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Science Briefs

Small but Still Mighty: Ultrafine Grains Produce Ultrastrong Metals

Researchers used in situ high-pressure diffraction to resolve a debate about whether a metal’s strength increases or decreases when its grain size decreases below a critical point. The results indicate that ultrastrong metals for future applications can indeed be achieved through grain-size refinement and grain-boundary engineering. Read more »

Rotavirus VP3 Is a Multifunctional Capping Machine

Rotavirus, a major cause of infantile gastroenteritis, is responsible for the deaths of about 200,000 children per year. Although vaccines are available, the virus still circulates, and a fuller understanding of the viral structures is needed. Here, scientists investigate the structure and function of the last unsolved rotavirus structural protein. Read more »

Artificial Antiferromagnets Facilitate Studies of Domain-Wall Motion

Researchers fabricated artificial spin lattices that undergo a paramagnetic-to-antiferromagnetic phase transition. These artificial antiferromagnets enable studies of dynamical properties that are critical to understanding, and ultimately implementing, real-world applications such as advanced computing and data-storage technologies. Read more »

COSMIC Probes Evolution of Single-Atom Platinum Catalyst

Researchers synthesized a single-atom platinum catalyst that outperformed, by a factor of 15, conventional platinum-based catalysts, which are used for fuel cells and automotive emissions control. Operando x-ray spectromicroscopy at the ALS’s COSMIC beamline revealed how electronic interactions affect the material’s morphology. Read more »

Long Chains Stabilize Higher-Efficiency Solar Cells

Perovskite thin films have many attractive properties for use in photovoltaics, but their assembly into practical devices has led to trade-offs between efficiency and stability. The addition of surfactant-type molecules with hydrophobic chains helped produce perovskite solar cells that are both efficient and stable. Read more »

How a Cancer Drug Targets Proteins for Degradation

Protein structures obtained by Novartis researchers helped reveal how a cancer drug promotes the degradation of proteins essential to cell proliferation. A detailed understanding of the drug’s mechanism of action is key to determining whether the protein-degradation system can be reprogrammed to degrade different targets. Read more »PPT-icon-35

A Forked Path for Superconductivity

Uranium ditelluride (UTe2) exhibits a form of superconductivity that could, in theory, enable fault-tolerant quantum computing. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy revealed several aspects of the material’s unusual electronic environment, including one-dimensional conducting channels that are orthogonally oriented. Read more »

Porous Electrolyte Frameworks for All-Solid-State Batteries

With the help of microtomography at the ALS, researchers developed a method to produce a porous electrolyte framework that they used to construct a working all-solid-state battery. Such batteries potentially offer a higher energy density, longer cycle life, and better inherent safety than state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries. Read more »

Study Leads to Firmer Grasp of Biochemical “Reactive Handle”

Protein crystallography provided new insight into a functional group of molecules that, if added to bacterial enzymes, could enable a variety of alterations to the bacteria’s polymer output. Tweaking enzymes to produce these “reactive handles” is a first step toward biosynthesizing diverse polymers with tailored properties. Read more »