Rutgers University-New Brunswick researchers have discovered a new class of materials – called intercrystals – with unique electronic properties that could power future technologies. Intercrystals exhibit newly discovered forms of electronic properties that could pave the way for advancements in more efficient electronic components, quantum computing and environmentally friendly materials, the scientists said. The research is described in a report in the journal Nature Materials.

The smallest grooves on the brain's surface, unique to humans, have largely been ignored by anatomists, but recent studies show that they're related to cognitive performance, including face recognition and reasoning ability. A new UC Berkeley study shows that the depths of these tertiary sulci are also linked to increased interconnectedness between areas of the brain associated with reasoning and high-level cognitive functions. The sulci may decrease the length of neural connections, improving communication efficiency.

A serendipitous observation in a Chemical Engineering lab at Penn Engineering has led to a surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials that can pull water from the air, collect it in pores and release it onto surfaces without the need for any external energy. The research, published in Science Advances, was conducted by an interdisciplinary team, including Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), Amish Patel, Professor in CBE, Baekmin Kim, a postdoctoral scholar in Lee’s lab and first author, and Stefan Guldin, Professor in Complex Soft Matter at the Technical University of Munich. Their work describes a material that could open the door to new ways to collect water from the air in arid regions and devices that cool electronics or buildings using the power of evaporation.

Large shifts in UV radiation at Lake Tahoe are associated with wet and dry climate extremes, finds a UC Davis study.

New research from the University of Chicago shows that dentine, the inner layer of teeth that transmits sensory information to nerves inside the pulp, first evolved as sensory tissue in the armored exoskeletons of ancient fish.

SeaSplat is an image-analysis tool that cuts through the ocean’s optical effects to generate images of underwater environments reveal an ocean scene’s true colors. Researchers paired the color-correcting tool with a computational model that converts images of a scene into a three-dimensional underwater “world” that can be explored virtually. 

Scientists studying a promising quantum material have stumbled upon a surprise: within its crystal structure, the material naturally forms one of the world’s thinnest semiconductor junctions—a building block of most modern electronics. The junction is just 3.3 nanometers thick, about 25,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper.