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For almost all performance measures, there is some carbon-based material that performs better than silicon. Yet it has proved tough to exploit these carbons in electronics, apart from niche applications. Could hybrid carbon-based materials be more successful?
Proteins are like fish in that they need water to survive — without it they lose vitality and become unable to carry out their functions. A new hydrogel material for protein microarray chips keeps the proteins wet and lively.
Microfluidic systems have great potential to perform complex chemical and biological processing and analysis on a single disposable chip. That goal is now a step closer with the demonstration of an efficient all-optical particle sorter.
The strength of polycrystalline materials is well known to increase with decreasing grain size. Below a certain 'strongest size' however, this behaviour is reversed. Mapping the deformation mechanisms in nanoscale materials by molecular dynamics simulation clarifies why.
Damaged bones can be repaired with a clinical cement made of calcium phosphate. But this material is currently too weak to support the body. Reducing the number of pores during the cement setting may be the key to solving this problem.
Nanoporous glasses are widely used as low-k dielectrics in microelectronic devices, but are susceptible to fracture, leading to failure of the device. New work shows how reactive fracture in these materials can be controlled by appropriate choice of solution chemistry during device processing.