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The ultra-high-strength composite metal foam created by Afsaneh Rabiei is a highlight of a well-traveled career during which the researcher has tried to learn everything she can about advanced materials. The result: a brand new material that can save energy and lives. “Basically, it is a new material for all sorts of safety devices,” said Rabiei, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. Rabiei’s invention isn’t the first metal foam, but she says it’s the strongest. The main weakness of existing metal foams is the varying sizes of their cells — tiny pockets of space inside the material. Instead, Rabiei used cells of standard sizes and combined them with a metallic matrix to support the cell walls. That helps

And since the bulk steel is three times heavier than the steel foam, it’s easy to see how the foam could attract car manufacturers looking for a bumper that will improve safety and gas mileage. Rabiei sees plenty of uses for her invention, including in airplanes, boats, and structures that need impact protection with maintaining low weight. It’s this high strength-to-density ratio — defining a material that’s both strong and light — that makes Rabiei’s foam unique. “This material showed a much higher strength-to-density ratio than any metal foam that has ever been reported,” she said.

MATERIALS Understanding Materials Websites with useful information on materials in design

The Center for Composite Materials has synthesized flexible/rigid polyurethane foams from soybean oil polyols. The advantage of these foams is that they can replace petroleum-based materials (synthetic polyols) and can be used for many applications. The morphology of the foams can be controlled by several factors: the type and functionality of the soybean oil polyols, the type of curing agents, the amount of water, and the amount of catalyst. Both flexible and rigid foams can be developed from vegetable oils by implementing different processes. The biocontent of the foams varies from 33 to 96 weight percent. The use of this biodegradable, locally harvested, and renewable source has economic and environmental advantages that make it an attractive alternative to petroleum-based materials.

Researchers have found a way to make flexible silicon solar cells using only 1 percent of the material used in conventional solar cells. The cells are made of micron-sized silicon wires that are encased in a flexible polymer that can be rolled or bent.  The researchers at Cal Tech who developed the cells eventually see them being used in clothing, but, for now, the cells could create cheaper and easier-to-install solar panels. Large consumer electronic companies like Sharp have experimented with organic thin-film solar cells, which are flexible, but they're less efficient than those made with silicon.  This breakthrough is the latest in a recent crop of studies combining the efficiency of silicon (about 15 to 20 percent efficiency) with the flexibility of the organic thin-film cells, but this one has the distinction of using only 1/100th of the amount of silicon per cell as a traditional silicon wafer. An added bonus to this type of solar cell is that existing manufacturing technology could be used to make them, further helping to keep cost down.

ntumescent materials expand or swell when they are exposed to heat. Sometimes these materials are used for fire safety. In the case of this ink it is used to create a decorative effect.INVT.render({pid: 'expanding-ink'});This is the most interesting use of intumescent materials we have seen here at Inventables. We're interested to see how well it actually insulates your hand from the hot coffee.

A new invention out of the Imperial College of London could forever alter how we think about batteries — and powering cars for that matter. Researchers have patented a mixture of carbon fiber and polymer that can store and discharge electricity, meaning that eventually the body of your car could also be running its engine.

A team of researchers at the FOM institute AMOLF (The Netherlands) has succeeded for the first time in powering an energy transfer between nano-electromagnets with the magnetic field of light. This breakthrough is of major importance in the quest for magnetic 'meta-materials' with which light rays can be deflected in every possible direction. This could make it possible to produce perfect lenses, and in the fullness of time, even 'invisibility cloaks.'

Smart dudes at Nanosys are figuring out a way to make the colors of LED lights more vivid, while using the same amount of energy as current LEDs. How are they accomplishing this feat? Why, they're using nanotechnology, of course. They slather this nano goop over blue LED lights, because that color is the most energy-efficient. This strange semiconductor material changes the colors of those LEDs, resulting in a rainbow of hues that look a whole lot brighter. Best of all, this nanotech can make the color rendering index (CRI) of warm white light look a lot more appealing. Bravo. Expect to see this tech on laptop displays, HDTV screens, and lighting fixtures by the end of this year.

Graphene could someday replace silicon as a semiconductor material and make our chips smaller and faster, except for one tiny detail: it’s been rather hard to mess with its electronic properties. Until now. “We have experimentally realized and theoretically investigated, for the first time, perfect atomic wires in graphene,” Ivan Oleynik, one of the two University of South Florida professors behind the discovery, told Wired.com. Atomic wires are short chains of atoms that conduct electricity and so far, they have been hard to achieve in graphene.

This is the discovery that could put the College of Wooster on the map: glass that swells like a sponge.  Put together like a nano-matrix, the new glass can unfold to hold up to eight times its weight.  The glass binds with gasoline and other pollutants containing volatile organic compounds but it does not bind with water, so it acts like a “smart” sponge, capable of picking and choosing from contaminated groundwater.

Dubbed a "spaser", this minuscule lasing object is the latest by-product of a buzzing field known as nanoplasmonics. Just as microelectronics exploits the behaviour of electrons in metals and semiconductors on micrometre scales, so nanoplasmonics is concerned with the nanoscale comings and goings of entities known as plasmons that lurk on and below the surfaces of metals. To envisage what as plasmon is, imagine a metal as a great sea of freely moving electrons. When light of the right frequency strikes the surface of the metal, it can set up a wavelike oscillation in this electron sea, just as the wind whips up waves on the ocean. These collective electron waves - plasmons - act to all intents and purposes as light waves trapped in the metal's surface. Their wavelengths depend on the metal, but are generally measured in nanometres. Their frequencies span the terahertz range - equivalent to the frequency range of light from the ultraviolet right through the visible to the infrared.