materials science

Self-Healing Metal Puts a Bit of Man in the Machine

Clay Dillow — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:40:24 -0400

A few months back, we wrote about a microcapsule-filled self-healing paint that repairs itself when scratched, putting corrosion fears in check while keeping up a surface's appearances. Now, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, Germany, are getting under the skin, developing a metal coating capable of repairing itself when damaged.

Graphene: Source of The Next Industrial Revolution?

Kit Eaton — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:24:40 -0500

"An atomically-thick layer of bonded carbon atoms in a hexagonal array, that can be made by peeling a layer off a graphite block with sticky-tape" doesn't sound like a particularly wondrous material. But that's an approximate description of graphene, which may one day fairly soon change the world.

Future Chips To Get More Powerful, Research Shows Plenty of Life in Moore's Law

Kit Eaton — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:54:59 -0500

Gordon Moore's 1965 observation of increasing integrated circuit power paralleling shrinkage in size was originally tentatively phrased: "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue." And yet it's held more or less true for forty years, and new research suggests that with continued innovation there's plenty of life in the Law yet.