MRS Bulletin Materials News Podcast
111 episodes - English - Latest episode: 16 days ago - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsMaterials News podcast by MRS Bulletin provides breakthrough news & interviews with researchers on hot topics including biomaterials, quantum materials, artificial intelligence, sustainability, perovskites, and robotics. Produced by the Materials Research Society.
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Episodes
Episode 10: Gallium-based liquid metal manipulated without physical contact
June 07, 2022 20:00 - 4 minutes - 3.27 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Michael Dickey from North Carolina State University about his work manipulating liquid gallium. When submerged in an aqueous solution, liquid gallium will form a sphere. When fed by gravity through a thin nozzle that is surrounded by aqueous solution, it will instead flow into the shape of a wire. Passing an electrical current through the liquid metal wire means that a magnetic field is created, which means the wire can be shaped ...
Episode 9: Semi-transparent organic PV achieves dual function
June 01, 2022 20:00 - 4 minutes - 2.94 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Yang Yang and Yepin Zhao of the University of California, Los Angeles about a dual-function p-type soft interlayer they developed to enhance efficiency of charge transfer in organic solar cells. With the introduction of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) as the p-type material, the researchers are able to improve the efficiency of the device as well as change its optical distribution. One goal for s...
Episode 8: Water vapor plasma bonds gold electrodes for flexible electronics
May 06, 2022 14:00 - 3 minutes - 2.44 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Kenjiro Fukuda from RIKEN in Japan and Masahito Takakuwa of Waseda University about a technique to connect integrated electronics while maintaining their flexibility. They demonstrated the method on two gold electrodes. To make the two pieces of gold bond, the researchers treated the gold with water vapor plasma. The researchers used this technique to electrically connect the gold electrodes of an organic photovoltaic to an organ...
Episode 7: Tunable biomimetic hydrogel informs cell behavior
April 27, 2022 10:00 - 7 minutes - 5.53 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Stephen Riffle interviews Samuel Herberg from SUNY upstate medical university in Syracuse, New York about a new tool to study cell behavior. According to Herberg, culturing cells in an environment that reflects the materials properties of the human body can help reveal new insights into cell biology and mechanisms of disease. To do that, his research team has created a hydrogel using natural polymers. Through UV and chemically induced crosslinking, Her...
Episode 6: Embedded sensor pinpoints stress inside batteries
April 19, 2022 15:00 - 4 minutes - 3.29 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews PhD candidate Laura Albero Blanquer and her professor, Jean-Marie Tarascon, from the Collège de France in Paris about their study on what occurs inside the cells of both liquid and solid-state batteries. They embedded the optical Fiber Bragg grating sensor that reflects monochromatic light, revealing a shift in the peak wavelength when there is a change in temperature, pressure, or stress. The sensors were calibrated so that only ...
Episode 5: Small molecule structure uncovered via femtosecond-crystallography & algorithm
April 04, 2022 14:00 - 4 minutes - 3.13 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Nate Hohman from The University of Connecticut about the structure of two chalcogenolates his group uncovered. By combining serial femtosecond crystallography —usually used to characterize large molecules—and a clique algorithm, Hohman’s group was able to analyze the structure of small molecules. With serial femtosecond crystallography, large molecules like proteins produce thousands of spots on the detector; in contrast, small mo...
Episode 4: Meet research team member SARA
March 18, 2022 16:00 - 5 minutes - 3.53 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Carla Gomes, Michael Thompson, and Max Amsler of Cornell University about their robot, SARA—Scientific Autonomous Reasoning Agent. Unlike commonly known artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as the neural networks that enable image recognition, SARA performs within a closed loop system through a type of AI known as active learning, which allows the system to reason without a lot of training data. Within 30 minutes, SARA ...
Episode 3: “Water-shocked” wood becomes moldable
February 14, 2022 11:00 - 3 minutes - 2.68 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin's Prachi Patel interviews Liangbing Hu of the University of Maryland on research to mold and shape wood — a low-cost, sustainable material. Beginning with basswood, Hu's laboratory removed some of the lignin and fully dried this hardwood. As the wood dries, the cell walls contract. Wood also has hollow fibers and open channels, called vessels, all of which close up as the material dries. The wood is then shocked with water, leaving it with partially open...
Episode 2: Glasses found denser than the supercooled liquid
February 07, 2022 14:00 - 4 minutes - 3.28 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin's Sophia Chen interviews Zahra Fakhraai of the University of Pennsylvania on her group's research to better understand how a substance condenses into glass. They studied the liquid–liquid phase transition in vapor-deposited thin films of N,N0-bis(3-methylphenyl)-N,N0-diphenylbenzidine (TPD). They discovered a new high-density supercooled liquid phase in glasses deposited in the thickness range of 25-55 nm. Their findings could lead to more precise theore...
Episode 2: Glasses found denser than the supercooled liquid
February 07, 2022 14:00 - 4 minutes - 3.28 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin's Sophia Chen interviews Zahra Fakhraai of the University of Pennsylvania on her group's research to better understand how a substance condenses into glass. They studied the liquid–liquid phase transition in vapor-deposited thin films of N,N0-bis(3-methylphenyl)-N,N0-diphenylbenzidine (TPD). They discovered a new high-density supercooled liquid phase in glasses deposited in the thickness range of 25-55 nm. Their findings could lead to more precise theore...
Episode 1: Self-healing concrete relies on enzyme-driven mechanism
January 11, 2022 19:00 - 3 minutes - 2.81 MBIn this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin's Sophia Chen interviews Nima Rahbar of Worcester Polytechnic Institute on the use of an enzyme, carbonic anhydrase, that initiates self-healing in concrete. The enzyme catalyzes calcium in the cement to react with carbon dioxide from the air to form crystals of calcite, which repairs cracks. Rahbar's research group has demonstrated how the material can heal millimeter-wide cracks. Ubiquitous concrete is responsible for 8% of human-made greenhouse gases,...
Episode 4: CareGum stretches, conducts electricity, and heals itself
October 11, 2021 10:00 - 9 minutes - 6.3 MBOmar Fabian: It’s summer and film director James Cameron has just dropped another scorching hit. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, we find mother-son duo Sarah and John Connor running for their lives, and for the lives of all humankind, with the help of a bad cyborg turned good played by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are so many undoubtedly cool visual features to take away from this iconic film. Little known fact: it actually won four Academy awards for its sound and visual effe...
CareGum stretches, conducts electricity, and heals itself
October 11, 2021 10:00 - 9 minutes - 6.3 MBOmar Fabian: It’s summer and film director James Cameron has just dropped another scorching hit. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, we find mother-son duo Sarah and John Connor running for their lives, and for the lives of all humankind, with the help of a bad cyborg turned good played by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are so many undoubtedly cool visual features to take away from this iconic film. Little known fact: it actually won four Academy awards for its sound and visual effe...
Desirée Plata: Functionalization of CNTs with heteroatoms
September 14, 2021 14:00 - 18 minutes - 12.7 MBMarkus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and editor of the Impact section of MRS Bulletin interviews Desirée Plata, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT about her group’s development of new methods toward functionalization of carbon nanotubes with heteroatoms, which enables covalent attachment, opening up a world of potential materials structures. This research is relevant because common functiona...
Episode 3: Desirée Plata: Functionalization of CNTs with heteroatoms
September 14, 2021 14:00 - 18 minutes - 12.7 MBMarkus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and editor of the Impact section of MRS Bulletin interviews Desirée Plata, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT about her group’s development of new methods toward functionalization of carbon nanotubes with heteroatoms, which enables covalent attachment, opening up a world of potential materials structures. This research is relevant because common functiona...
Episode 2: Gao and Ni on a deep learning method to predict elastic modulus field
March 24, 2021 11:00 - 26 minutes - 18.3 MBMRS Bulletin’s Impact editor Markus Buehler interviews Huajian Gao of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Bo Ni of Brown University on their development of a deep learning method to predict the elastic modulus field based on strain data that may be the result of an experiment. The method is highly efficient and offers real-time solutions to problems that usually require complex numerical methods that rely on variational methods to solve elasticity problems, like finite element an...
Episode 1: Cherie Kagan, 2021 MRS President, on the MRS governance structure
February 10, 2021 17:00 - 9 minutes - 6.71 MBIn an interview with Gopal Rao from MRS Bulletin, Cherie Kagan, the 2021 President of the Materials Research Society, discusses changes in the MRS Governance structure that provides greater engagement and empowerment of both volunteers and staff in alignment with the MRS mission. Changes include fewer committees but more “time bound” task forces and an independent nominating committee where MRS looks at the opportunity in this structure to create greater diversity in the leadership of the So...
Episode 14: David Morse on Corning R&D in materials science
November 24, 2020 18:00 - 21 minutes - 15.1 MBAs part of the MRS Communications 10th Anniversary event, Gopal Rao, Chief Editor for Technical Content at MRS, interviews David Morse, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Corning, about research, development, and innovations at Corning. They discuss Corning’s contributions to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s latest version of Gorilla glass, and Corning’s R&D efforts in ceramics as well as the role of industrial R&D labs in the research enterprise.
Episode 13: Julia Greer: From ion to atom to dendrite
November 24, 2020 17:00 - 18 minutes - 12.5 MBMarkus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor of the Impact section of MRS Bulletin interviews Julia Greer, director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at the California Institute of Technology about her research on the formation and nanomechanical behavior of electrodeposited lithium for Li-ion batteries. Greer’s group developed an in situ experimental methodology that allows them to electrochemically charge small-scale battery cells and to observe, in real-time, th...
Episode 12: Markus Buehler on de novo protein design
October 27, 2020 20:00 - 23 minutes - 16 MBGopal Rao, chief editor for technical content, interviews Markus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor of the Impact section of MRS Bulletin about his research on designing new proteins. Buehler’s group trains a deep learning model whose architecture is composed of several long short-term memory units from data consisting of musical representations of proteins classified by certain features. Their work is published in APL Bioengineering (doi:10.1063/1.5133026). Ma...
Episode 11: Materials research & COVID-19
September 14, 2020 18:00 - 44 minutes - 30.3 MBMaterials science and engineering has an important role to play in overcoming the current COVID-19 pandemic. Listen to Science Writer Philip Ball talk with three materials researchers, Catherine Fromen (University of Delaware), Thomas Webster (Northeastern University), and George Stylios (Heriott-Watt University, Edinburgh) about their work in different aspects of materials science to mitigate the pandemic. They cover various aspects, including drug delivery for immune engineering for COVID-...
Episode 10: Vinayak Dravid & Vikas Nandwana on the OHM smart sponge
September 01, 2020 13:00 - 19 minutes - 13.2 MBVinayak Dravid, the Abraham Harris Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University and with Vikas Nandwana, who is co-founder and CTO of MFNS Tech, introduce the oleophilic, hydrophobic, and magnetic (OHM) sponge. The OHM smart sponge was awarded 3rd place in the iMatSci Innovation Showcase competition at the 2019 MRS Fall meeting. For more information, see Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research (doi:10.1021/acs.iecr.0c01493).
Episode 9: Rigoberto C. Advincula on additive manufacturing for COVID-19
August 17, 2020 20:00 - 13 minutes - 9.47 MBRigoberto C. Advincula of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Editor in Chief of MRS Communications, discusses the role of materials and additive manufacturing on the personal protective equipment (PPE) supply chain during the new coronavirus pandemic. For more information, see “Additive Manufacturing for COVID-19: Devices, Materials, Prospects and Challenges,” MRS Communications.
Episode 8: Atomic defects cause quantum emitters in hBN
April 29, 2020 16:00 - 5 minutes - 3.71 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Jennifer Dionne from Stanford University about the origin of photonic emissions in the quantum material hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). Read the article in Nature Materials. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Many researchers are hotly anticipating quantum technology, a new paradigm that exploits the mathematics of quantum mechanics. But researchers are still developing the so-called quantum materials to build these devices and connect them in a future quantum int...
Episode 8: Atomic defects form quantum emitters in hBN
April 29, 2020 16:00 - 5 minutes - 3.71 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Jennifer Dionne from Stanford University about the origin of photonic emissions in the quantum material hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). Read the article in Nature Materials. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Many researchers are hotly anticipating quantum technology, a new paradigm that exploits the mathematics of quantum mechanics. But researchers are still developing the so-called quantum materials to build these devices and connect them in a future quantum int...
Episode 7: Microneedle array key to deliver vaccine against COVID-19
April 14, 2020 19:00 - 5 minutes - 3.7 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Stephen Balmert of the University of PIttsburgh about a patch delivery method of a vaccine to counter COVID-19. Read the article in EBioMedicine. Transcript CHEN: To prevent the spread of Covid-19 in the long term, we will almost certainly need a vaccine against the disease. Stephen Balmert, a biomedical engineer from the University of Pittsburgh, is part of an international collaboration that has made such a candidate vaccine for Covid-19. They’ve test...
Episode 6: Catalyst design speeds up CO2 conversion to carbon products
March 30, 2020 22:00 - 4 minutes - 3.4 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Pelayo Garcia de Arquer of the University of Toronto in Canada about a catalyst-ionomer architecture his group designed to quickly convert CO2 into useful hydrocarbons. Read the abstract in Science. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: The challenge for the world to reduce carbon emissions is steep. To reduce these emissions in the long run, some scientists believe it will be necessary to extract carbon dioxide from the air. But once you extract all that carbon dio...
Episode 5: Coupled-QD system in graphene reveals puzzling charging patterns
March 16, 2020 18:00 - 4 minutes - 3.33 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Dan Walkup of the National Institute of Standards and Technlogy about an unusual concentric quantum dot structure created in graphene. Read the abstract in Physical Review B . Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Physicist Dan Walkup has a mystery on his hands. Working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, his team has engineered a strange phenomenon in the 2D material graphene using a scanning tunneling microscope, or STM....
Episode 4: Toxic bromate removed from drinking water
February 27, 2020 17:00 - 5 minutes - 3.98 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Tina Škorjanc, a PhD student at New York University in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and her professor Dinesh Shetty at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, about porphyrin–based covalent organic frameworks they developed that remove the toxic substance bromate from drinking water. Read the article in Chemical Science. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Drinking water: Whether it’s out of the tap, the refrigerator, or a bottle, we expect it to be clean. Water ...
Episode 3: E.coli evolved to eat CO2
February 13, 2020 13:00 - 5 minutes - 4.05 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel about a strain of E. coli his team developed that generates all its biomass from carbon dioxide. Their work was achieved through a technique called adaptive laboratory evolution, that is, evolutionary selection. Read the article in Cell. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Inside a lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, biologist Ron Milo and his team have engineered a strain of E.coli with an u...
Episode 2: AI steers autonomous x-ray scattering experiments
January 29, 2020 16:00 - 3 minutes - 2.61 MBPrachi Patel of MRS Bulletin interviews Kevin Yager and Masafumi Fukuto of Brookhaven National Laboratory about an artificial intelligence algorithm they designed that analyzes data and then decides what should be measured next. In their first autonomous experiment, the researchers used x-ray scattering to map the boundaries of a droplet where nanoparticles segregate. Read the article in Scientific Reports. PRACHI PATEL: Discovering new materials takes an enormous amount of time. You make ...
Episode 2: AI steers autonomous x-ray scattering experiments
January 29, 2020 16:00 - 3 minutes - 2.61 MBPrachi Patel of MRS Bulletin interviews Kevin Yager and Masafumi Fukuto of Brookhaven National Laboratory about an artificial intelligence algorithm they designed that analyzes data and then decides what should be measured next. In their first autonomous experiment, the researchers used x-ray scattering to map the boundaries of a droplet where nanoparticles segregate. Read the article in Scientific Reports. PRACHI PATEL: Discovering new materials takes an enormous amount of time. You make ...
Episode 1: Strain engineering guided by machine learning
January 13, 2020 15:00 - 6 minutes - 4.61 MBOmar Fabián of MRS Bulletin interviews Ju Li of Massachusetts Institute of Technology about applying machine learning to elastic strain engineering of semiconductor materials at the nanoscale. The research team presents a framework for guiding strain engineering whereby materials properties and performance could be designed. Read the article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Transcript OMAR FABIÁN: There are innumerable ways to alter a material’s properties. For crystallin...
Episode 24: Gold nanoparticles modify electrical behavior inside living cells
December 18, 2019 18:00 - 3 minutes - 2.65 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Frankie Rawson of the University of Nottingham, UK, about wirelessly manipulating the electrical behavior of living cells. His research group does so by applying an external voltage to Au nanoparticles inserted into the cell. The voltage causes a molecule attached to each Au nanoparticle to undergo a redox reaction, in which atoms give up or accept electrons from each other. Read the abstract in Applied Nano Materials. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Tiny elect...
Episode 23: Spin-triplet superconductivity discovered in uranium ditelluride
November 21, 2019 19:00 - 4 minutes - 3.04 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Nicholas Butch of the National Institute of Standards and Technology about the evidence of topological states found in UTe2. These could possibly function as topological qubits, a favorable “hardware” for quantum computers that should not require error correction. Read the article in Science. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Recently, you may have heard that Google’s quantum computer executed an algorithm a billion times faster than a conventional computer. But...
Episode 22: NV center qubits engineered optically for quantum computers
November 21, 2019 15:00 - 4 minutes - 3.18 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Jason Smith of the University of Oxford about using ultrashort pulse laser processing to engineer nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond that can then perform as qubits in quantum computers. Read the article in Optica. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Quantum computers promise to be much faster than conventional computers at solving certain problems, such as in chemistry and machine learning. But it’s still unclear what material to build them from. One promising ca...
Episode 21: Cold fusion revisited
October 29, 2019 14:00 - 22 minutes - 15.6 MBPhilip Ball of MRS Bulletin interviews Yet-Ming Chiang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about their Google-sponsored elaborate study on cold fusion. The investigations have provided new insights into highly hydrided metals and low-energy nuclear reactions, with much interesting science yet to be explored. Read the multi-authored Perspective in Nature.
Episode 21: Cold fusion revisited
October 29, 2019 14:00 - 22 minutes - 15.6 MBPhilip Ball of MRS Bulletin interviews Yet-Ming Chiang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about their Google-sponsored elaborate study on cold fusion. The investigations have provided new insights into highly hydrided metals and low-energy nuclear reactions, with much interesting science yet to be explored. Read the multi-authored Perspective in Nature.
Episode 20: Research highlights: Perovskites
October 15, 2019 14:00 - 5 minutes - 3.68 MBResearchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill stabilize solar cells by converting the surfaces of lead halide perovskites to water-insoluble lead oxysalt, as reported in Science. Researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science open a new path to defect management in materials by providing insight into the low defect density of halide perovskites, as reported in Materials Horizon. Researchers at the University of Oxford add ionic liquids to perovskites which markedly improves t...
Episode 19: Polymer grown on liquid metal nanodroplets
September 19, 2019 17:00 - 4 minutes - 3.07 MBPrachi Patel of MRS Bulletin interviews Carmel Majidi of Carnegie Mellon University about utilizing atom transfer radical polymerization to create liquid metal–polymer hybrid materials with high stability, excellent dispersibility, and tunable mechanical and optical properties. Read the article in Nature Nanotechnology. Transcript PATEL: Rubbers and plastics have snuck into hundreds of products we use every day. They have excellent mechanical properties for these applications. But they are ...
Episode 18: Organic high-spin material conducive for quantum computing
September 11, 2019 17:00 - 4 minutes - 3.02 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Jason Azoulay of the University of Southern Mississippi about his conjugated polymer semiconductor, a promising candidate for technologies that integrate both conventional electronics and spintronics. Read the article in Science Advances. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Conventional electronics like your smartphone or computer use the voltage and current of electrons in a material to encode and transmit information. Spintronics aims to exploit the quantum spin ...
Episode 17: Lead-halide perovskites make effective catalysts for organic synthesis
August 26, 2019 15:00 - 1 minute - 1.26 MBResearch on perovskites has progressed rapidly for PV and LEDs, with new solar-cell efficiency records being set at a regular pace. There are hints of the first commercial products reaching the market by 2020, just a decade since perovskite photovoltaics were first discovered. MRS Bulletin presents the impact of a recent advance in this burgeoning field. Read the abstract in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (doi:10.1021/jacs.8b08720). Transcript Welcome to MRS Bulletin’s Materi...
Episode 17: Lead-halide perovskites make effective catalysts for organic synthesis
August 26, 2019 15:00 - 1 minute - 1.26 MBResearch on perovskites has progressed rapidly for PV and LEDs, with new solar-cell efficiency records being set at a regular pace. There are hints of the first commercial products reaching the market by 2020, just a decade since perovskite photovoltaics were first discovered. MRS Bulletin presents the impact of a recent advance in this burgeoning field. Read the abstract in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (doi:10.1021/jacs.8b08720). Transcript Welcome to MRS Bulletin’s Materi...
Episode 16: Thermoelectrics enables clothes with adjustable temperature
August 16, 2019 13:00 - 5 minutes - 3.5 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Renkun Chen of the University of California, San Diego about his flexible thermoelectric devices that can provide personalized cooling and heating effects in clothing. Read the article in Science Advances. Transcript Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: If you’ve ever had to pay an air conditioning bill during the summer, you know how expensive it gets. Renkun Chen is a mechanical engineer at UCSD with an energy-saving idea: clothes with adjustable temperature. He ...
Episode 15: 3D stretchable electronics achieves ultrahigh conductivity
August 07, 2019 14:00 - 3 minutes - 2.72 MBPrachi Patel of MRS Bulletin interviews Benjamin C.-K. Tee of the National University of Singapore about an interfacial design for stretchable electronics that uses three-dimensional helical copper micro-interconnects embedded in an elastic rubber substrate. Read the article in APL Materials. Transcript PRACHI PATEL: Metals are excellent at conducting electricity but not the best at being stretched or bent. For electronics that can be worn or wrapped around curved surfaces, stretchable condu...
Episode 14: Thin film patterns classified by machine learning
July 22, 2019 20:00 - 4 minutes - 3.18 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Alex Hexemer of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and Daniela Ushizima and Shuai Liu of the University of California, Berkeley about their design of multiple Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to classify nanoparticle orientation in a thin film by learning scattering patterns. Read the article in MRS Communications. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Materials researchers come from around the world to study their samples in the beamline at th...
Episode 13: Tendril-like robot inspired by plants
July 02, 2019 16:00 - 5 minutes - 3.56 MBSophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Barbara Mazzolai and Edoardo Sinibaldi of the Italian Institute of Technology about their robot made from two types of polymers, enabling it to extend and retract like the tendrils of a plant. Read the article in Nature Communications. Transcript SOPHIA CHEN: Barbara Mazzolai is designing robots inspired by plants. Recently, she and her research team at the Italian Institute of Technology have made a robot that looks like a plant tendril, similar to t...
Episode 12: Europium thwarts reactivity in metal-halide perovskite solar cells
June 25, 2019 17:00 - 1 minute - 1.18 MBResearch on perovskites has progressed rapidly for PV and LEDs, with new solar-cell efficiency records being set at a regular pace. There are hints of the first commercial products reaching the market by 2020, just a decade since perovskite photovoltaics were first discovered. MRS Bulletin presents the impact of a recent advance in this burgeoning field. Read the abstract in Science (doi:10.1126/science.aau5701). Transcript Welcome to MRS Bulletin’s Materials News Podcast, providing breakth...
Episode 11: Nanoparticle megalibraries enable materials discovery
June 12, 2019 13:00 - 5 minutes - 2.4 MBPrachi Patel of MRS Bulletin interviews Chad Mirkin of Northwestern University about the use of his polymer pen lithography technique combined with an ink spray-coating method to ultimately create a megalibrary of nanoparticles that speeds up the discovery of new materials. Read the abstract in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Transcript PATEL: Mirkin and his colleagues are trying to dramatically speed up materials discovery. They have created a tool: a “megalibrary.”...
Episode 10: Protein-based polymer achieves green electronics
May 07, 2019 15:00 - 5 minutes - 2.79 MBOmar Fabián of MRS Bulletin interviews Alireza Dolatshahi-Pirouz of the Technical University of Denmark about the use of silk to fabricate eco-friendly electronics. Read the article in Advanced Science. Transcript FABIÁN: We have an electronic waste problem. While the development of recyclable plastics has helped curb that problem, currently only about 15% of e-waste is actually recycled. So how can we make a bigger dent? Materials researchers from Denmark are looking to the silkworm for an...