The atoms of the 5th element of the periodic table often find themselves in the company of each other, forming allotropes with a rich variety of structural motifs, each carrying a unique set of chemical and physical properties. Despite the long catalog, most boron allotropes do not simultaneously possess high electrical conductivity and plasticity, but a recent study has expanded the portfolio.

Scientists have now designed a new allotrope called Imma-B60 by washing out the sodium from the sodium boride compound Na4B60. Their findings are published in Nature Chemistry.

Unlike the dense, tightly packed atomic arrang...

Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so shows how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s like traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr (17,000 mph) and parallel parking in an open garage on a multibillion-dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward, you actually drift up, and there’s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone aboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resulting debris field could wipe out dozens of satellites and even harm people on the ground. No pressure, obviously.

For decades, aerospace engineers have docked successfully using hard-coded physics equations and human pilots to make correc...

A study led by researchers at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center found that a dietary form of a naturally occurring molecule called calcium alphaketoglutarate, or Ca-αKG, reduced lung tumor growth in female mice and activated genes associated with better outcomes in women with lung cancer. The researchers also found that Ca-αKG had the opposite effect in male mice, where it was associated with larger tumors and increased tumor-cell proliferation.

The findings, published in the journal Cell Reports, suggest that Ca-αKG may influence lung cancer primarily through epigenetic changes—chemical modifications that help control which genes are turned on or off—rather than by changing the ca...

A Husker research team’s latest research could open the door to broader use of a class of materials whose electrical properties may someday power next-generation electronics, high-density energy storage, improved computer memory and new strategies for cooling.

In a new paper published in Science, University of Nebraska–Lincoln researchers Xiaoshan Xu, Alexei Gruverman and Evgeny Tsymbal demonstrate that hafnium oxide—a tough, heat-resistant chemical compound used widely in modern electronics—is inherently antiferroelectric, a rare quality found in very few materials. Unlike hafnium oxide, also known as hafnia, many intrinsically antiferroelectric materials contain the toxin lead, which limits their widespread use.

The trio said the discovery will help settle a longstanding...