Alfred Nobel, namesake of the Nobel Prizes, was originally known for inventing dynamite, though not fondly, as he found out. When his brother died, a newspaper erroneously reported Alfred’s death. The obituary chided him for his invention that, especially at that time, often proved deadly.
One of the grand challenges in materials science is discovering exactly how materials form glasses.
David Simmons, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the University of Akron’s Department of Polymer Engineering is trying to understand at the fundamental level the relationship between the molecular structure and the way a material forms a glass.
To enable the rational design of future materials, such as batteries that could more safely and efficiently power electric cars, a research group at The Ohio State University is developing an innovative modeling approach to reveal the details of the microscopic structure and dynamics in microphase-separated polymer electrolytes.
Bharat Bhushan, Ph.D., was on sabbatical at Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne, Switzerland in 2005 when a transformation began.
After reading an article in a trade magazine on the lotus leaf’s water repellant properties, Bhushan’s industrial research launched down a greener, livelier new path.
In 2016, the Ohio Supercomputer Center arrived at another crossroads. We began installation of the most powerful supercomputer in the history of the center. We swapped out almost all of our storage and other infrastructure, essentially rebuilding OSC’s production infrastructure from the ground up.
For all the different moving parts that go into mechanical engineering systems, the gas turbine is a relatively simple design: a large rotor fitted with vanes is made to revolve by a fast-moving gas flow.
To begin understanding dark matter in astrophysics, one must first step into a world where galaxies are considered small. The is the world that Annika Peter, Ph.D., and graduate student Stacy Kim are discovering more fully at The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics.
Compared to its centuries-old fossil fuel counterparts, nuclear power is a young player in today’s lineup of energy sources. Still, since the world’s first nuclear power plant became operational in 1954, there have been three marked advancement periods, or generations, of nuclear technology. Each new generation has improved upon the current safety and performance of the previous generation.
Several years ago, a Physics World article posed the question, “Why would anyone still want to study a physical phenomenon that was discovered in the 1930s, explained in the 1960s and has been the subject of numerous reviews since the 1970s?”
The quest to understand the fundamental building blocks of nature and their interactions is one of the longest-running and most ambitious of human endeavors.
