Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed three-dimensional (3-D) printing technology and techniques to create free-standing structures made of liquid metal at room temperature.
“It’s difficult to create structures out of liquids, because liquids want to bead up. But we’ve found that a liquid metal alloy of gallium and indium reacts to the oxygen in the air at room temperature to form a ‘skin’ that allows the liquid metal structures to retain their shapes,” says Dr. Michael Dickey, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. (more…)
At the heart of computing are tiny crystals that transmit and store digital information’s ones and zeroes. Today these are hard and brittle materials. But cheap, flexible, nontoxic organic molecules may play a role in the future of hardware.
A team led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Southeast University in China discovered a molecule that shows promise as an organic alternative to today’s silicon-based semiconductors. The findings, published this week in the journal Science, display properties that make it well suited to a wide range of applications in memory, sensing and low-cost energy storage. (more…)
Hands-on activities broaden engineering students’ view of thermodynamics
Carbon dioxide, candle wax, a hobby rocket and water would not seem to have much in common but they all were among the topics presented by 14 students in the Honors sections of the course MEEG341 Thermodynamics on Wednesday, Dec. 5, as a means to cement classroom learning.
“I want students to leave the course knowing there are many uses for what they learn in this class, learning that they can apply later on as real-world engineers,” said Lian-Ping Wang, a mechanical engineering professor who holds a joint appointment as professor of physical ocean science and engineering. (more…)
Berkeley Lab Researchers Unlock Ferromagnetic Secrets of Promising Materials
Spintronic technology, in which data is processed on the basis of electron “spin” rather than charge, promises to revolutionize the computing industry with smaller, faster and more energy efficient data storage and processing. Materials drawing a lot of attention for spintronic applications are dilute magnetic semiconductors – normal semiconductors to which a small amount of magnetic atoms is added to make them ferromagnetic. Understanding the source of ferromagnetism in dilute magnetic semiconductors has been a major road-block impeding their further development and use in spintronics. Now a significant step to removing this road-block has been taken.
A multi-institutional collaboration of researchers led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), using a new technique called HARPES, for Hard x-ray Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy, has investigated the bulk electronic structure of the prototypical dilute magnetic semiconductor gallium manganese arsenide. Their findings show that the material’s ferromagnetism arises from both of the two different mechanisms that have been proposed to explain it. (more…)
