Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

A recent development would make electricity generation from the sun’s heat more efficient, by using ceramic-metal plates for heat transfer at higher temperatures and at elevated pressures.
Credit: Purdue University illustration/Raymond Hassan

Scientists have developed a new material and manufacturing process that would make one way to use solar power – as heat energy – more efficient in generating electricity. Solar power accounts for less than 2% of U.S. electricity but could make up more than that if the cost of electricity generation and energy storage for use on cloudy days and at nighttime were cheaper.

A Purdue University-led team developed a new material and manufacturing process that would make one way to use solar power – as heat energy – more efficient in generating electricity...

Researchers in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering have developed a technique to harvest 2-inch diameter wafers of 2-D material within just a few minutes.
Credit: Peng Lin

Efficient method for making single-atom-thick, wafer-scale materials opens up opportunities in flexible electronics. Researchers have developed a technique to harvest 2-inch diameter wafers of 2-D material within just a few minutes. They can then be stacked together to form an electronic device within an hour.

Since the 2003 discovery of graphene, there has been significant interest in other types of 2-D materials as well. These materials could be stacked together like Lego bricks to form a range of devices with different functions, including operating as semiconductors...

The novel topological insulator built in the Würzburg Institute of Physics: a controllable flow of hybrid optoelectronic particles (red) travels along its edges. (Picture: Karol Winkler)

For the first time, physicists have built a unique topological insulator in which optical and electronic excitations hybridize and flow together. Topological insulators are materials with very special properties. They conduct electricity or light particles on their surface or edges only but not on the inside. This unusual behaviour could eventually lead to technical innovations which is why topological insulators have been the subject of intense global research for several years.

Physicists of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany, with colleagues from the Technion in Haifa, Is...

A single nanocluster of 22 gold atoms — Au22 — is only 1 nanometer in diameter, allowing it to easily slip through the bacterial cell wall.
Credit: Peidong Yang, UC Berkeley

Harvesting solar fuels through a bacterium’s unusual appetite for gold. Scientists have placed light-absorbing gold nanoclusters inside a bacterium, creating a biohybrid system that produces a higher yield of chemical products, such as biofuels, than previously demonstrated. The biohybrid captures sunlight and carbon dioxide to make chemicals useful not only on Earth but also in the exotic environment of space.

Moorella thermoacetica first made its debut as the first non-photosensitive bacterium to carry out artificial photosynthesis in a study led by Peidong Yang, a professor in UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry...