Printing optical chips as a layer cake

Faster, more energy-efficient ICT, or sensors to detect anything between beginning fruit rot and microscopic cracks in glass fibers: photonic technology holds great promises for the future. To deliver on those promises, a ...

Glass as stable as crystal: Homogeneity leads to stability

Scientists from The University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science used computer simulations to study the aging mechanism that can cause an amorphous glassy material to turn into a crystal. They find that removing tiny ...

Electrochemical cell harvests lithium from seawater

Lithium is a vital element in the batteries that power electric vehicles, but soaring lithium demand is expected to exhaust land-based reserves by 2080. KAUST researchers have now developed an economically viable system that ...

New technique builds super-hard metals from nanoparticles

Metallurgists have all kinds of ways to make a chunk of metal harder. They can bend it, twist it, run it between two rollers or pound it with a hammer. These methods work by breaking up the metal's grain structure—the microscopic ...

What stops flows in glassy materials?

Glasses have a liquid-like disordered structure but solid-like mechanical properties. This leads to one of the central mysteries of glasses: Why don't they flow like liquids? This question is so important that it was selected ...

Putting on the pressure improves glass for fiber optics

Rapid, accurate communication worldwide is possible via fiber optic cables, but as good as they are, they are not perfect. Now, researchers from Penn State and AGC Inc. in Japan suggest that the silica glass used for these ...

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