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Category: materials

By 2050, two-thirds of us wil be living in cities, so architects are taking inspiration from nature to build more sustainable skylines.

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The Wood Innovation and Design Centre
https://www.unbc.ca/engineering-graduate-program/wood-innovation-and-design-centre

Tokyo to build world’s tallest timber tower
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscrapers-timber-trend-catching-fire-duplicate-2/index.html
“The 70-story tower will be a hybrid structure made from 90% wooden materials. A steel vibration-control framework will underpin the design — an important feature in a city where earthquakes are frequent.”

A Lusher and Greener Singapore (URA and NParks Introduce Schemes to Promote Skyrise Greenery)
https://www.nparks.gov.sg/news/2009/4/a-lusher-and-greener-singapore-ura-and-nparks-introduce-schemes-to-promote-skyrise-greenery
“The greening of Singapore will literally move to greater heights with the launch of URA’s programme, LUSH. NParks is also introducing a pilot incentive scheme to encourage existing building owners to green up their rooftops.”

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CHICAGO — Four stories underground — encased in several feet of concrete — is the University of Chicago’s new nanofabrication facility, where researchers apply the principles of quantum physics to real-world problems and technologies.

A small cadre of faculty and graduate students in a clean room bathed in yellow light wear protective clothing to ensure the integrity of the experiments they are conducting, which involves the very matter that comprise the universe: electrons, photons, neutrons and protons.

The William Eckhardt Research Center where they are working is located across the street from where a team led by Enrico Fermi, the architect of the nuclear age, carried out the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

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Messed up is the right phrasing for it, I figure.

March 18 (UPI) — After a dead whale washed ashore in the Philippines, scientists pulled 88 pounds of plastic debris from the mammal’s intestines. The young Cuvier’s beaked whale died from gastric shock, according to biologists.

The necropsy was conducted by scientists at the D’ Bone Collector Museum. They were assigned by biologists with the Philippines Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources.

“This whale had the most plastic we have ever seen in a whale. It’s disgusting,” museum biologists wrote in a Facebook update. “Action must be taken by the government against those who continue to treat the waterways and ocean as dumpsters.”

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Discovery allows scientists to look at how 2-D materials move with ultrafast precision.

Using a never-before-seen technique, scientists have found a new way to use some of the world’s most powerful X-rays to uncover how move in a single atomic sheet at ultrafast speeds.

The study, led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and in collaboration with other institutions, including the University of Washington and DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, developed a new technique called ultrafast X-ray scattering. This technique revealed the changing structure of an atomically thin two-dimensional crystal after it was excited with an optical laser pulse.

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Traditionally, welding has been limited to materials that share similar properties, so it’s tough to make even aluminum and steel join forces. But now, scientists from Heriot-Watt University are claiming a breakthrough method that can weld together materials as different as glass and metal, thanks to ultrafast laser pulses.

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A recently discovered Weyl semimetal delivers the largest intrinsic conversion of light to electricity of any material, an international team lead by a group of Boston College researchers reports today in the journal Nature Materials.

The discovery is based on a unique aspect of the material where electrons can be separated by their chirality, or handedness—similar to DNA. The findings may offer a new route to efficient generation of electricity from light, as well as for thermal or .

“We discovered that the Weyl semimetal Tantalum Arsenide, has a colossal bulk photovoltaic effect—an intrinsic, or non-linear, generation of current from light more than ten times larger than ever previously achieved,” said Boston College Associate Professor of Physics Kenneth Burch, a lead author of the article, titled “Colossal mid-infrared bulk photovoltaic effect in a type-I Weyl semimetal.”

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A newly-discovered material made from squid teeth could one day replace man-made fibres like nylon and polyester, according to a review by scientists at Pennsylvania State University. This would help to reduce microplastic pollution in the oceans, as well as paving the way for new possibilities such as self-repairing safety clothing, or garments with built-in, flexible screens.

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Researchers at The University of Manchester in the UK have discovered that the Hall effect—a phenomenon well known for more than a century—is no longer as universal as it was thought to be.

In the research paper published in Science this week, the group led by Prof Sir Andre Geim and Dr. Denis Bandurin found that the Hall effect can even be signifcantly, if strongly interact with each other giving rise to a viscous flow. The new phenomenon is important at —something that can have important implications for when making electronic or .

Just like molecules in gases and liquids, electrons in solids frequently collide with each other and can thus behave like viscous fluids too. Such electron fluids are ideal to find new behaviours of materials in which are particularly strong. The problem is that most materials are rarely pure enough to allow electrons to enter the viscous regime. This is because they contain many impurities off which electrons can scatter before they have time to interact with each other and organise a viscous flow.

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