Materials Science News

While the shiny material of pearls and abalone shells has long been prized for its iridescence and aesthetic value in jewelry and decorations, scientists admire mother-of-pearl for other physical properties as well.

Ancient Greenland was green. New Danish research has shown that it was covered in conifer forest and, like southern Sweden today, had a relatively mild climate.

As the national debate over energy independence intensifies, researchers at the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy Research are refining methods to convert coal into liquid fuel.

Tiny plastic fibers could be the key to some diverse technologies in the future -- including self-cleaning surfaces, transparent electronics, and biomedical tools that manipulate strands of DNA.

Any machinist will tell you that a little grease goes a long way toward making a tool work better. And that may soon hold true for plastic electronics as well.

Physicists at the University of Pennsylvania are using a new technique to craft some of the tiniest metal nanostructures ever created, none larger than 10 nanometers, or 10,000 times smaller than the width of a single human hair.

Collaborative research between scientists in the UK and Germany (published in Nature Materials) has led to a breakthrough in the understanding of the formation of ice.

Buried beneath a sulfurous cauldron in European seas lies a class of microorganisms known as "extremophiles," so named because of the extreme environmental conditions in which they live and thrive.

Skyrocketing gasoline prices and growing concern over global warming has spawned massive growth of the biofuel industry, particularly ethanol production.

A team of University of British Columbia researchers has contributed to the greatest advancement in superconductor research in a decade by "growing" the purest samples of superconductors to date.