In a recent report, Xiaolei Peng and a team of scientists in materials science and engineering at the University of Texas, U.S., and the Tsinghua University, China, developed opto-thermoelectric microswimmers bioinspired ...
As anyone who has ever straightened their hair knows, water is the enemy. Hair painstakingly straightened by heat will bounce back into curls the minute it touches water. Why? Because hair has shape memory. Its material properties ...
Artificial surfaces that can repel liquids have attracted significant attention across scientific and industrial platforms to create functional topological features. But the role of the underlying structures that are in contact ...
Ice-templating is a powerful technique to construct biological materials using ice nucleation and growth to obtain frozen material architectures, but scientists have been unable to control these two factors with effective ...
Silicon is widely used in the microelectronics industry although its photonics applications are restricted to the visible and partial near-infrared spectral range due to its fundamental optical bandgap. Researchers have therefore ...
Many natural surfaces can rapidly shed water droplets due to their water-repellent functionality. In 1945, scientists Cassie and Baxter linked the water-repellent function of natural surfaces to their surface textures. The ...
Protons are subatomic particles with a positive electric charge. Proton translocation plays a significant role in natural phenomena and manmade technologies. But it remains challenging to control proton conduction and fabrication ...
Converting carbon dioxide to methanol, a potentially renewable alternative fuel, offers an opportunity to simultaneously form an alternative fuel and cut down on carbon dioxide emissions.
They occur in nature, are reactive and play a role in many biological processes: polyenes. It is no wonder that chemists have for a long time been interested in efficiently constructing these compounds—not least in order ...
The discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is made by a jellyfish, transformed cell biology. It allowed scientists to stitch the GFP sequence to proteins from other organisms to trace their movements and interactions ...
