Nanomaterials

​Wood is an established and versatile construction material, used to build everything from high-rises and airports to apartment buildings. It also, however, is not immune to catching fire. A new coating could help keep that from happening, and it's actually made from wood.

A new technique has been used to turn ordinary metals into "metallic wood" with a greatly improved strength-to-weight ratio. By manipulating materials at the atomic scale, scientists claim to have created a sheet of nickel that is as strong as titanium​, but up to five times lighter.

Diamond is a useful material, but its relative rarity on Earth makes it difficult to get. Now, researchers at NCSU have demonstrated a new way to convert carbon nanofibers and nanotubes into diamond fibers that can be performed in a lab more easily than existing techniques.

Spider silk has long held the title of strongest natural biomaterial. Now, researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed a new biomaterial out of wood nanofibers that steals the strength record.

Zapping hydrogen out of water through electrolysis is the cleanest way to produce the fuel, but that requires rare-Earth metal catalysts. Researchers have now developed a quick and inexpensive alternative, making a “nanofoam” catalyst out of nickel and iron that performs better than usual.

​Creating a material that can alter its optical properties in real time has proved challenging for scientists, but a team has finally achieved a major breakthrough by developing a material that can transition from clear to reflective and back again using an array of gold nanoparticles.

Radiation exposure leaves astronauts with an increased risk of cancer and other diseases. Now a team from Australian National University has developed a new nanomaterial that could protect space travelers with a thin film that dynamically reflects harmful radiation.

To make water repellent coatings that are a self-healing, a team of scientists led by Jürgen Rühe at the University of Freiburg in Germany has come up with a superhydrophobic that sheds its outer skin like a snake to repair itself after being damaged.

Soon, people in smog alerts could breath easy thanks to a new nanofiber solution developed at NUS. Air filters made from the material can block most small particles while still letting air circulate, and at the same time block UV rays without reducing natural light.

Icing can bring down aircraft, snap power lines, and cause a surprising amount of structural damage. However, scientists at the University of Houston have come up with a surprising solution – and it involves magnets.

A new process developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison)​ could see homes powered by footsteps on energy-harvesting flooring for around the same price as conventional flooring.

Scientists from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory claim to have produced one of the most usable of all chemicals - ethanol - in a process conducted at room temperature that effectively reverses the combustion process