Mixing two brittle materials to make something flexible defies common sense, but Rice University scientists have done just that to make a novel dielectric. Dielectrics are the polarized insulators in batteries and other devices that separate positive and negative electrodes. Without them, there are no electronic devices. The most common dielectrics contain brittle metal oxides…

When you read about electrifying art, “electrifying” isn’t usually a verb. But an artist working with a Rice University lab is in fact making artwork that can deliver a jolt. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour introduced laser-induced graphene (LIG) to the world in 2014, and now the researchers are making art with the…

Threading a needle is hard, but at least you can see it. Think about how challenging it must be to thread a screw through a rod inside a bone in someone’s leg. Rice University seniors at the Brown School of Engineering set out to help doctors simplify the process of repairing fractured long bones in…

Graphene can come from graphite. But borophene? There’s no such thing as borite. Unlike its carbon cousin, two-dimensional borophene can’t be reduced from a larger natural form. Bulk boron is usually only found in combination with other elements, and is certainly not layered, so borophene has to be made from the atoms up. Even then,…

Scientists are discovering new two-dimensional materials at a rapid pace, but they don’t always immediately know what those materials can do. Researchers at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering say they can find out fast by feeding basic details of their structures to “deep learning” agents that have the power to map the materials’ properties.…

In the heat of a furnace, boron atoms happily dive into a bath of gold. And when things get cool, they resurface as coveted borophene. The discovery by scientists from Rice University, Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University is a step toward practical applications like wearable or transparent electronics, plasmonic sensors or energy storage for…

Cleaning pollutants from water with a defective filter sounds like a non-starter, but a recent study by chemical engineers at Rice University found that the right-sized defects helped a molecular sieve soak up more perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) in less time. In a study in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, Rice…

Laser-induced graphene (LIG), a flaky foam of the atom-thick carbon, has many interesting properties on its own but gains new powers as part of a composite. The labs of Rice University chemist James Tour and Christopher Arnusch, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, introduced a batch of LIG composites in the…

A ceramic that becomes more electrically conductive under elastic strain and less conductive under plastic strain could lead to a new generation of sensors embedded into structures like buildings, bridges and aircraft able to monitor their own health. The electrical disparity fostered by the two types of strain was not obvious until Rice University’s Rouzbeh…

When you light up a metal nanoparticle, you get light back. It’s often a different color. That’s a fact – but the why is up for debate. In a new paper in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters, Rice chemist Stephan Link and graduate student Yi-Yu Cai make a case that photoluminescence, rather than…

Boron nitride nanotubes sure do like to stick together. If they weren’t so useful, they could stay stuck and nobody would care. But because they are useful, Rice University chemists have determined that surfactants — the basic compounds in soap — offer the best and easiest way to keep boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) from clumping.…

What if a sensor sensing a thing could be part of the thing itself? Rice University engineers believe they have a two-dimensional solution to do just that. Rice engineers led by materials scientists Pulickel Ajayan and Jun Lou have developed a method to make atom-flat sensors that seamlessly integrate with devices to report on what…

Thanks to one peculiar characteristic of carbon nanotubes, engineers will soon be able to measure the accumulated strain in an airplane, a bridge or a pipeline – or just about anything – over the entire surface or down to microscopic levels. They’ll do so by shining a light onto structures coated with a two-layer nanotube…

Rice University scientists have built a better epoxy for electronic applications. Epoxy combined with “ultrastiff” graphene foam invented in the Rice lab of chemist James Tour is substantially tougher than pure epoxy and far more conductive than other epoxy composites while retaining the material’s low density. It could improve upon epoxies in current use that…

In the way things often happens in science, Amey Apte wasn’t looking for two-dimensional tellurium while experimenting with materials at Rice University. But there it was. “It’s like I tried to find a penny and instead found a dollar,” he says. Apte and his colleagues made tellurium, a rare metal, into a film less than…

By getting in the way, fluorine atoms help a two-dimensional material transform from a semiconductor to a metal in a way that could be highly useful for electronics and other applications. A study led by Rice University materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and lead author Sruthi Radhakrishnan details a new method to transform tungsten disulfide from…

Rice University scientists have developed something akin to the Venus’ flytrap of particles for water remediation. Micron-sized spheres created in the lab of Rice environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez are built to catch and destroy bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic chemical used to make plastics. The research is detailed in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental…

Here’s one way to fit a square peg into a round hole. First, according to Rice University engineers, get a nanotube hole. Then insert water. If the nanotube is just the right width, the water molecules will align into a square rod. Rice materials scientist Rouzbeh Shahsavari and his team used molecular models to demonstrate…

Mike Williams, Rice University After their recent pioneering experiments to couple light and matter to an extreme degree, Rice University scientists decided to look for a similar effect in matter alone. They didn’t expect to find it so soon. Rice physicist Junichiro Kono, graduate student Xinwei Li and their international colleagues have discovered the first…

Rice University researchers have found that fracture-resistant “rebar graphene” is more than twice as tough as pristine graphene. Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon. On the two-dimensional scale, the material is stronger than steel, but because graphene is so thin, it is still subject to ripping and tearing. Rebar graphene is the nanoscale analog…

Growing a batch of carbon nanotubes that are all the same may not be as simple as researchers had hoped, according to Rice University scientists. Rice materials theorist Boris Yakobson and his team bucked a theory that when growing nanotubes in a furnace, a catalyst with a specific atomic arrangement and symmetry would reliably make…

Borophene, the atomically flat form of boron with unique properties, is even more interesting when different forms of the material mix and mingle, according to scientists at Rice and Northwestern universities. Scientists at the institutions made and analyzed borophene with different lattice arrangements and discovered how amenable the varied structures are to combining into new…

Rice University scientists have developed a simple way to produce conductive, three-dimensional objects made of graphene foam. The squishy solids look and feel something like a child’s toy but offer new possibilities for energy storage and flexible electronic sensor applications, according to Rice chemist James Tour. The technique detailed in Advanced Materials is an extension…

Rice University researchers have synthesized and isolated plasmonic magnesium nanoparticles that show all the promise of their gold, silver and aluminum cousins with none of the drawbacks. The Rice lab of materials scientist Emilie Ringe produced the particles to test their ability to emit plasmons, the ghostly electron bands that, when triggered by energy from…