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4D-bioprinted silk hydrogels for tissue engineering

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Only 30% of a coffee bean is soluble in water, and many brewing methods aim to extract significantly less than that. So of the 1.6 billion pounds of coffee Americans consume in a year, more than 1.1 billion pounds of grounds are knocked from filters into compost bins and garbage cans. While watching the grounds from her own espresso machine accumulate, Danli Luo, a University of Washington doctoral student in human centered design and engineering, saw an opportunity. Coffee is nutrient-rich and sterilized during brewing, so it's ideal for growing fungus, which, before it sprouts into mushrooms, forms a "mycelial skin." This skin, a sort of white root system, can bind loose substances together and create a tough, water-resistant, lightweight material.

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Need a new 3D material? Build it with DNA

When the Empire State Building was constructed, its 102 stories rose above midtown one piece at a time, with each individual element combining to become, for 40 years, the world's tallest building. Uptown at Columbia, Oleg Gang and his chemical engineering lab aren't building Art Deco architecture; their landmarks are incredibly small devices built from nanoscopic building blocks that arrange themselves. "We can now build the complexly prescribed 3D organizations from self-assembled nanocomponents, a kind of nanoscale version of the Empire State Building," said Gang, professor of chemical engineering and of applied physics and materials science at Columbia Engineering and leader of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials' Soft and Bio Nanomaterials Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory. "The capabilities to manufacture 3D nanoscale materials by design are critical for many emerging applications, ranging from light manipulation to neuromorphic computing, and from catalytic materials to biomolecular scaffolds and reactors," said Gang.

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Research on ice-forming compound could improve pipeline safety, carbon capture and storage

Canadians may think they're intimately familiar with ice in all its forms, but there is one kind that most have probably never heard of. Clathrate hydrates are tiny crystalline cages of ice that can trap other gases or liquids inside them. These hydrates can form in natural gas pipelines and cause explosions if they block the line. The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was caused by hydrate formation, says John Tse, Canada Research Chair of Materials Science and a professor in the Department of Physics and Engineering Physics at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). That's one of the reasons Tse and his colleagues "want to understand more about how this compound forms, and how the gas and water interact with each other."

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New bio-based hot glue made from industrial leftovers outperforms commercial adhesives

A new bio-based hot glue derived from a byproduct of the wood pulp industry beats traditional epoxy resins and commercial hot-melt glues in terms of adhesive performance. Researchers from Beijing Forestry University developed a hot-melt adhesive derived from xylan—a complex sugar found in plant cell walls—that can be applied in a molten state and reused over 10 times without any loss of its original strength. The synthesis strategy was reported in Nature Sustainability. Adhesives don't just bond materials, they are the backbone of industrial manufacturing in sectors like packaging, construction and electronics. They are often divided into groups—solvent-based adhesives, reactive adhesives, and hot-melt adhesives (HMAs)—based on how they cure (dry or harden).

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Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries power everything from electric vehicles to wearable devices. But new research from Case Western Reserve University suggests that a more sustainable and cost-effective alternative may lie in zinc-based batteries. In a study published recently in Angewandte Chemie, researchers announced a significant step toward creating high-performance, low-cost zinc-sulfur batteries. "This research marks a major step forward in the development of safer and more sustainable energy storage solutions," said Chase Cao, a principal investigator and assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Case School of Engineering. "Aqueous zinc-sulfur batteries offer the potential to power a wide range of applications -- from renewable energy systems to portable electronics -- with reduced environmental impact and reliance on scarce materials."

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Stretchable, flexible, recyclable: 3D printing method creates fantastic plastic

Princeton engineers have developed an easily scalable 3D printing technique to manufacture soft plastics with programmed stretchiness and flexibility that are also recyclable and inexpensive—qualities not typically combined in commercially manufactured materials. In an article in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, a team led by Emily Davidson reported that they used a class of widely available polymers called thermoplastic elastomers to create soft 3D printed structures with tunable stiffness. Engineers can design the print path used by the 3D printer to program the plastic's physical properties so that a device can stretch and flex repeatedly in one direction while remaining rigid in another. Davidson, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, said this approach to engineering soft architected materials could have many uses, such as soft robots, medical devices and prosthetics, strong lightweight helmets, and custom high-performance shoe soles.

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Nanopatterned graphene enables infrared 'color' detection and imaging

University of Central Florida (UCF) researcher Debashis Chanda, a professor at UCF's NanoScience Technology Center, has developed a new technique to detect long wave infrared (LWIR) photons of different wavelengths or "colors." The research was recently published in Nano Letters. The new detection and imaging technique will have applications in analyzing materials by their spectral properties, or spectroscopic imaging, as well as thermal imaging applications. Humans perceive primary and secondary colors but not infrared light. Scientists hypothesize that animals like snakes or nocturnal species can detect various wavelengths in the infrared almost like how humans perceive colors.

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Room-temperature superconductivity: Researchers uncover optical secrets of Bi-based superconductors

Copper-oxide (CuO2) superconductors, such as Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (Bi2212), have unusually high critical temperatures. Optical reflectivity measurements of Bi2212 have shown that it exhibits strong optical anisotropy. However, this has not been studied through optical transmittance measurements, which can offer more direct insights into bulk properties. Now, researchers have elucidated the origin of this optical anisotropy through ultraviolet and visible light transmittance measurements of lead-doped Bi2212 single crystals, enabling a more precise investigation into its superconductivity mechanisms. Their research is published in the journal Scientific Reports. Superconductors are materials which conduct electricity without any resistance when cooled down below a critical temperature. These materials have transformative applications in various fields, including electric motors, generators, high-speed maglev trains, and magnetic resonance imaging.

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Predicting atomic structures proves useful in energy and sustainability

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have developed a new approach that combines generative artificial intelligence (AI) and first-principles simulations to predict three-dimensional atomic structures of highly complex materials. This research highlights LLNL's efforts in advancing machine learning for materials science research and supporting the Lab's mission to develop innovative technological solutions for energy and sustainability. The study, recently published in Machine Learning: Science and Technology, represents a potential leap forward in the application of AI for materials characterization and inverse design. The approach uses X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy. Accurately determining atomic structures from spectroscopic data has long posed a challenge, particularly for complex systems, such as shapeless materials.

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Organic LED material achieves faster organic phosphorescence for better display tech

Screens for TVs, smartphones or other displays could be made with a new kind of organic LED material developed by an international team, co-led by University of Michigan engineers. The material maintains sharp color and contrast while replacing the heavy metal with a new hybrid material. Curiously, the material also seemed to break a quantum rule. OLED devices currently on the market include heavy metal components like iridium and platinum, which improve the efficiency, brightness and color range of the screen. But they come with drawbacks—significantly higher cost, a shorter device lifetime and increased health and environmental hazards.

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Ceramics: Tungsten Nitride

An inorganic compound, tungsten nitride is a hard, solid, brown material that is electrically conductive and decomposes in water. 

The most common application of this ceramic is as a diffusion barrier, particularly preventing the diffusion of copper in integrated circuits. As such, tungsten nitride is most often used in the form of thin films, rather than bulk ceramics. Since trace amounts of copper can harm transistors or other silicon-based devices, integrated circuits cannot function properly without diffusion barriers. 

Though less commonly used than tungsten films of titanium nitride, tungsten nitride is still useful in microelectronics, particularly because it is a superior CVD barrier material. Sputtered films are most often used as diffusion barriers for copper, but they have their limitations, particularly as devices shrink in side, making the need for chemical vapor deposition barrier layers instead. Compared to the other transition metal nitrides, tungsten nitride has the lowest electrical resistivity in a single crystal as well.

However, when deposited by sputtering, tungsten nitride can also be used as hard, wear resistant coatings for applications such as cutting tools. 

Sources: ( 1 - image 2 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ) ( 4 ) ( 5 )

Image sources: ( 1 ) ( 3 )

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New hydrogel could preserve waterlogged wood from shipwrecks

From the RMS Titanic to the SS Endurance, shipwrecks offer valuable—yet swiftly deteriorating—windows into the past. Conservators slowly dry marine wooden artifacts to preserve them, but doing so can inflict damage. To better care for delicate marine artifacts, researchers in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering developed a new hydrogel that quickly neutralizes harmful acids and stabilizes waterlogged wood from an 800-year-old shipwreck. Wooden artifacts from shipwrecks are drenched with seawater, an environment that enables acid-producing bacteria and wood-eating fungi to thrive. To prevent damage from acid and microbes, conservators usually remove water from these artifacts by freeze-drying or using a process that replaces the water with highly pressurized carbon dioxide or a viscous polymer. However, these processes can take months and increase brittleness or warps the artifacts.

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“Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we’ve learned as we’ve moved toward that dream. That’s the point at which most people give up. It’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one ‘dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.’”

—

Paulo Coelho

 The Alchemist

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Promising strategy leverages atomic displacements to control quantum properties of a vanadate perovskite

Perovskites, materials with a crystal structure that mirrors that of the mineral calcium titanate CaTiO₃, exhibit properties that are advantageous for developing various technologies. For instance, they have proved promising for designing photovoltaic (PV) systems and electronic devices. Perovskites are also ideal materials to explore a variety of quantum states, including orbital order, magnetism and superconductivity. Moreover, physicists can carefully engineer these materials to unlock various tunable properties, which typically result from subtle deviations from the cubic perovskite structure. Realizing these deviations and controlling them to attain specific properties can be highly challenging. In a recent paper published in Nature Physics, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research introduced a promising strategy to realize subtle atomic displacements in the vanadate perovskite YVO3.

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X-ray measurements reveal an unexpected role for copper in photocatalysts

Copper is a promising catalyst for sustainably converting carbon dioxide into substances with more electrons (called reduced species). This is an important step in converting carbon dioxide into fuels. This reaction is often initiated by electrical energy, but it can also be achieved using solar energy to produce solar fuels. However, scientists do not fully understand the chemical nature of the copper catalyst during the solar reaction. In this work, scientists used X-rays to investigate how copper catalysts change when operating only with light and no applied electricity. Changes to the copper composition during the reaction indicate that it plays an unexpected role. Instead of forming a more reduced species, the copper produces a more oxidized chemical species.

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