October 16, 2019
Material scientists have discovered what makes the scales of the massive Amazonian freshwater fish, Arapaima gigas, resistant to breaking when a piranha bites. The answer could serve as inspiration for stronger, lightweight and flexible synthetic armors.
October 19, 2023
UC San Diego engineers have developed a recipe to make a certain class of ceramics tougher and more resistant to cracking. The newfound toughness of these ceramics paves the way for their use in extreme applications, such as spacecraft and other hypersonic vehicles.
May 21, 2015
…own research on battery materials. To usher in an age of inexpensive, carbon-neutral electric cars, we need higher performance and less expensive batteries, Meng explains. This includes batteries to power the cars themselves and batteries at charging stations that hold energy captured from the sun and wind. The behind-the-scenes technical…
February 14, 2013
…of California, San Diego, identify three characteristics of biological materials that they believe engineers would do well to emulate in man-made materials: light weight, toughness and strength.
March 21, 2019
…lightweight plastic or composite materials. Building a nearly 300-pound canoe takes a lot of planning and design work to make sure it won’t sink like a stone…or, well, a block of concrete. “We use different concepts we learn in classes and critical thinking to try to make the lightest and…
January 29, 2021
An international team of researchers produced islands of amorphous, non-crystalline material inside a class of new metal alloys known as high-entropy alloys. This discovery opens the door to applications in everything from landing gears, to pipelines, to automobiles.
February 27, 2020
…her research results to materials that would heal similar to wounds. Palacci’s contribution stems from his study of the ability of seemingly primitive building blocks to organize in complex patterns and robust machineries. The ‘squishy science’ of e-skin Soft matter—a branch of condensed matter physics—is ubiquitous and people use it…
May 2, 2024
Robots that can assist physicians during surgery. Robots that can swim. Robots that can grip delicate objects. These were some of the demonstrations on display at Robosoft, the biggest conference in the field of soft robotics, in San Diego this year.
April 27, 2017
A team of scientists from UC San Diego and two other universities has received a five year, $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to unravel the fundamental properties of melanins, a family of natural pigments found in skin, hair, eyes and even the plumage of brightly colored…
May 3, 2018
Researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California San Diego mixed together unlikely materials to create a new hybrid form of crystalline matter that could change the practice of materials science. The findings, published in “Nature,” present potential benefits to medicine and the pharmaceutical industry.
