MRS Bulletin Materials News Podcast

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Alexia Groff, a recent PhD graduate from Imperial College London, about growing genetically modified lettuce to produce myoglobin, an iron-containing protein found in meat. Companies could extract this myoglobin for plant-based meatless alternatives. This work was published in a recent issue of Frontiers in Plant Science.

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Vivek Chawla of Sandia National Laboratories about his research group’s automation of a nanoindentation machine, which probes materials locally to characterize mechanical properties. The work paves the way to incorporating an automated nanoindenter for a self-driving laboratory for materials discovery. This work was published in a recent issue of Review of Scientific Instruments.

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Associate Professor Klaas-Jan Tielrooij from both the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Spain, and Assistant Professor Albert Beardo Ricol from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, about their research into heat transport in ultrathin semiconductors. Using a combination of ultra-high resolution pump–probe thermometry and modelling, they uncovered a non-intuitive heat flux driven by thermoelastic effects. They attribute this behavior to differing mechanical properties at the edge of the material when compared to the middle portion. This work was published in a recent issue of Nature Physics.

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Henry Quansah Afful, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign about a general framework for understanding how layered materials respond to stress. Afful is interested in the threshold conditions where the material goes from plastic deformation to fracture. Using nanoindentation, his group could learn, at the atomic scale, when plastic deformation starts and how various temperatures affect the mechanical behavior of layered materials. This work was published in a recent issue of Communications Materials.

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews assistant professor Christos Athanasiou and postdoctoral researcher Danqi Sun from Georgia Institute of Technology about their research on introducing a new material state through polymer necking. After applying different strain rates to poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) then testing the material at different orientations, they discovered changes in mechanical behavior. They attributed these behaviors to changes in the microstructure. This work was published in a recent issue of the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Matt Dickerson of the Air Force Research Laboratory about his research group’s development of 3D- printed nanofibrous ceramics. By blending together block copolymers and pre-ceramic polymers, then burning away the block polymer, the pre-ceramic material transforms into ceramic. Dickerson believes this technique will make large-scale ceramic components easier to make. This work was published in a recent issue of npj Advanced Manufacturing.

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin's Laura Leay interviews Carlos Portela from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about his research group’s design and modeling framework for 3D woven metamaterials. The design framework utilizes a graph structure which allows the woven architecture to be tuned, and it is computationally inexpensive so that it can run on a desktop computer. The outputs include files for finite element modeling to test the metamaterial for large deformations, and for 3D printing of the structure. This work was published in a recent issue of Nature Communications.

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Gideon Segev from Tel Aviv University in Israel and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Shane Ardo from the University of California, Irvine about their ratchet-based ion pumps (RBIPs). Consisting of a nanoporous capacitor-like structure, the RBIP drives a flux of charged particles at voltages as low as 50 mV, while redox reactions need at least 1.23 V. Furthermore, the ratchet is selective where ions can be sorted based on their diffusion coefficient. This opens doors for efficient devices for desalination and selective ion separation. This work was published in a recent issue of Nature Materials. 

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay reports on the quantified relationship between rheology of a granular biomaterial and tissue self-organization, a study conducted by research groups at the University of California, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, Stanford University, and Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. The collaborators developed a 3D-bioprinter with a piezoelectric print head to control mechanical forces and a composite extracellular matrix for the biomaterial. One aim of the research was to demonstrate a print medium that could be used to produce a wide variety of biological structures. This work was published in a recent issue of Nature Materials. 

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Samual Stupp from Northwestern University about his group’s research on developing treatments for spinal cord injuries by use of an organoid. The researchers fabricated the human spinal cord organoid by including microglial cells, which are the immune cells in the central nervous system. They mimicked various kinds of spinal injuries, then applied different injury treatments to see how the organoid responded best. This work was published in a recent issue of Nature Biomedical Engineering.