News

A group of materials scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology has shown that a palladium-based intermetallic electride, Y3Pd2, can improve the efficiency of carbon-carbon cross-coupling reactions. Their findings point the way to a more sustainable world through catalysis.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials could offer new building blocks for future technologies — but only if scientists can control growth and properties. Strain, caused by “stretching” or “bunching” the atomic structure as a crystal grows, is one way to control these properties.

A special class of materials known as “Weyl semimetals” have unusual physical properties. In these materials, researchers can separate electrons by their “handedness.” That’s whether the electrons’ magnetic moment is in the same direction as the electrons’ movement or the opposite direction.
This results in a host of unique phenomena that researchers can use to turn infrared light into electricity and develop very fast electronic circuits.

Researchers have created a unique device which will unlock the elusive terahertz wavelengths and make revolutionary new technologies possible.

Researchers at Seoul National University and Inha University in South Korea developed photo-sensitive artificial nerves that emulated functions of a retina by using 2-dimensional carbon nitride (C3N4) nanodot materials.

The University of Rochester research lab that recently used lasers to create unsinkable metallic structures has now demonstrated how the same technology could be used to create highly efficient solar power generators.

Quantum information technologies need materials that can produce a regular stream of single particles of light (photons). Two-dimensional materials are made of single layers of coordinated atoms.
Recent research has shown that these 2D materials may have potential as light sources that emit light as single photons.

Diamond is prized by scientists and jewellers alike, largely for a range of extraordinary properties including exceptional hardness. Now a team of Australian scientists has discovered diamond can be bent and deformed, at the nanoscale at least.

A group of researchers from ITMO University has come up with the concept of a new drug against cancer: a nanorobot made of DNA fragments, which can potentially be used not only to destroy cancer cells but also to locate them in the body.