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Category: materials

Scientists have made liquid carbon in a lab for the first time, Interesting Engineering reported.

Liquid carbon was thought to be impossible to study under normal conditions. The material only exists for billionths of a second under extreme pressure and temperatures of about 4,500 degrees Celsius, making this record-breaking technology limitless in its potential.

Nuclear fusion, combining light atomic nuclei to release massive amounts of clean energy, has long been considered the holy grail of power generation. Fusion could change society by providing unlimited electricity without radioactive waste, helping cities, individuals, and companies save money compared to resource-intensive traditional energy methods.

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Just when scientists thought they knew everything about crystals, a Northwestern University and University of Wisconsin-Madison collaboration has uncovered a hidden secret.

Centrosymmetric are a special type of material that is fully symmetrical in every direction from a central point. Previously, scientists thought only non-centrosymmetric materials could exhibit chiral behavior—a property in which an object acts differently from its mirror reflection. But, for the first time, researchers have found a centrosymmetric crystal can act “chiral” despite its symmetry.

In the new study, published in Science, the research team investigated how a specific centrosymmetric crystal interacts with circularly polarized light, which twists like a corkscrew in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.

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Single-atom catalysts (SACs) are materials consisting of individual metal atoms dispersed on a substrate (i.e., supporting surface). Recent studies have highlighted the promise of these catalysts for the efficient conversion and storage of energy, particularly when deployed in fuel cells and water electrolyzers.

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A research team led by Prof. Shao Dingfu from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has predicted a new class of antiferromagnetic materials with unique cross-chain structures, termed “X-type antiferromagnets.” These materials exhibit sublattice-selective spin transport and unconventional magnetic dynamics, offering new possibilities for next-generation spintronic devices.

Published in Newton, this work challenges conventional views of collective atomic behavior in solids and promises transformative applications in next-generation electronics.

Antiferromagnets (AFMs) are valued for their zero net magnetization and ultrafast dynamics, making them attractive for spintronics. However, their practical application has been hindered by mutual spin cancellation between magnetic sublattices, which limits spin current control. The newly proposed X-type AFMs, with their distinctive “X”-shaped intersecting chain geometry, overcome this limitation.

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Nanoplastics can compromise intestinal integrity in mice by altering the interactions between the gut microbiome and the host, according to a paper in Nature Communications. The study explores the complex interactions of nanoplastics with the gut microenvironment in mice.

Nanoplastics are pieces of plastic less than 1,000 nanometers in diameter, which are created as plastics degrade. Previous research has suggested that uptake can disrupt the gut microbiota; however, the underlying mechanism behind this effect is poorly understood.

Researcher Wei-Hsuan Hsu and colleagues used RNA sequencing, transcriptomic analysis and microbial profiling to analyze the effects of polystyrene nanoplastics on the intestinal microenvironment when ingested in mice. They found that nanoplastic accumulation in the mouse intestine was linked to altered expression of two proteins involved in intestinal barrier integrity (ZO-1 and MUC-13), which could disrupt intestinal permeability.

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A research team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a compact dynamic cantilever magnetometer with a diameter of just 22 mm, achieving magnetic moment sensitivity on the order of 10-17 A·m2.

“This breakthrough fills a technological gap in ultra-sensitive magnetic measurements for small, low-dimensional materials under ,” said Prof. Wang Ning, a member of the team.

The study was published in Review of Scientific Instruments.

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The reliable manipulation of the speed at which light travels through objects could have valuable implications for the development of various advanced technologies, including high-speed communication systems and quantum information processing devices. Conventional methods for manipulating the speed of light, such as techniques leveraging so-called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effects, work by utilizing quantum interference effects in a medium, which can make it transparent to light beams and slow the speed of light through it.

Despite their advantages, these techniques only enable the reciprocal control of group velocity (i.e., the speed at which the envelope of a wave packet travels through a medium), meaning that a will behave the same irrespective of the direction it is traveling in while passing through a device. Yet the nonreciprocal control of light speed could be equally valuable, particularly for the development of advanced devices that can benefit from allowing signals to travel in desired directions at the desired speed.

Researchers at the University of Manitoba in Canada and Lanzhou University in China recently demonstrated the nonreciprocal control of the speed of light using a cavity magnonics device, a system that couples (i.e., quanta of microwave light) with magnons (i.e., quanta of the oscillations of electron spins in materials).

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