Jun 07, 2022 (Nanowerk News) What do coffee, red wine and ink have in common? The stubborn stains they leave behind. Anyone who has ever knocked over a cup of coffee will know that coffee dries in an unusual pattern, the stain is lighter at the center but it gets...
Emerging 4D printing technologies for biomedical applications
Jun 07, 2022 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Compared to creating static objects with 3D printing, 4D printing systems add time as the fourth dimension to 3D printing: 4D printing allows a 3D printed structure to change its configuration or function with time in response to external stimuli such as temperature, light, water,...
Colossal collisions linked to solar system science
Jun 07, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A new study shows a deep connection between some of the largest, most energetic events in the universe and much smaller, weaker ones powered by our own Sun. The results come from a long observation with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory of Abell 2146, a pair...
Schroedinger’s red pixel by quasi-bound-states in-the-continuum
Jun 07, 2022 (Nanowerk News) The brilliant and often iridescent colours that we see in some species of birds, beetles and butterflies arise from a regular arrangement of nanostructures that scatter selective wavelengths of light more strongly to generate colour. These colours are called structural colours, which usually range from...
Earth-abundant solar pixels found to produce hydrogen for weeks
Jun 07, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Devices made of readily available oxide and carbon-based materials can produce clean hydrogen from water over weeks - according to new research (Nature Materials, "Long-term solar water and CO2 splitting with photoelectrochemical BiOI–BiVO4 tandems"). The findings, co-led by Dr Virgil Andrei, a Research Fellow at...
Detecting new particles around black holes with gravitational waves
Jun 07, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Clouds of ultralight particles can form around rotating black holes. A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam and Harvard University now show that these clouds would leave a characteristic imprint on the gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes. Black holes are generally...
New polymer property could give accessible solar power a boost
Jun 07, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Lightweight as a window cling and replicable as a newspaper, organic solar cells are emerging as a viable solution for the nation's growing energy demand. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are the first to observe a biological property called chirality emerging in achiral...
Insulation from nanostructured wood aerogel proves better than existing plastic-based materials
Jun 07, 2022 (Nanowerk News) One day soon, buildings could become more energy-efficient—and environmentally sustainable—with insulating material developed from wood by researchers in Sweden. The newly-developed material offers as good or even better thermal performance than ordinary plastic-based insulation materials, according to researchers reporting recently in ACS Applied Materials &...
Bumps in 2D materials could smooth quantum investigations
Jun 06, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Atoms do weird things when forced out of their comfort zones. Rice University engineers have thought up a new way to give them a nudge. Materials theorist Boris Yakobson and his team at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering have a theory that changing...
Liquid platinum at room temperature
Jun 06, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Researchers in Australia have been able to use trace amounts of liquid platinum to create cheap and highly efficient chemical reactions at low temperatures, opening a pathway to dramatic emissions reductions in crucial industries. When combined with liquid gallium, the amounts of platinum required are...