Chemistry

The familiar pencil-lead form of carbon, graphite, consists of layers of carbon atoms tightly bonded in the plane but only loosely bonded between planes; because the layers move easily over one…

It’s stronger than steel and nylon, and more extensible than Kevlar. What is this super-tough material? Spider silk; and learning how to spin it is one of the materials industries’ Holy Grails.…

Titanium is the lightweight metal of choice for many applications and a non-melt consolidation process being developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory may make it cheap enough to bulletproof your…

A type of plastic that exhibits metallic and semi-conductor-like properties will be described in an inaugural doctoral lecture at the University of Leicester on Wednesday June 4th(*). In his lecture,…

Nano-whatever is all the rage. They're a big deal because they can make a blacker version of black and lots of other things but what does that even mean? Richard Compton and his team at Oxford…

CSIRO researchers have discovered a new class of fatty acids -- alpha-hydroxy polyacetylenic fatty acids -- that they say could be used as sensors for detecting changes in temperature and mechanical…

In the rapid and fast-growing world of nanotechnology, researchers are continually on the lookout for new building blocks to push innovation and discovery to scales much smaller than the tiniest…

Your contact lenses of the future could be completely biodegradable. A soft contact lens is a hydrogel - a solid, gelatinous mass consisting of water incorporated in a polymer network. Now Berkeley…

Cracks in buildings that close without external help may seem a little far fetched but we already have a good template in the human body's ability to heal wounds by sending blood platelets to the…

A frequency-agile metamaterial that for the first time can be tuned over a range of frequencies in the so-called “terahertz gap” has been engineered by a team of researchers from Boston College, Los…