Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

Material may replace many metals as lightweight, flexible heat dissipators in cars, refrigerators, and electronics. Polymers are usually the go-to material for thermal insulation. Think of a silicone oven mitt, or a Styrofoam coffee cup, both manufactured from polymer materials that are excellent at trapping heat.

Now MIT engineers have flipped the picture of the standard polymer insulator, by fabricating thin polymer films that conduct heat – an...

Researchers have created a smart device capable of producing large amounts of clean hydrogen. By concentrating sunlight, their device uses a smaller amount of the rare, costly materials that are required to produce hydrogen, yet it still maintains a high solar-to-fuel efficiency. Their research has been taken to the next scale with a pilot facility installed on the EPFL campus.

Scientists at EPFL’s Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering (LRESE) came up with the idea of concentrating solar irradiation to produce a larger amount of hydrogen over a given area at a lower cost...

Tiny robots powered by magnetic fields could help drug-delivery nanoparticles reach their disease targets. MIT Engineers have designed tiny robots that can help drug-delivery nanoparticles push their way out of the bloodstream and into a tumor or another disease site. The magnetic microrobots could help to overcome one of the biggest obstacles to delivering drugs with nanoparticles: getting them to exit blood vessels and accumulate in the right place.

Like crafts in “Fantastic Voyage” – a 1960s science fiction film in which a submarine...

Researchers at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have 3D-printed an all-liquid device that, with the click of a button, can be repeatedly reconfigured on demand to serve a wide range of applications – from making battery materials to screening drug candidates.

“What we demonstrated is remarkable...