Materials

Though you can make objects smarter by adding sensors to them, a team of MIT engineers has managed to 3D print metamaterial structures with electrodes directly integrated into them to allow objects to sense user interaction.

By casting one eye to a past where ancient buildings were held together with animal blood, and one eye to a future where humans use Martian soil for on-site construction, scientists have cooked up a new recipe for cost effective "cosmic concrete."

Imagine if there was protective clothing that usually stayed soft and comfortable, but that could instantly harden when needed. Such technology may someday be possible, thanks to a new understanding of a tiny animal's shell.

A first-of-a-kind trial now underway seeks to apply the wonder material graphene's impressive attributes to one of the UK's major thoroughfares, by deploying it in a road resurfacing project along a stretch of the A1.

Ceramic materials are strong and can stand up to heat very well, but they’re notoriously fragile. Now, researchers at Texas A&M have uncovered a previously unknown self-healing mechanism in a certain type of ceramic, which works at room temperature.

Although magnesium is known for being lightweight, riveting pieces of it together can be an involved, energy-intensive process. A new technique is claimed to make doing so much simpler, possibly opening up new uses for the metal.

Perovskites are quickly emerging in the solar energy field, thanks to their ability to convert photons into electricity. Now this process has been tweaked to pick up neutrons instead, making an effective detector for leaks from radioactive materials.

Autonomous vehicles operate in a complex environment, and recognizing traffic signs is an important part of that. A new microstructured material reflects light in rainbow rings, which can make traffic signs easier for computer vision systems to read.

"Muscle shirt" may soon take on a whole new meaning. A team has found a way to use bacteria to produce synthetic muscle proteins, which can then be spun into fibers to make clothing, protective gear and biomedical implants and prosthetics.

When lightweight composite materials are used in fields such as aerospace, it's vitally important to know if they're experiencing mechanical stress – before they fail. A new composite is able to do so, simply by fluorescing under UV light.

There is a growing field of research dedicated to so-called "living materials" that might one day allow structures to repair themselves, and a new example adapts this thinking to bacteria-based building blocks that are fit for a range of purposes.

A milestone in decarbonization today as Sweden's SSAB made the world's very first "fossil-free" steel delivery, created with green hydrogen instead of coal and coke, to a customer, Volvo, where it will be used in electric trucks.