Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: materials

The practice of purposely looping thread to create intricate knit garments and blankets has existed for millennia. Though its precise origins have been lost to history, artifacts like a pair of wool socks from ancient Egypt suggest it dates back as early as the third to fifth century CE. Yet, for all its long-standing ubiquity, the physics behind knitting remains surprisingly elusive.

“Knitting is one of those weird, seemingly simple but deceptively complex things we take for granted,” says and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Lauren Niu, who recently took up the craft as a means to study how “geometry influences the mechanical properties and behavior of materials.”

Despite centuries of accumulated knowledge, predicting how a particular knit pattern will behave remains difficult—even with modern digital tools and automated knitting machines. “It’s been around for so long, but we don’t really know how it works,” Niu notes. “We rely on intuition and trial and error, but translating that into precise, predictive science is a challenge.”

Read more | >

The ancient peoples of the Philippines and of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) may have built sophisticated boats and mastered seafaring tens of thousands of years ago—millennia before Magellan, Zheng He, and even the Polynesians.

In a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Ateneo de Manila University researchers Riczar Fuentes and Alfred Pawlik challenge the widely-held contention that technological progress during the Paleolithic only emerged in Europe and Africa.

They point out that much of ISEA was never connected to mainland Asia, neither by land bridges nor by ice sheets, yet it has yielded evidence of early human habitation. Exactly how these peoples achieved such daring ocean crossings is an enduring mystery, as organic materials like wood and fiber used for boats rarely survive in the .

Read more | >

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara and TU Dresden are pioneering a new approach to robotics by creating a collective of small robots that function like a smart material.

According to Matthew Devlin, a former doctoral researcher in the lab of UCSB mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes and lead author of a paper published in Science, researchers have developed a method for robots to behave more like a material.

Read more | >

Researchers have developed COK-47, a solid lubricant that outperforms traditional options by leveraging water molecules to reduce friction.

This advanced material consists of ultra-thin titanium oxide sheets that create a low-friction tribofilm in humid conditions, making it highly durable and effective.

Revolutionizing Lubricants with Cutting-Edge Research.

Read more | >

Scientists have developed a way to 3D-print high-performance thermoelectric materials, promising a major leap in cooling technology. This breakthrough could cut costs, reduce waste, and improve efficiency, challenging conventional manufacturing.

Read more | >

It’s true that Japanese scientists have made a significant breakthrough concerning hydrogels and cancer cells. Here’s a breakdown of what the research entails:

* The Breakthrough:

* Researchers at Hokkaido University and the National Cancer Center Research Institute developed a novel hydrogel, a “double-network (DN) gel,” that can rapidly revert differentiated cancer cells back into cancer stem cells (CSCs).

Read more | >

Plasma arc cutting (PAC) is a thermal cutting technique widely used in manufacturing applications such as shipbuilding, aerospace, fabrication, nuclear plants decommissioning, construction industry, and the automotive industry. In this process, a jet of plasma or ionized gas is ejected at high speeds, which melts and subsequently removes unwanted parts of materials from electrically conductive workpieces such as metals.

The plasma jet is typically produced in two steps: pressuring a gas through a small nozzle hole and generating an electric arc via power supply. Remarkably, the introduced arc ionizes the gas coming out of the nozzle, which in turn generates plasma with extremely high temperatures. This enables the plasma jet to easily, quickly, and precisely slice different metals and alloys.

The quality of workpieces cut using PAC depends on various factors: kind of plasma gas and its pressure, nozzle hole shape and size, arc current and voltage, cutting speed, and distance between the torch and the workpiece. While most of these factors are well understood in the context of PAC, the impact of gas flow dynamics on cut quality remains less clearly known. This is mainly due to challenges in visualization of the flow dynamics.

Read more | >

A collaborative team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD), Nanjing University, Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory (SLAB), and international partners has introduced a new method to regulate exotic electronic states in two-dimensional materials.

Building on the foundations laid by their previous work on twisted van der Waals materials, the team of physicists has now discovered a novel way to manipulate correlated electronic states in twisted double bilayer tungsten diselenide (TDB-WSe₂). This breakthrough offers new possibilities for developing advanced quantum materials and devices.

By precisely twisting two bilayers of WSe₂ near a 60-degree angle and applying a perpendicular electric field, the researchers have achieved control over the interaction between two distinct electronic bands, known as the K-valley and Γ-valley bands. This tuning has led to the observation of a “valley charge-transfer insulator”—an exotic state where electron movement is highly correlated, and electrical conductivity is suppressed.

Read more | >