Materials Sciences

It looks like glass and feels like solidified smoke, but the most interesting features of the new silica aerogels made by UC Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers are too small to see or feel. Lighter than styrofoam, this strange material is riddled with pores just nanometers in size, leaving it 98 percent empty.

Water can soak into the material, but in the confined space the water molecules arrange themselves in unusual ways, said Subhash Risbud, professor of chemica

A stable cluster of aluminum atoms, Al13, acts as a single entity in chemical reactions, demonstrating properties similar to those of a halogen, reports a research team led by A. Welford Castleman Jr., the Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Physics and the Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in Science at Penn State, in a paper to be published in the 2 April 2004 issue of the journal Science. Experimental results and theoretical calculations indicate that the cluster chemically resembles a “superhalo

Today’s advanced materials have become extremely complex in chemistry, structure and function, which means scientists need faster, more efficient ways to model and test new designs.

J. Carson Meredith, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has pioneered combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput screening in polymer science – techniques that allow researchers to create and evaluate thousands of polymeric materials in a

Ames Laboratory researchers studying self-assembling polymers

A group of bioinspired polymers are being studied by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory to understand how they are able to form and react to stimuli similar to the way proteins, lipids and DNA react in nature. Unlocking how these soluble block polymers are able to self-assemble could potentially lead to a variety of uses such as controlled release systems for sustained and modulated delivery of d

Granular materials – which include everything from coal to coco pops – are physical substances that don’t quite fit into any of the known phases of matter: solid, liquid, or gas.

Keep the grains under pressure, vacuum-packed coffee for example, and you have solid-like behaviour; open the pack and pour it into a container and suddenly the grains flow freely like a liquid.

The changing personalities of granular materials can have devastating implications, for example the distur

Increases versatility of conducting polymers

A powerful one-step, “chain growth” method should make it easier to design and synthesize a variety of highly conductive polymers for different research and commercial applications, according to a presentation by the method’s developer, Carnegie Mellon University chemist Richard McCullough. McCullough, dean of the Mellon College of Science and professor of chemistry, is reporting his research Tuesday, March 30, at the 227th annual meet