electrical engineering tagged posts

Study of bacterium links biology, materials science, and electrical engineering. When the Shewanella oneidensis bacterium “breathes” in certain metal and sulfur compounds anaerobically, it produces materials that could be used to enhance electronics, electrochemical energy storage, and drug-delivery devices.

The ability of this bacterium to produce molybdenum disulfide – a material that is able to transfer electrons easily, like graphene – is the focus of research published in Biointerphases by a team of engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“This has some serious potential if we can understand this process and control aspects of how the bacteria are making these and other materials,” said Shayla Sawyer, an associate professor of electrical, computer, and systems ...

This recovered bismuth sample has a rhombohedral structure and contains liquid structural motifs after deep melting at high pressures. The surprising structural memory effect in the molten state is responsible for the unexpected change from magnetic repulsion to magnetic attraction in bismuth. Credit: Image courtesy of Yu Shu and Guoyin Shen

New work used high pressure and temperature to reveal a kind of “structural memory” in samples of bismuth, a discovery with great electrical engineering potential. Bismuth is a historically interesting element for scientists, as a number of important discoveries in the metal physics world were made while studying it, including important observations about the effect of magnetic fields on electrical conductivity. Bismuth has a number of phases...