A material designed by MIT chemical engineers can react with carbon dioxide from the air, to grow, strengthen, and even repair itself. The polymer, which might someday be used as construction or repair material or for protective coatings, continuously...
Researchers in the College of Science and College of Engineering have discovered that a high-strength polymer called "PBDT" has a rare double helix structure, opening possibilities for use in a variety of applications.
This discovery, recently published in Nature Communications, comes...
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the major greenhouse gases causing global warming. If carbon dioxide could be converted into energy, it would be killing two birds with one stone in addressing the environmental issues. A joint research team...
The grand challenge to improve energy storage and increase battery life, while ensuring safe operation, is becoming evermore critical as we become increasingly reliant on this energy source for everything from portable devices to electric vehicles. A Columbia Engineering...
For 6,000 years, humans have been making things from metal because it's strong and tough; a lot of energy is required to damage it. The flip side of this property is that a lot of energy is required to...
Many natural organisms have the ability to repair themselves. Now, manufactured machines will be able to mimic this property. In findings published this week in Nature Materials, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a self-healing material that spontaneously...
A team of materials scientists from Penn State, Cornell and Argonne National Laboratory have, for the first time, visualized the 3-D atomic and electron density structure of the most complex perovskite crystal structure system decoded to date.
Perovskites are minerals...
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have demonstrated a room-temperature method that could significantly reduce carbon dioxide levels in fossil-fuel power plant exhaust, one of the main sources of carbon emissions in...
Industry uses platinum alloys as catalysts for oxygen reduction, essential in fuel cells and metal-air batteries, among other applications. Expensive and rare, that metal imposes tight restrictions on manufacture. Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung have...
An artificial-intelligence approach created at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Eshelman School of Pharmacy can teach itself to design new drug molecules from scratch and has the potential to dramatically accelerate the design of new drug...
Schematic of a new catalyst made of copper nanoparticles that converts carbon dioxide to multicarbon products (ethylene, ethanol, and propanol). At top left are transmission electron microscope images of the copper nanoparticles. The transformation of the nanoparticles from spheres...
