A basic building block of modern technology, inductors are everywhere: cellphones, laptops, radios, televisions, cars. And surprisingly, they are essentially the same today as in 1831, when they were first created by English scientist Michael Faraday. The particularly large size of inductors made according to Faraday’s design are a limiting factor in delivering the miniaturized…

So you drop your smartphone flat on its back. What’s the worst that could happen? These days, maybe a dent. A smartphone’s metal body is made of a crystalline material with a highly ordered arrangement of atoms. Such materials have a clear order to disrupt — with potential weak points defined by “defects” in that…

Control is a constant challenge for materials scientists, who are always seeking the perfect material — and the perfect way of treating it — to induce exactly the right electronic or optical activity required for a given application. One key challenge to modulating activity in a semiconductor is controlling its band gap. When a material…