Engineers have taken their inspiration from shells and grapefruits to create what they say is the first manufactured non-cuttable material.

This new material, which could be used in the security and health and safety industries, can turn back the force of a cutting tool upon itself. The lightweight material – named Proteus after the shape-changing mythical god — is made of ceramic spheres encased in a cellular aluminium structure that in tests could not be cut by angle grinders, drills or high-pressure water jets.

An international research team, led by Durham University, UK, and Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tool...

New research suggests that the low density of mini-Neptunes could be explained simply by the presence of a thick layer of water. Many exoplanets known today are ‘super-Earths’, with a radius 1.3 times that of Earth, and ‘mini-Neptunes’, with 2.4 Earth radii. Mini-Neptunes, which are less dense, were long thought to be gas planets, made up of hydrogen and helium.

Now, scientists at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université/Cnes)(1) have examined a new possibility, namely that the low density of mini-Neptunes could be explained simply by the presence of a thick layer of water that experiences an intense greenhouse effect caused by the irradiation from their host star.

These findings, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Let...

Molecular biologists and bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have unraveled key mechanisms behind the mysteries of aging. They isolated two distinct paths that cells travel during aging and engineered a new way to genetically program these processes to extend lifespan.

Our lifespans as humans are determined by the aging of our individual cells...

A recently published study led by Virginia Commonwealth University researchers sheds new light on how water interacts with the nanomaterial graphene, a single, thin layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal honeycomb lattice.

The researchers’ findings could hold implications for a variety of applications, including sensors, fuel cell membranes, water filtration, and graphene-based electrode materials in high-performance supercapacitors.

The study, “Solvent–Solvent Correlations across Graphene: The Effect of Image Charges,” was published in the American Chemica...