Qingkun Liu, a postdoctoral research associate at CU Boulder, holds up samples of a new gel that could improve the energy efficiency of windows across the United States.
Credit: CU Boulder

A new, super-insulating gel developed by researchers at CU Boulder could dramatically increase the energy efficiency of skyscrapers and other buildings, and might one day help scientists build greenhouse-like habitats for colonists on Mars. The “aerogel,” which looks like a flattened plastic contact lens, is so resistant to heat that you could put a strip of it on your hand and a fire on top without feeling a thing. But unlike similar products on the market, the material is mostly transparent.

“Transparency is an enabling feature because you can use this gel in windows, and you could use it in extraterres...

The open problem was what controlled the velocity of the electron liquid (shown as a wavy waterfront). The findings show that it is the frozen antiferromagnetism on the honeycomb lattice that sets this velocity by slowing it down as the two interact.
Credit: Yale-NUS College

A new discovery explains what happens during the phase transition in Dirac materials, paving the way for engineering advanced electronics that perform significantly faster. Yale-NUS Associate Professor of Science (Physics) Shaffique Adam is the lead author for a recent work that describes a model for electron interaction in Dirac materials, a class of materials that includes graphene and topological insulators, solving a 65-year-old open theoretical problem in the process...

These are extracellular vesicles under the electron microscope. Credit: Helmholtz Zentrum München

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is an incurable lung disease of unknown origin with limited treatment options. Research suggests that the signaling molecule WNT5A plays a key role in the pathogenic process. Now a group of scientists from Helmholtz Zentrum München working with colleagues from the University of Denver have taken a further step towards uncovering the mechanisms responsible for the development of fibrosis: IPF is associated with the increase of extracellular vesicles that relay WNT5A signals to cells in the lungs...

When two monolayers of WTe2 are stacked into a bilayer, a spontaneous electrical polarization appears, one layer becoming positively charged and the other negatively charged. This polarization can be flipped by applying an electric field.
Credit: Joshua Kahn

Researchers report that the 2D form of tungsten ditelluride can undergo ‘ferroelectric switching.’ Materials with ferroelectric properties can have applications in memory storage, capacitors, RFID card technologies and even medical sensors – and tungsten ditelluride is the first exfoliated 2D material known to undergo ferroelectric switching.

2D materials can be prepared in crystalline sheets as thin as a single monolayer, only one or a few atoms thick...