Category Technology/Electronics

Self-healing rubber links permanent covalent bonds (red) with reversible hydrogen bonds (green). Credit: Image courtesy of Peter and Ryan Allen/Harvard SEAS

Potential applications include durable tires, wearable electronics, medical devices. Imagine a tire that could heal after being punctured or a rubber band that never snapped. Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new type of rubber that is as tough as natural rubber but can also self-heal.

Self-healing materials aren’t new – researchers at SEAS have developed self-healing hydrogels, which rely on water to incorporate reversible bonds that can promote healing...

Candy cane supercapacitor. Credit: Stoyan Smoukov

Supercapacitors promise recharging of phones and other devices in seconds and minutes as opposed to hours for batteries. But current technologies are not usually flexible, have insufficient capacities, and for many their performance quickly degrades with charging cycles. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University of Cambridge have found a way to improve all 3 problems in one stroke. Their prototyped polymer electrode, which resembles a candy cane achieves energy storage close to the theoretical limit, but also demonstrates flexibility and resilience to charge/discharge cycling.

The technique could be applied to many types of materials for supercapacitors and enable fast charging of mobile phones, smart clothes and ...

The artist’s rendering shows how potential wells are created for the light in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green). Credit: David Dung, Universität Bonn

Physicists create optical ‘wells’ for a super-photon for the first time. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new-gen computers. Many thousands of photons can be merged to form a single super-photon if they are sufficiently concentrated and cooled. The individual particles merge with each other, making them indistinguishable. Researchers call this a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. It has long been known that normal atoms form such condensates. Prof...

Incoherent Diffractive Imaging via Intensity Correlations of Hard X Rays. Physical Review Letters, 2017; 119 (5) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.053401 Image: Anton Classen

Physicists have developed a new technique for determining molecular structure. Physicists from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY, Hamburg) have come up with a method that could significantly improve the quality of X-ray images in comparison to conventional methods. Incoherent diffractive imaging (IDI) could help to image individual atoms in nanocrystals or molecules faster and with a much higher resolution.

For >100 years, X-rays have been used in crystallography to determine the structure of molecules...