Standard snapshots from space don’t quite show Earth in all its glory. There’s so much more to see. To reveal details impossible to observe with the naked eye, Rice University engineers are building a portable spectrometer that can be mounted on a small satellite, flown on an airplane or a drone or someday even held […]
New Way to Beat the Heat in Electronics
A nanocomposite invented at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering promises to be a superior high-temperature dielectric material for flexible electronics, energy storage and electric devices. The nanocomposite combines one-dimensional polymer nanofibers and two-dimensional boron nitride nanosheets. The nanofibers reinforce the self-assembling material while the “white graphene” nanosheets provide a thermally conductive network that allows […]
Better Red Than Dread: Barrier Keeps Batteries Safe
Rice University scientists have taken the next step toward the deployment of powerful, rechargeable lithium metal batteries by making them safer and simpler to manufacture. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour made test cells with a coat of red phosphorus on the separator that keeps the anode and cathode electrodes apart. The phosphorus acts […]
Nanotubes May Give the World Better Batteries
Rice University scientists are counting on films of carbon nanotubes to make high-powered, fast-charging lithium metal batteries a logical replacement for common lithium-ion batteries. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour showed thin nanotube films effectively stop dendrites that grow naturally from unprotected lithium metal anodes in batteries. Over time, these tentacle-like dendrites can pierce […]
Scientists Go Deep To Quantify Perovskite Properties
Scientists led by Rice University and Los Alamos National Laboratory have discovered electronic properties in quantum-scale devices that are likely to impact the growing field of low-cost perovskite based optoelectronics. In an open-access Nature Communicationspaper, researchers led by Los Alamos scientists Aditya Mohite and Jean-Christophe Blancon, both of whom will join Rice this summer, studied the […]
Flat Gallium Joins Roster Of New 2-D Materials
Scientists at Rice University and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have discovered a method to make atomically flat gallium that shows promise for nanoscale electronics. The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and colleagues in India created two-dimensional gallenene, a thin film of conductive material that is to gallium what graphene is to […]
Rice Team Designs Lens-Free Fluorescent Microscope
Lenses are no longer necessary for some microscopes, according to Rice University engineers developing FlatScope, a thin fluorescent microscope whose abilities promise to surpass those of old-school devices. A paper in Science Advances by Rice engineers Ashok Veeraraghavan, Jacob Robinson, Richard Baraniuk and their labs describes a wide-field microscope thinner than a credit card, small enough to […]
Scientists Create Patterned Graphene Onto Food, Paper, Cloth, Cardboard
Rice University scientists who introduced laser-induced graphene (LIG) have enhanced their technique to produce what may become a new class of edible electronics. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour, which once turned Girl Scout cookies into graphene, is investigating ways to write graphene patterns onto food and other materials to quickly embed conductive identification tags […]
Two-Stage Gas Sensor Reports on Soil Dynamics
A gene “genie” developed by Rice University scientists grants researchers valuable data about microbes through puffs of gas from the soil. The latest version is a robust two-stage microbial sensor that will help bioengineers, geobiologists and other researchers observe gene expression and the bioavailability of nutrients in laboratory facsimiles of environments like soil and sediments […]
‘Weyl-Kondo Semimetal’: Physicists Discover New Type of Quantum Material
U.S. and European physicists searching for an explanation for high-temperature superconductivity were surprised when their theoretical model pointed to the existence of a never-before-seen material in a different realm of physics: topological quantum materials. In a new study due this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), […]