Biorefinery facilities are critical to fueling the economy—converting wood chips, grass clippings, and other biological materials into fuels, heat, power, and chemicals.
Sergei Kalinin of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory knows that seeing something is not the same as understanding it.
Rice University researchers have learned to manipulate two-dimensional materials to design in defects that enhance the materials’ properties.
It’s not enough to design new drugs. For drugs to be effective, they have to be delivered safely and intact to affected areas of the body. And drug delivery, much like drug design, is an immensely complex task.
The lighter wand for your gas BBQ, a submarine’s sonar device and the ultrasound machine at your doctor’s office all rely on piezoelectric materials, which turn mechanical stress into electrical energy, and vice versa.
Catalysts make chemical reactions more likely to occur. In most cases, a catalyst that’s good at driving chemical reactions in one direction is bad at driving reactions in the opposite direction.
Epitaxy, or growing crystalline film layers that are templated by a crystalline substrate, is a mainstay of manufacturing transistors and semiconductors.
Steady progress in the development of advanced materials has led to modern civilization’s foundational technologies—better batteries, resilient building materials and atom-scale semiconductors.
In the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, the state of the art of materials science defined technology’s zenith and accelerated economies.