’s true that Japanese scientists have made a significant breakthrough concerning hydrogels and cancer cells. Here’s a breakdown of what the research entails:

* The Breakthrough:

* Researchers at Hokkaido University and the National Cancer Center Research Institute developed a novel hydrogel, a “double-network (DN) gel,” that can rapidly revert differentiated cancer cells back into cancer stem cells (CSCs).

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Plasma arc cutting (PAC) is a thermal cutting technique widely used in manufacturing applications such as shipbuilding, aerospace, fabrication, nuclear plants decommissioning, construction industry, and the automotive industry. In this process, a jet of plasma or ionized gas is ejected at high speeds, which melts and subsequently removes unwanted parts of materials from electrically conductive workpieces such as metals.

The plasma jet is typically produced in two steps: pressuring a gas through a small nozzle hole and generating an electric arc via power supply. Remarkably, the introduced arc ionizes the gas coming out of the nozzle, which in turn generates plasma with extremely high temperatures. This enables the plasma jet to easily, quickly, and precisely slice different metals and alloys.

The quality of workpieces cut using PAC depends on various factors: kind of plasma gas and its pressure, nozzle hole shape and size, arc current and voltage, cutting speed, and distance between the torch and the workpiece. While most of these factors are well understood in the context of PAC, the impact of gas flow dynamics on cut quality remains less clearly known. This is mainly due to challenges in visualization of the flow dynamics.

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A collaborative team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD), Nanjing University, Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory (SLAB), and international partners has introduced a new method to regulate exotic electronic states in two-dimensional materials.

Building on the foundations laid by their previous work on twisted van der Waals materials, the team of physicists has now discovered a novel way to manipulate correlated electronic states in twisted double bilayer tungsten diselenide (TDB-WSe₂). This breakthrough offers new possibilities for developing advanced quantum materials and devices.

By precisely twisting two bilayers of WSe₂ near a 60-degree angle and applying a perpendicular electric field, the researchers have achieved control over the interaction between two distinct electronic bands, known as the K-valley and Γ-valley bands. This tuning has led to the observation of a “valley charge-transfer insulator”—an exotic state where electron movement is highly correlated, and electrical conductivity is suppressed.

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Superconductivity is a widely sought after material property, which entails an electrical resistance of zero below a specific critical temperature. So far, it has been observed in various materials, including recently in so-called multilayer graphene allotropes (i.e., materials that consist of several layers of a hexagonal carbon lattice).

Recent studies found that when bilayer graphene is placed on a WSe2 (tungsten-diselenide) substrate, its superconducting phase is enhanced. This results in a greater charge carrier density and higher (i.e., the temperature at which a material becomes a superconductor).

Researchers at University of California at Santa Barbara and California Institute of Technology have carried out a study aimed at further investigating this enhancement in the graphite allotrope Bernal bilayer graphene. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, reports the observation of two distinct superconducting states in this material, challenging current models of electron pairing in graphite allotropes.

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