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Category: materials

You only get one brain: The best helmet material for protecting your noggin

Though participation in sports can have positive impacts both physiologically and socially, extreme sports, like football and roller derby, come with elevated risks. In a 2019 study, over 40% of 498 athletes suffered at least one injury over the course of the year.

These injury rates are even higher in elite cricket—around 70%, with about 13% of all injuries being to the head, neck, and face—pointing to a need for improvements in protective helmets.

In AIP Advances, researchers from Chongqing Jiaotong University and Chongqing No. 7 Middle School compared the performance of three helmet materials under the most common types of impact and loading conditions.

Scientists Create the Impossible: New Compound Challenges Fundamental Principle of Chemistry

Once thought unlikely, this new finding in coordination chemistry could lead to promising advances in catalysis and materials science.

For more than 100 years, the widely accepted 18-electron rule has been a foundational guideline in organometallic chemistry. Now, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have synthesized a new organometallic compound that challenges this principle. They developed a stable 20-electron version of ferrocene, an iron-based metal-organic complex, which could open new directions in chemical research.

“For many transition metal complexes, they are most stable when surrounded by 18 formal valence electrons. This is a chemical rule of thumb on which many key discoveries in catalysis and materials science are based,” said Dr. Satoshi Takebayashi, lead author of the paper published in Nature Communications.

A promising pathway for the electrical switching of altermagnetism

The ability to switch magnetism, or, in other words, to change the orientation of a material’s magnetic moments, using only electricity, could open new opportunities for the efficient storage of data in hard drives and other magnetic memory devices. While the electrical switching of magnetism has been a long-sought-after research goal, it has so far proved to be difficult to realize.

Researchers at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in China and Peking University, led by Prof. Haizhou Lu and Prof. X. C. Xie, recently demonstrated the electrical switching of a particular form of magnetism known as altermagnetism, which was first discovered in 2022.

Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, could have important implications for the development of new technologies based on altermagnetic materials that can be controlled with electrical currents, without the need for external magnetic fields.

SpaceX officially announced Starship Flight 10 Launch Date after…No More This Month!

🧑🚀 Q: What are the details of the upcoming Crew-11 mission? A: Crew-11 is set to launch on July 31st, 2025, with NASA astronaut Zena Cartman as commander, for a 6-month stay on the ISS.

Technical Improvements.

🔧 Q: What new system has SpaceX installed at Pad A for Starship? A: SpaceX installed a new Ship Quick Disconnect (QD) system at Pad A, which is smaller, temporary, and designed for static fire tests only.

🪂 Q: What upgrades have been made to the Dragon spacecraft Endeavor? A: Endeavor now features the Drogue 3.1 parachute system with reinforced crown material and a new packing system for more controlled deployment.

Program Challenges.

🚁 Q: What issues is Boeing’s Starliner program facing? A: Starliner is experiencing helium leaks and thermal management problems affecting its thrusters, delaying the next mission.

Continue reading “SpaceX officially announced Starship Flight 10 Launch Date after…No More This Month!” | >

These microlasers light up your food — and then you can eat them

Scientists have reimagined the meaning of a “light meal,” creating microlasers that use natural products to emit illuminated beams through food. And they’re completely edible. These mini lights, the first demonstration of laser emission from an entirely edible system, could be harnessed for everything from environmental sensors to food safety trackers and bio-barcodes.

Scientists from Slovenia’s Jožef Stefan Institute have successfully created “edible microlasers,” which are exactly what they sound like – tiny optical devices, smaller than a grain of sand, that emit a beam of coherent light like normal lasers. And they’re made out of biocompatible and digestible materials like gelatin, sugar and dyes, including additives already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), meaning they’re perfectly safe to ingest.

Why, you may ask? Because they’re tiny and safe to eat, with fluorescent compounds such as chlorophyll (from olive oil) and riboflavin (vitamin B2), they could be widely applicable for use in food safety to track supply chain data, detect temperature changes and spoilage, prevent counterfeit goods or even act as QR or bar codes.

A new mechanism to realize spin-selective transport in tungsten diselenide

Spintronics are promising devices that work utilizing not only the charge of electrons, like conventional electronics, but also their spin (i.e., their intrinsic angular momentum). The development of fast and energy-efficient spintronic devices greatly depends on the identification of materials with a tunable spin-selective conductivity, which essentially means that engineers can control how electrons with different spin orientations move through these materials, ideally using external magnetic or electric fields.

Marine fungi degrade plastic and can be conditioned to do it faster

Plastics are a prevalent and persistent pollutant in the environment. As plastic production increases, finding ways to degrade these recalcitrant polymers is paramount. Many terrestrial fungi, across the kingdom, degrade various types of plastic. Plastics are the fastest-growing habitat in the oceans, and we hypothesized that fungi isolated from the ocean would demonstrate high success rates in degrading polyurethane (PU). To test this, visual degradation assays were performed by inoculating 1% PU medium with 68 different fungal strains cultured from marine habitats. The area of clearance of the fungus was measured periodically, to determine a relative degradation rate. Of the 68 fungal strains, 42 demonstrated the ability to degrade PU.

Twist To the M-ax(is): New Twist Platform Opens Path to Quantum Simulation of More Exotic States of Matter

Researchers introduce a new class of twistable materials, unlocking unprecedented quantum possibilities. Twisted materials—known as moiré structures—have revolutionized modern physics, emerging as today’s “alchemy” by creating entirely new phases of matter through simple geometric manipulation. The term “moiré” may sound familiar—it describes the st