MRS Bulletin Materials News Podcast

Markus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor of the Impact section of MRS Bulletin interviews Julia Greer, director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at the California Institute of Technology about her research on the formation and nanomechanical behavior of electrodeposited lithium for Li-ion batteries. Greer’s group developed an in situ experimental methodology that al...

Gopal Rao, chief editor for technical content, interviews Markus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor of the Impact section of MRS Bulletin about his research on designing new proteins. Buehler’s group trains a deep learning model whose architecture is composed of several long short-term memory units from data consisting of musical representations of proteins classified...

Materials science and engineering has an important role to play in overcoming the current COVID-19 pandemic. Listen to Science Writer Philip Ball talk with three materials researchers, Catherine Fromen (University of Delaware), Thomas Webster (Northeastern University), and George Stylios (Heriott-Watt University, Edinburgh) about their work in different aspects of materials science to mitigate the...

Vinayak Dravid, the Abraham Harris Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University and with Vikas Nandwana, who is co-founder and CTO of MFNS Tech, introduce the oleophilic, hydrophobic, and magnetic (OHM) sponge. The OHM smart sponge was awarded 3rd place in the iMatSci Innovation Showcase competition at the 2019 MRS Fall meeting. For more information, see Industrial &am...

Rigoberto C. Advincula of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Editor in Chief of MRS Communications, discusses the role of materials and additive manufacturing on the personal protective equipment (PPE) supply chain during the new coronavirus pandemic. For more information, see “Additive Manufacturing for COVID-19: Devices, Materials, Prospects and Challeng...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Jennifer Dionne from Stanford University about the origin of photonic emissions in the quantum material hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). Read the article in Nature Materials. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Many researchers are hotly anticipating quantum technology, a new paradigm that exploits the mathematics of quantum mechanics. But researchers are still developing...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Stephen Balmert of the University of PIttsburgh about a patch delivery method of a vaccine to counter COVID-19. Read the article in EBioMedicine . Transcript CHEN: To prevent the spread of Covid-19 in the long term, we will almost certainly need a vaccine against the disease. Stephen Balmert, a biomedical engineer from the University of Pittsburgh, is part of...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Pelayo Garcia de Arquer of the University of Toronto in Canada about a catalyst-ionomer architecture his group designed to quickly convert CO2 into useful hydrocarbons. Read the abstract in Science . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: The challenge for the world to reduce carbon emissions is steep. To reduce these emissions in the long run, some scientists believe it wi...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Dan Walkup of the National Institute of Standards and Technlogy about an unusual concentric quantum dot structure created in graphene. Read the abstract in Physical Review B . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Physicist Dan Walkup has a mystery on his hands. Working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, his team has engineered...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Tina Škorjanc, a PhD student at New York University in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and her professor Dinesh Shetty at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, about porphyrin–based covalent organic frameworks they developed that remove the toxic substance bromate from drinking water. Read the article in Chemical Science . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Drinking wat...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel about a strain of E. coli his team developed that generates all its biomass from carbon dioxide. Their work was achieved through a technique called adaptive laboratory evolution, that is, evolutionary selection. Read the article in Cell . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Inside a lab at the Weizmann Institute of...

Prachi Patel of MRS Bulletin interviews Kevin Yager and Masafumi Fukuto of Brookhaven National Laboratory about an artificial intelligence algorithm they designed that analyzes data and then decides what should be measured next. In their first autonomous experiment, the researchers used x-ray scattering to map the boundaries of a droplet where nanoparticles segregate. Read the article in Scientifi...

Omar Fabián of MRS Bulletin interviews Ju Li of Massachusetts Institute of Technology about applying machine learning to elastic strain engineering of semiconductor materials at the nanoscale. The research team presents a framework for guiding strain engineering whereby materials properties and performance could be designed. Read the article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Tra...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Frankie Rawson of the University of Nottingham, UK, about wirelessly manipulating the electrical behavior of living cells. His research group does so by applying an external voltage to Au nanoparticles inserted into the cell. The voltage causes a molecule attached to each Au nanoparticle to undergo a redox reaction, in which atoms give up or accept electrons...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Nicholas Butch of the National Institute of Standards and Technology about the evidence of topological states found in UTe2. These could possibly function as topological qubits, a favorable “hardware” for quantum computers that should not require error correction. Read the article in Science . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Recently, you may have heard that Google’s...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Jason Smith of the University of Oxford about using ultrashort pulse laser processing to engineer nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond that can then perform as qubits in quantum computers. Read the article in Optica . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Quantum computers promise to be much faster than conventional computers at solving certain problems, such as in chemistr...

Philip Ball of MRS Bulletin interviews Yet-Ming Chiang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about their Google-sponsored elaborate study on cold fusion. The investigations have provided new insights into highly hydrided metals and low-energy nuclear reactions, with much interesting science yet to be explored. Read the multi-authored Perspective in Nature .

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill stabilize solar cells by converting the surfaces of lead halide perovskites to water-insoluble lead oxysalt, as reported in Science . Researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science open a new path to defect management in materials by providing insight into the low defect density of halide perovskites, as reported in Materials Horizon .  ...

Prachi Patel of MRS Bulletin interviews Carmel Majidi of Carnegie Mellon University about utilizing atom transfer radical polymerization to create liquid metal–polymer hybrid materials with high stability, excellent dispersibility, and tunable mechanical and optical properties. Read the article in Nature Nanotechnology . Transcript PATEL: Rubbers and plastics have snuck into hundreds of products w...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Jason Azoulay of the University of Southern Mississippi about his conjugated polymer semiconductor, a promising candidate for technologies that integrate both conventional electronics and spintronics. Read the article in Science Advances . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Conventional electronics like your smartphone or computer use the voltage and current of electron...

Research on perovskites has progressed rapidly for PV and LEDs, with new solar-cell efficiency records being set at a regular pace. There are hints of the first commercial products reaching the market by 2020, just a decade since perovskite photovoltaics were first discovered. MRS Bulletin presents the impact of a recent advance in this burgeoning field. Read the abstract in the Journal of the Ame...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Renkun Chen of the University of California, San Diego about his flexible thermoelectric devices that can provide personalized cooling and heating effects in clothing. Read the article in Science Advances . Transcript Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: If you’ve ever had to pay an air conditioning bill during the summer, you know how expensive it gets. Renkun Chen is a...

Prachi Patel of MRS Bulletin interviews Benjamin C.-K. Tee of the National University of Singapore about an interfacial design for stretchable electronics that uses three-dimensional helical copper micro-interconnects embedded in an elastic rubber substrate. Read the article in APL Materials . Transcript PRACHI PATEL: Metals are excellent at conducting electricity but not the best at being stretch...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Alex Hexemer of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and Daniela Ushizima and Shuai Liu of the University of California, Berkeley about their design of multiple Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to classify nanoparticle orientation in a thin film by learning scattering patterns. Read the article in MRS Communications . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN...

Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Barbara Mazzolai and Edoardo Sinibaldi of the Italian Institute of Technology about their robot made from two types of polymers, enabling it to extend and retract like the tendrils of a plant. Read the article in Nature Communications . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Barbara Mazzolai is designing robots inspired by plants. Recently, she and her research team at the...