materials science

Enlarge / A test of radiative cooling panels at the University of Colorado. Moving from the present world to one where renewable power dominates our energy economy is going to require some additional technologies. These may include storage, enhanced grid management, and demand-response power management, but they could also include something entirely new. Recently, a…

Magnetic swirls called skyrmions have gotten a new twist. Scientists have created a new version of the atomic whirlpools, in which the tiny magnetic fields of individual atoms in a material arrange into a swirl pattern. Known as antiferromagnetic skyrmions, the new structures have some advantages that could make them easier to work with than…

Enlarge / The structure of some of the protein wires used by bacteria. There's a huge variety of ways that we can potentially generate all the power we need for tiny medical sensors or other devices with minimal power needs. But there's often a big gap between those sorts of use cases and something that…

Enlarge / The cyanobacteria in flasks contribute to the structure at right.Cell Press It seems like every week, I can do an article on some interesting science that ended up buried under hyperbolic headlines and overly credible coverage. This week's victim is "living concrete." It only sort of exists, in that the material can either…

Enlarge / A Tribot leaps ahead of its peers. Robots have traditionally been roughly humanoid in form, which has some obvious advantages, in that the robots are better able to integrate into a human-designed environment. But there are lots of environments that aren't human designed, and researchers have been experimenting with robotic forms that look…

Enlarge / Firefighters from Stockton, Calif., put out flames off of Hidden Valley Rd. while fighting a wildfire, Friday, May 3, 2013 in Hidden Valley, Calif. (AP Photo/Los Angeles Times, Mel Melcon) The last few years have seen horrific fire seasons in California, resulting in destruction, deaths, and economic damage. And with climate change continuing…

Enlarge / The seemingly simple act of charging is getting increasingly complex. Batteries tend to involve lots of trade-offs. You can have high capacity, but it means more weight and a slower charge. Or you can charge quickly and see the lifetime of your battery drop with each cycle. There are ways to optimize performance—figuring…

Inspired by a strange fish that can withstand the punishing pressures of the deepest reaches of the ocean, scientists have devised a soft autonomous robot capable of keeping its fins flapping — even in the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. The team, led by roboticist Guorui Li of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, successfully…

Monash University Associate Professor Matthew Hill, Dr. Mahdokht Shaibani, and Professor Mainak Majumder with the lithium-sulphur battery design.Monash University The name "lithium-ion battery" seems to imply that lithium is the essential ingredient that dictates the battery's performance characteristics. But that's less true than it appears. The electrodes that the lithium shuttles between are critical for…

Enlarge / Challenges scale considerably when the battery pack weighs 300kg. Lithium batteries have become incredibly popular for electronic devices, and the emphasis on weight and size for those batteries means that the amount of raw materials tied up in them isn't too large. But that's absolutely not the case for the other growing use…