Materials Sciences

There is more to mother-of-pearl than good looks. Also called nacre, the gleaming, white material is renowned in scientific circles for its strong, yet flexible, properties. Now researchers have developed a nanoscale, layered material that comes close to nacre’s properties, including its iridescence.

The ability to nanomanufacture artificial nacre may provide lightweight, rigid composites for aircraft parts, artificial bone and other applications.

Reporting online in Nature Mater

Scientists at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Teddington, Middlesex, UK have good news for manufacturers and users across the optical instrumentation industry. Based on existing processes developed in the US and Japan, a team of researchers at NPL has developed a new technique for commercial manufacturing of ultra-black coatings, which represent one of the blackest, lowest reflectance surfaces developed so far.

Performance of optical instrumentation depends on the quality of material

University of Toronto researchers have developed a hybrid plastic that can produce light at wavelengths used for fibre-optic communication, paving the way for an optical computer chip.

The material, developed by a joint team of engineers and chemists, is a plastic embedded with quantum dots – crystals just five billionths of a metre in size – that convert electrons into photons. The findings hold promise for directly linking high-speed computers with networks that transmit information using

Finland Leads Europe In The Development Of Biodegradable Plastics

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, has made degradable bioplastic more durable due to reinforcement with natural fibres. This biocomposite, which is totally biodegradable, supports sustainable development. The waste costs for products made from this will be small, and in the future consumers will have an enhanced appreciation of biodegradability of materials.

VTT achieved this biocomposite using flax fi

An ultrathin film containing 1-nanometer thick clay particles has been created for the first time, an accomplishment that may yield new materials and devices for medicine, electronics and engineering, according to Purdue University and Belgian scientists.

Using a method that captures clay particles on a crystal, Purdue and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven research partners were able to produce, see and manipulate a single layer of clay. It would take 70,000 of these layers to equal the thickn

Anyone who buys a swayed plank of wood has to be, well, warped.

But a Texas forestry sciences researcher may have a straight-forward computer model just around the bend, saving millions for wood manufacturers and consumers.
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“Wood is an old material that has been used in construction for thousands of years,” said Dr. Zhiyong Cai, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station forest products researcher. “Every place in the world uses wood products, but there still are things we don