University of Melbourne

A University of Melbourne researcher has led the successful development of an organic, non-combustible and lightweight cladding core – a product that was previously thought to be impossible to create. Typically, lightweight cladding is made from organic, carbon-based, composite materials like plastic, but these materials by their nature are combustible. Non-combustible materials like steel, ceramic…

In a world of growing energy needs, and a global imperative to halt carbon emissions, a tiny ‘quasiparticle’ called an exciton could provide the answer to our problems. Excitons are formed when light is absorbed by molecules or crystals. But they can also emit light, after they are created electrically in things like light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Although…

An international team of more than 20 scientists has inadvertently discovered how to create a new type of crystal using light more than ten billion times brighter than the sun. The discovery, led by Associate Professor Brian Abbey at La Trobe in collaboration with Associate Professor Harry Quiney at the University of Melbourne, has been…

The spheroid is the width of a few human hairs and made up of 25,000 human lung cells clustered together with iron particle, suspended in a fluid that runs though a microscopic obstacle course of channels sealed between glass. It is a science fiction-like biological machine and testing ground housed “on-a-chip” that is being developed…