Will it appeal to your curiosity if you hear that someone is going to merge together two wonder materials: one that is beautifully coloured and another that is very flat, conductive, flexible and strong? The whole buzz in making modern displays is for ones that are flexible – televisions that can bend around walls and […]
Newly designed materials are allowing the creation of devices that generate electricity when they’re squashed or stretched. The trick is unscrambling the spaghetti of chains of atoms that makes the material up and stacking and ordering them to give this effect. It’s been shown that this can be achieved by forcing the material through a […]
One in three people in the UK know a family member or friend with dementia and the number of people suffering from this life shattering disease is rising rapidly as our population ages. Researchers at the University of Cambridge are developing super-resolution microscopes to watch the earliest steps in the progression of the disease at […]
Porphyrins are found in almost every life form on earth and we’ve been studying them for over 100 years, yet we still can’t tell you everything about these multifunctional cofactors. In the early days of porphyrin science the only way to get hold of these intensely coloured molecules was by visiting abattoirs, collecting pints of […]
The electronic devices that we use nowadays are made of silicon- one of the most abundant elements on the Earth, yet very difficult and expensive to convert into a smartphone. Sphagetti-like polymer molecules could change all that. For many years scientific research has been driven by a vision that in the future electronic devices could […]
On the nanoscale there is another world that we barely glimpse. How can we build things in it? In everyday life we can handle objects and glue them together. However on the nanoscale this is hard. As nanodevices are small, we often need a lot of them (billions) to accomplish a task. Even when we […]
Powering everyday technology with solar cells Sunlight is the most abundant source of energy on the planet. Photovoltaics – the science behind turning sunlight directly into electricity – has been studied for over 70 years and the result is the now familiar solar panels we see on roofs and in new ‘solar farms’ everywhere around […]
Development of tiny LED-like light sources can allow perfectly secure communications The semiconductor Gallium Nitride (GaN) has become famous in recent years for its applications in LED lighting. Its material properties allow for high efficiency, long lasting and nicely coloured bulbs to be created. The success of these LEDs relies on very small structures (several […]
Nanoparticle catalysis is used in every day, such as in catalytic converters, or large-scale industrial processes which for instance aim to connect carbon atoms together. The point of catalysis is to reduce the energy requirements of a reaction to make it faster and less expensive. The use of nanoparticle catalysts is beneficial due to the […]
Graphene is a two-dimensional material consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. It is now at the centre of an ever growing research effort owing to its unique properties which are interesting for both fundamental science and applications. Graphene development could impact products in many industries, from flexible, wearable […]