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Since the Stone Age humans have been adept at selecting materials for specific tasks based on the material’s properties. With the discovery of smelting man learned to manipulate materials to improve performance. Now new materials can be “built” on a nm scale with properties that are required for a host of applications, from solar cells to catalysts in industrial process.
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The self-assembly of peptides into fibrils is commonly observed. Such fibrils may have biological roles and may also be useful in nanotechnology applications, as scaffolds to create metal nanowires or to template the self-assembly of other inorganic materials, for biosensors or as supports for cell adhesion. The misfolding of proteins into so-called amyloid fibrils is also implicated in amyloid diseases such as Alzheimer’s and type II diabetes. It has been suggested that amyloid fibrils are ...
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Professor So Iwata, who leads the Membrane Protein Laboratory at Diamond Light Source and is also a professor at Imperial College London, has been awarded the Gregori Aminoff prize in crystallography for 2010.
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BBSRC is planning to award one Diamond Professorial Research Fellowship to be located in the Research Complex at Harwell
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Hydrogen is difficult to store or transport with current technology. Hydrogen gas has good energy density by weight, but poor energy density by volume compared to the hydrocarbons used currently to power cars. In principle, hydrogen requires a larger tank than petrol to store the same energy, making it a less practical alternative in volumetric terms. One approach to improve the energy density of gaseous hydrogen is by storing the gas at higher pressures. This requires material and design ...
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Many nanotechnology and biotechnology applications rely on how tiny metal particles arrange themselves on flat surfaces. These patterned structures on the nanometre scale are of great importance in making novel electronic, magnetic and photonic devices. Therefore being able to accurately characterise them is vital. However, this can be very challenging and sometimes requires several different techniques to find the detailed shape and chemical composition of the nanoparticles. A group of ...
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On Tuesday 1st September the Lord Lieutenant of Surrey, Mrs Sarah Goad JP, took part in an innovative science and art project to launch the involvement of the UK’s national synchrotron facility, Diamond Light Source, in the British Science Festival, which opens in Surrey this weekend.
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Understanding the deformation of polycrystalline structural materials is the key to improving performance and reliability of complex engineering components and systems. The interaction between grains in the metal and how they behave under stress is vital to determining the strength of a component and how it will deform. However capturing full details of polycrystalline deformation is a significant challenge, partly because of the sheer volume of information involved, and partly due to the ...
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Transition metal oxides are an intriguing class of materials since it is possible to drastically modify their properties by changing their temperature, applying a magnetic field or simply by irradiating them with light. Of particular interest are the manganites that exhibit complex interactions bewteen the spin and and orbital degrees of freedom. To fully understand the nature of this delicate balance between the different phases of the same material it is crucial to exploit the versatility ...
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Professor So Iwata, an Imperial College London scientist, has been awarded the first ever ‘Diamond Fellowship’ of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
