A novel nanoscale additive manufacturing technique termed Nanotribological Printing creates structures through tribomechanical and tribochemical surface interactions at the contact between a substrate and an atomic force microscope probe, where material pattern formation is driven by normal and shear contact stresses. This technique advances the field of nanomanufacturing by providing a versatile and easily accessible method...
Nov 13, 2018
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In recent years, black-phosphorus-analogue (BPA) two-dimensional materials have been demonstrated to exhibit promising optoelectronic performances and distinguished ambient stabilities, holding great promise in practical applications. In new work, researchers demonstrated that ultra-small 2D beta-lead oxide quantum dots showed fast carrier dynamics and significantly high photocurrent density and excellent ambient stability....
Nov 06, 2018
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The ability to produce ammonia efficiently from air and water at room temperature and ambient pressure is of great interest in agriculture where it is used in fertilizers. In particular, the electrochemical reduction of nitrogen, in which the conversion of nitrogen to ammonia takes place under mild conditions, is highly relevant for the chemical industry that needs to cope with increasing demands for ammonia and at the same...
Nov 05, 2018
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Researchers investigated the thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity of epoxy composites with high loading fractions of graphene and h-BN fillers. They found that the graphene fillers outperformed boron nitride fillers in terms of thermal conductivity enhancement. The surprising finding is that, in the high loading composites with quasi-2D fillers, the apparent cross-plane thermal conductivity of the fillers can be the...
Oct 30, 2018
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Researchers investigated the potentially protective role of nanoceria against oxidative stress associated with microgravity and cosmic radiations in space. Their findings support the application of antioxidant nanomaterials to skeletal muscle tissue culture for protection from the noxious effects of microgravity and cosmic radiations, which result in muscle mass and force loss and limit human operations and permanence in space....
Oct 29, 2018
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In the past few years, monolayer and multilayer silicenes have been successfully grown on various metal substrates. Unfortunately, silicene on metal substrate generally exhibits metallic or semi-metallic character without a bandgap, and thus cannot be used as adsorption layer of photovoltaic materials. A new comprehensive investigation of multilayer silicene by means of ab initio swarm-intelligence structure-searching method...
Oct 15, 2018
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A new study on worldwide graphene production shows unequivocally that the quality of the graphene produced in the world today is rather poor, not optimal for most applications, and most companies are producing graphite microplatelets. This is possibly the main reason for the slow development of graphene applications, which usually require a customized solution in terms of graphene properties. A conclusion that sounds even...
Oct 09, 2018
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For the most part, advances in energy storage will rely on the continuing development of materials science, pushing the limits of performance of existing battery materials and developing entirely new battery structures and compositions. The battery industry is already working to reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries, including by removing expensive cobalt from their positive electrodes. Researchers also are looking at the...
Oct 04, 2018
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Researchers have developed a new type of optical manipulation method to achieve versatile manipulation of objects with different sizes and types using optical heating. In this new technique, nanoparticles get trapped at temperature hot spots instead of electrical hot spots, which demonstrates a different working mechanism and approach from the traditional optical manipulation techniques. Due to this unique working principle,...
Oct 03, 2018
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