MRS Bulletin Materials News Podcast

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Murat Onen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about analog deep learning that could help lower the cost of training artificial intelligence (AI). The programmable analog device stores information in the same place where the information is processed. The resistor’s main material is tungsten oxide, w...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Monica Olvera de la Cruz of Northwestern University and her colleagues who gained insight into biochirality. By analyzing self-assembly for a series of amphiphiles, C n -K, consisting of an ionizable amino acid [lysine (K)] coupled to alkyl tails with n = 12, 14, or 16 carbons, the researchers found the degree of ionization is what cont...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Sergey Artyukhin from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Louis Ponet, who is affiliated with both the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa about a topologically protected switching phenomena in ferroic materials. When a multiferroic crystal (GdMn2O5) is placed in a magnetic field at a very particular...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Peter Gumbsch, who is affiliated with both the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials in Germany about gear-based mechanical metamaterials. The researchers offer a paradigm shift in design where—instead of choosing a material for a given application and compromising on materials propert...

Victor A. Rodriguez-Toro, a researcher in materials and devices and a science correspondent for MRS Bulletin, interviews Ayse Turak, Associate Professor of Engineering Physics and Director of the Centre for Emerging Device Technologies at McMaster University in Canada, about her group’s research in organic optoelectronics. Turak focuses her research on developing easy, versatile, and inexpensive m...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin ’s Sophia Chen interviews Bin Ouyang of Florida State University about making a better cathode for lithium ion batteries. The current use of cobalt and nickel in their cathodes causes Li-ion batteries to contract in volume and degrade. Ouyang and his colleagues simulated and then fabricated new cathode materials that do not use cobalt or nickel and also degrad...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews graduate student John Ahrens of Harvard University about challenges in bioprinting heart tissue. One challenge in particular is aligning the cells. Heart cells are narrow and rectangular in shape. In a natural heart, they line up in parallel to form aligned filaments. Those aligned filaments are built up into a larger tissue with more...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Laura Rossi from Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) and  Greg van Anders from the University of Michigan (USA) and Queen’s University (Canada) about advances they’ve made in colloidal preassembly in order to gain control in materials structure at a range of length scales. Through experiments and computer simulation, the re...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Adam Kubec at Swiss startup XRNanotech and research team member Marie-Christine Zdora of the Paul Scherrer Institut about their proof-of-principle of an x-ray achromatic lens. The lens consist of a focusing diffractive and a defocusing refractive optical element that achieves imaging of a range of wavelengths without having to move the...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Stephen Riffle interviews Jennifer Gelinas, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology and Institute for Genomic Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Dion Khodagholy, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, about their ionic communication system for implantable devices. The s...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Michael Dickey from North Carolina State University about his work manipulating liquid gallium. When submerged in an aqueous solution, liquid gallium will form a sphere. When fed by gravity through a thin nozzle that is surrounded by aqueous solution, it will instead flow into the shape of a wire. Passing an electrical current through t...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Yang Yang and Yepin Zhao of the University of California, Los Angeles about a dual-function p -type soft interlayer they developed to enhance efficiency of charge transfer in organic solar cells. With the introduction of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) as the p -type material, the researchers are able...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Kenjiro Fukuda from RIKEN in Japan and Masahito Takakuwa of Waseda University about a technique to connect integrated electronics while maintaining their flexibility. They demonstrated the method on two gold electrodes. To make the two pieces of gold bond, the researchers treated the gold with water vapor plasma. The researchers used t...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Stephen Riffle interviews Samuel Herberg from SUNY upstate medical university in Syracuse, New York about a new tool to study cell behavior. According to Herberg, culturing cells in an environment that reflects the materials properties of the human body can help reveal new insights into cell biology and mechanisms of disease. To do that, his research team ha...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews PhD candidate Laura Albero Blanquer and her professor, Jean-Marie Tarascon, from the Collège de France in Paris about their study on what occurs inside the cells of both liquid and solid-state batteries. They embedded the optical Fiber Bragg grating sensor that reflects monochromatic light, revealing a shift in the peak wavelength when...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Nate Hohman from The University of Connecticut about the structure of two chalcogenolates his group uncovered. By combining serial femtosecond crystallography —usually used to characterize large molecules—and a clique algorithm, Hohman’s group was able to analyze the structure of small molecules. With serial femtosecond crystallography,...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Carla Gomes, Michael Thompson, and Max Amsler of Cornell University about their robot, SARA—Scientific Autonomous Reasoning Agent. Unlike commonly known artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as the neural networks that enable image recognition, SARA performs within a closed loop system through a type of AI known as active lear...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin 's Prachi Patel interviews Liangbing Hu of the University of Maryland on research to mold and shape wood — a low-cost, sustainable material. Beginning with basswood, Hu's laboratory removed some of the lignin and fully dried this hardwood. As the wood dries, the cell walls contract. Wood also has hollow fibers and open channels, called vessels, all o...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin 's Sophia Chen interviews Zahra Fakhraai of the University of Pennsylvania on her group's research to better understand how a substance condenses into glass. They studied the liquid–liquid phase transition in vapor-deposited thin films of N,N0 -bis(3-methylphenyl)- N,N0 -diphenylbenzidine (TPD). They discovered a new high-density supercooled liquid p...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin 's Sophia Chen interviews Nima Rahbar of Worcester Polytechnic Institute on the use of an enzyme, carbonic anhydrase, that initiates self-healing in concrete. The enzyme catalyzes calcium in the cement to react with carbon dioxide from the air to form crystals of calcite, which repairs cracks. Rahbar's research group has demonstrated how the material...

Omar Fabian: It’s summer and film director James Cameron has just dropped another scorching hit. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day , we find mother-son duo Sarah and John Connor running for their lives, and for the lives of all humankind, with the help of a bad cyborg turned good played by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are so many undoubtedly cool visual features to take away from this...

Markus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and editor of the Impact section of MRS Bulletin interviews Desirée Plata, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT about her group’s development of new methods toward functionalization of carbon nanotubes with heteroatoms, which enables covalent attachment, opening...

MRS Bulletin ’s Impact editor Markus Buehler interviews Huajian Gao of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Bo Ni of Brown University on their development of a deep learning method to predict the elastic modulus field based on strain data that may be the result of an experiment. The method is highly efficient and offers real-time solutions to problems that usually require complex numeri...

In an interview with Gopal Rao from MRS Bulletin,  Cherie Kagan, the 2021 President of the Materials Research Society, discusses changes in the MRS Governance structure that provides greater engagement and empowerment of both volunteers and staff in alignment with the MRS mission. Changes include fewer committees but more “time bound” task forces and an independent nominating committee where MRS l...

As part of the MRS Communications 10th Anniversary event, Gopal Rao, Chief Editor for Technical Content at MRS, interviews David Morse, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Corning, about research, development, and innovations at Corning. They discuss Corning’s contributions to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s latest version of Gorilla glass, and Corning’s R&...