Category Technology/Electronics

Highly ordered sodium silicate particles (bottom right) with a regular array of spherical pores (bottom left) form on silicon surface. The one-step synthesis is directed by the atomic ordering of the substrate, which induces the formation of a soft template for sodium silicate growth. Sodium silicate, in turn, modifies the structure of the soft template during growth, encapsulating it within its structure (top). Credit: Image courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

To create more efficient catalysts, sensing and separation membrane, and energy storage devices, scientists often start with particles containing tiny pore channels. Defects between the particles can hamper performance...

Stretch-and-release fabrication, testing and optimization of a flexible ceramic armor inspired from fish scales,” by Robert Martini and François Barthelat, Bioinspiration and Biomimetics: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3190/11/6/066001

Ceramic-covered gloves offer industrial workers increased protection from piercing. They started with striped bass. Over a 2-year period the researchers went through about 50 bass, puncturing or fracturing hundreds of fish scales under the microscope, to try to understand their properties and mechanics better. “The people at the fish market must have wondered what we were up to,” says François Barthelat smiling ruefully...

Concept artwork of the holographic image that was created with the ANU invention. Credit: Lei Wang, ANU

Physicists from The Australian National University (ANU) have invented a tiny device that creates the highest quality holographic images ever achieved, opening the door to imaging technologies seen in science fiction movies such as Star Wars. Lead researcher Lei Wang said the team created complex holographic images in infrared with the invention that could be developed with industry.

“As a child, I learned about the concept of holographic imaging from the Star Wars movies. It’s really cool to be working on an invention that uses the principles of holography depicted in those movies,” said Mr Wang, a PhD student at the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering...

Topological transitions of a deformed kagome lattice by uniform soft twisting. Two types of triangles (red and blue) are connected by free hinges at their corners, forming a deformed kagome lattice with primitive vectors a1, a2. The angle θ between the triangles defines the twisting coordinate. The blue curve shows (defined in equation (1)) as a function of θ. The 3 white dots on the θ axis represent three critical angles (, and ) where sides of the triangles form straight lines (yellow stripes on the lattices) and topological polarization RT (shown as black arrows above the axes) changes.

University of Michigan researchers have developed a new way to design a “metamaterial” that allows the material to switch between being hard and soft without damaging or altering the material itself...