Dec 15, 2021 (Nanowerk News) Manufacturers add synthetic antioxidants to plastics, rubbers and other polymers to make them last longer. However, the health effects of these compounds, and how readily they migrate into the environment, are largely unknown. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters ("Massive Emissions...
How to transform vacancies into quantum information
Dec 15, 2021 (Nanowerk News) “Vacancy” is a sign you want to see when searching for a hotel room on a road trip. When it comes to quantum materials, vacancies are also something you want to see. Scientists create them by removing atoms in crystalline materials. Such vacancies can serve...
Shape-morphing microrobots deliver drugs to cancer cells (w/video)
Dec 15, 2021 (Nanowerk News) Chemotherapy successfully treats many forms of cancer, but the side effects can wreak havoc on the rest of the body. Delivering drugs directly to cancer cells could help reduce these unpleasant symptoms. Now, in a proof-of-concept study, researchers reporting in ACS Nano ("Environmentally Adaptive Shape-Morphing...
New algorithm drives use of AI in material sciences
Dec 15, 2021 (Nanowerk News) The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in classical sciences such as chemistry, physics, or mathematics remains largely uncharted territory. Researchers from the Berlin Institute for the Foundation of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) at TU Berlin and Google Research have successfully developed an algorithm to precisely...
Scientists create stable materials for more efficient solar cells
Dec 15, 2021 (Nanowerk News) Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have developed a new process for producing stable perovskite materials to create more efficient solar cells. Crystalline silicon is the most widely used material for solar cells. However, over the last decade, perovskite solar cells, made from metal...
Flawed diamonds may provide perfect interface for quantum computers
Dec 15, 2021 (Nanowerk News) Flaws in diamonds — atomic defects where carbon is replaced by nitrogen or another element — may offer a close-to-perfect interface for quantum computing, a proposed communications exchange that promises to be faster and more secure than current methods. There’s one major problem, though: these...
Advancing photonics materials with cellular automation
Dec 15, 2021 (Nanowerk News) Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have designed a novel computational model that accurately predicts the properties of photonics materials, paving the way for next-generation photonics devices. Their findings, published in npj Computational Materials ("A scheme for simulating multi-level phase change...
Physicists see an unusual quantum phenomenon
Dec 14, 2021 (Nanowerk News) A highly unusual movement of light emitting particles in atomically-thin semiconductors was experimentally confirmed by scientists from the Würzburg–Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat–Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter. Electronic quasiparticles, known as excitons, seemed to move in opposite directions at the same time. Professor Alexey...