IN FOCUS

EXTENDED DEADLINES! Call for Papers—Two Journal of Materials Research Focus Issues The Materials Science of Additive Manufacturing—September 2014 Issue NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE—April 8, 2014 Guest editors: Todd A. Palmer, Pennsylvania State University; Jens Günster, BAM Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, Germany; and Daniel Gunther, voxeljet AG, Germany   Optical Ceramics Science—October 2014 Issue NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE—April 15, 2014 Guest editors: Romain Gaume, University of Central Florida; Yiquan Wu, Alfred University; and Thomas Hartnett, Raytheon Company   Visit the JMR Focus Issues web page for more details. MRS OnDemand® Content from the 2013 MRS Fall Meeting is now LIVE! Of special interest is the Big and Open Data For Materials Research Panel Discussion held on December 5, 2013, at the 2013 MRS Fall Meeting. The panelists, who included Rick Barto, Mary Galvin, Nicola Marzari, Jim Pinkleman, and J. Michael Simonson, discussed the wide range of issues in big and open data affecting the materials community. To access any of the MRS OnDemand presentations, login with your MRS username and password or create a free account. Announcing the re-launch of the Materials for Energy blog! Thanks to the efforts of the MRS Student Chapter at the University of Texas at Austin, the Materials for Energy blog has been redesigned and packed with many new, information-filled postings. With the oversight of Elizabeth A. Kocs, Director of Programming and Outreach, The Energy Initiative, University of Illinois at Chicago, contributors have been updating the blog frequently with cutting-edge postings on the scientific, policy, and regulatory issues surrounding materials for energy. Submit or propose content and provide feedback on the blog at MaterialsForEnergyBlog@gmail.com, or reach out to the student chapter at MRSaustinTX@gmail.com.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF MATERIALS


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Materials in Focus

3D Laser Writing Yields Strong, Lightweight Bone-like Material
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

by Prachi Patel

Image caption: Strong, lightweight bone-like material created by 3D laser writing. Credit: Yens Bauer. Click image to enlarge.

Researchers have used laser writing to make porous materials that are lighter than water and strong as steel. The engineered composites have a strength-to-density ratio that is higher than any known engineered material. Such strong but light materials can be used to make air and spacecraft components, armor, and energy storage devices. More

Read the abstract in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tunable 3D Polymer Networks Self-assemble from Sticky Colloidal Particles
Argonne National Laboratory

by Tim Palucka

Image caption: Argonne materials scientists announced a new technique to produce wavy, fur-like structures by self-assembly at non-equilibrium conditions from sticky colloidal particles. Credit: Arnaud Demortière, Alexey Snezhko and Igor Aronson. Click to enlarge.

By switching from water to a more aggressive organic solvent, and by using a polymer system that could survive in such a strong solvent, researchers have demonstrated the tunable self-assembly of sticky colloids into structures ranging from wavy, fur-like carpets to highly crosslinked, interconnected gel-like networks. The high surface-to-volume ratio of these structures could make them candidates for battery electrodes (the fur-like material) or functionalized filters (the crosslinked networks). More

Read the abstract in Nature Communications.


Bio Focus

Tethered Chromatophores One Key to Cuttlefish Camouflage
Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Marine Biology Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

by Laurel Hamers

Image caption: Chromatophores were previously thought to be simply sacs of pigment that acted as filters; scientists have now discovered that nanostructures (labeled here as "granules") within the cells are capable of fluorescing. Credit: George Bell. Click image to enlarge.

A team of researchers at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, has uncovered new details about the mechanism behind the color-changing system of the cuttlefish. Their results, published in a recent issue of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, could facilitate the creation of man-made materials with similar camouflage properties. More

Read the abstract in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Industry Focus

Granta Announces Simulation and Materials Information Management Advances from Additive Manufacturing Projects

Government Focus

Brought to you by the MRS Government Affairs Committee (GAC)

Proposals Sought: Department of Energy – Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Carbon Fiber Composites from Renewable Non-Food Biomass

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) within the Department of Energy (DOE) is soliciting proposals to develop a cost competitive pathway to produce high performance carbon fiber for vehicle lightweighting from renewable non-food biomass. Carbon fiber composites are lightweight, yet strong, materials that can greatly improve vehicle fuel efficiency when incorporated into structural and non-structural components.

EERE’s Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative (CEMI), launched in 2013, has the goal of enhancing national competitiveness in clean energy technologies while improving existing processes and stimulating the manufacturing of new energy products in the United States. The mission of the Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) within EERE is to develop and transform biomass resources into commercially viable, high performance biofuels, bioproducts, and biopower through targeted research, development, demonstration, and deployment supported through public and private partnerships. This effort aims to address both objectives by demonstrating a new technology pathway to produce high performance and low cost renewable carbon fibers. More

Image in Focus

Down the Rabbit Hole: Adventures in Nanoscience

Scanning electron microscopy of a cracked inverse opal scaffold used in microbattery electrodes.

Credit: James Pikul, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

(A Second Place Winner in the Science as Art competition at the 2013 MRS Fall Meeting)

Copyright for all Science as Art images belongs to the Materials Research Society. To request permission to re-use the images, please contact Anita Miller.

HAPPENINGS AT MRS

MRS News

Let Your Voice Be Heard on Capitol Hill!

Now is a critical time to send letters to your representatives telling them why support of the physical sciences and science education is important to you. Visit www.mrs.org/materials-voice and send the following three letters to your legislators:

• Restore Sustainable Funding Levels in the FY2014 Budget for NSF, DOE-Office of Science, NIST and DOD
• Eliminate the Innovation Deficit and Recommit to Strong and Sustained Investments in Research and Education
• Support FY2014 Appropriations at Sustainable Levels to EERE and ARPA-E

Interested in learning more? The winter issue of INTERSECTIONS—Materials Research & Science Policy is now available online at www.mrs.org/intersections-winter-2014. This issue includes an announcement from Nabil Bassim about the development of a new policy subcommittee, highlights from Tabbetha Dobbins about the 2013 MRS Fall Meeting Materials Voice letter-writing campaign, and a review of this past fall's Congressional Visits Day from Linda Olafsen.

2014 MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit
April 21-25, 2014
San Francisco, California

PREREGISTRATION NOW OPEN!
Register by 5:00 pm (ET), April 4 and SAVE!

Visit our registration page for details.

Of Interest to the Materials Science Community

MRS Fellow George Pharr Named to the National Academy of Engineering

George Pharr, Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Joint Faculty Scientist in the Materials Science and Technology Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named to the National Academy of Engineering. He becomes the fifth NAE member in the College of Engineering. He is a Principal Editor of the Journal of Materials Research as well as an MRS Fellow. Pharr received the Innovation in Materials Characterization Award in 2010, along with Warren C. Oliver, "for seminal contributions to the development of the instrumentation and analysis methods of nanoindentation for characterizing the mechanical properties of materials at the micrometer- and nanometer-length scales."

Pharr studies nanoscale materials for uses in high strength materials for energy production and storage, electronics, modern medicine, computer hard drives and everyday products. He is an expert in the mechanical behavior of materials, nanoindentation—tests that examine the mechanical properties of small volumes of materials—and small-scale mechanical behavior. In 2013, Pharr presented an MRS OnDemand^® Webinar on "Nanoindentation: Fundamentals and Frontiers," in conjuction with Warren Oliver. Click here to view the video of this webinar. More

TED^x–Madtown (Madison, Wisconsin) Talk on Teaching the Nanoscale to Elementary School Students

Troy Dassler, who teaches at Aldo Leopold Elementary in Madison, WI, drops water on a lotus leaf to demonstrate how nanoscale hairs on the surface repel water. This idea came from his collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to bring nanoscale science to elementary-aged children through funding from the National Science Foundation. In his talk, Troy breaks down his methods of teaching this specific discipline of science of the very small and shares the impressive discoveries his students have made. Click the image above to start the video.

MEETINGS UPDATE

Critical Meeting Deadlines

JUST PUBLISHED

MRS Communications

Research Letters:

Oxygen vacancy enhanced room-temperature ferromagnetism in Sr₃SnO/c-YSZ/Si (001) heterostructures
Y.F. Lee, F. Wu, J. Narayan and J. Schwartz

Lithium oxide solution in chloride melts as a medium to prepare LiCoO₂ nanoparticles
Vladimir Khokhlov, Dmitriy Modenov, Vasiliy Dokutovich, Viktor Kochedykov, Irina Zakir’yanova, Emma Vovkotrub and Igor’ Beketov

A new experimental approach for evaluating the mechanical integrity of interfaces between hard coatings and substrates
Ke Chen, Yang Mu and W.J. Meng

Get your free Android App or iTunes App for MRS Communications for full mobile access to this journal.


MRS Bulletin

Elastic Strain Engineering
February 2014

Guest editors: Ju Li, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Zhiwei Shan, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China; and Evan Ma, Johns Hopkins University, USA

“Smaller is stronger.” Nanostructured materials such as thin films, nanowires, nanoparticles, bulk nanocomposites, and atomic sheets can withstand non-hydrostatic (e.g., tensile or shear) stresses up to a significant fraction of their ideal strength without inelastic relaxation by plasticity or fracture. Large elastic strains, up to ∼10%, can be generated by epitaxy or by external loading on small-volume or bulk-scale nanomaterials and can be spatially homogeneous or inhomogeneous. This leads to new possibilities for tuning the physical and chemical properties of a material, such as electronic, optical, magnetic, phononic, and catalytic properties, by varying the six-dimensional elastic strain as continuous variables. By controlling the elastic strain field statically or dynamically, a much larger parameter space opens up for optimizing the functional properties of materials, which gives new meaning to Richard Feynman’s 1959 statement, “there’s plenty of room at the bottom.”

Introduction

Elastic strain engineering for unprecedented materials properties
Ju Li, Zhiwei Shan, and Evan Ma

Theme Articles

Elastic strain engineering of ferroic oxides
Darrell G. Schlom, Long-Qing Chen, Craig J. Fennie, Venkatraman Gopalan, David A. Muller, Xiaoqing Pan, Ramamoorthy Ramesh and Reinhard Uecker

Strain scaling for CMOS
S.W. Bedell, A. Khakifirooz and D.K. Sadana

Observing and measuring strain in nanostructures and devices with transmission electron microscopy
Martin J. Hÿtch and Andrew M. Minor

“Stretching” the energy landscape of oxides—Effects on electrocatalysis and diffusion
Bilge Yildiz

Elastically strained nanowires and atomic sheets
Dapeng Yu, Ji Feng and James Hone

Technical Feature

Nanogaps for SERS applications
Lianming Tong, Hongxing Xu and Mikael Käll


Journal of Materials Research
Focus Issue: Synthesis of Nanostructured Functional Oxides
January 2014, Volume 29, Issue 2

A selection of papers:

Synthesis strategies for improving the performance of doped-BaZrO₃ materials in solid oxide fuel cell applications
Lei Bi and Enrico Traversa

Toward efficient solar water splitting over hematite photoelectrodes
Shaohua Shen

Nanostructural characterization of mesoporous hematite thin film photoanode used for water splitting
Ricardo H. Goncalves and Edson R. Leite

DIVERSIONS

Did You Know?

That in 1920 Peter Schidrowitz developed prevulcanized latex, leading to the "dipped rubber goods" industry? (Source: Plastics Historical Society).

Submit "Did You Know" and "Quiz" items for consideration by emailing the MRS Science News Editor.

Answer to the Quiz in the previous Materials360^®:
The part of the pig that was used as the ball in the early stages of American football was the bladder (inflated with air).

NEW PRODUCTS FOCUS


New Smart Infrared Loop Sterilizer

The SteriMax Smart from WLD-TEC is ideal for all laboratories, anaerobic environments and safety cabinets. This innovative Sterilizer uses specifically focused infrared light which generates an IR hotspot for sterilizing inoculating loops at a temperature of 650° to 1100°C in only 5 to 10 seconds immediately and without any preheating.
[Contact: sales@wld-tec.com or 49-551-793789]

New LED and Light Measurement Systems

Labsphere recently introduced the illumia®plus series of LED and light measurement systems, building on its illumia technology with enhanced design that allows for adjustability. The illumia®plus is equipped with Labsphere’s mobile Integral™ light measurement software that allows users to access their systems from any location in almost any language. The redesigned spheres allow for tool-less switching between base-up and base-down measurement geometries and hot-swapping of stabilized lamps, saving customers significant time for each measurement. Lighting manufacturers can pick the illumia®plus options they need now and add on modules as standards and business change.
[Contact: labsphere@labsphere.com or 603-927-4266]

[To suggest items for inclusion in Industry News and New Products Focus, please contact Mary Kaufold at 724-779-2755]

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