News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Lithium dendrites cause poor performance and even explosions in batteries with flammable liquid electrolytes. How these dendrites grow, even with a solid electrolytes, is still a mystery, but materials engineers at MTU and Oak Ridge study the conditions that enable dendrites and how to stop them.

Like animals and humans, plants possess a kind of immune system. It can e.g. recognize pathogenic fungi by the chitin in their cell walls, triggering disease resistance. Some fungi hide from the immune system by modifying some of the chitin building blocks, converting chitin into chitosan. Researchers of the University of Münster now found that plants can react to a certain pattern in this chitosan, stimulating their immune system.

Taking a thin film common in cell phone touchscreens, researchers have used liquid metal chemistry to shrink it from 3D to 2D. The ultra-thin and ultra-flexible electronic material could be printed and rolled out like newspaper, for the touchscreens of the future.

Halide perovskites have garnered attention because they're highly efficient at capturing energy in solar cells and efficient emitters in diodes. But researchers failed at making perovskite LEDs that emit blue light. UC Berkeley chemists succeeeded, but X-ray studies of the LED's structure show that it's very sensitive to temperature, humidity and chemical environment. Hence environmental and chemical control is essential for stable operation. But these properties also allow for potentially broader use, such as sensors.

New research done at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Huazhang University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, has exciting implications for secure data transfer across optical fiber networks.