What new materials are there?

A couple of interesting things about this stuff. First, its applications for solar cells as noted in the article, because it shifts radiation from a useless or harmful frequency to one that can be harvested. Second, biofluorescence (not to be confused with bioluminescence) has evolved as a strategy to deal with UV (in fact astrobiologists have proposed looking for fluorescence on planets around red dwarfs when they flare as biosigns).
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...escent-solids-can-be-3d-printed-in-any-shape/Overall it looks like biotech (well, beer is biotech come to think of it) biomimetics, synthetic biology are going to have significant applications in space.
 
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A general point I'd like to make is that genuinely hi-tech and elegant (low mass, closed loop, and ISRU), not ideologically Luddite, design has a lot to offer for aerospace, and vice versa, since optimum design for aerospace is 'green' it has a lot to offer on earth.
 
Arjen said:
Superconductive at room temperature - and a pressure of 2.6 million atmospheres.
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This material is a 3 element superconductor.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02895-0

Adding a third element greatly broadens the combinations that can be included in future experiments searching for new superconductors, says study co-author Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “We’ve opened a whole new region” of exploration, he says.

Materials that superconduct at high but not extreme pressures could already be put to use, says Maddury Somayazulu, a high-pressure-materials scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois. The study shows that by “judiciously choosing the third and fourth element” in a superconductor, he says, you could in principle bring down its operational pressure.
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A real world high temperature superconductor now exists and the category for its operation offers a real world possibility for finding something that could be applicable for wide use. Which of course makes the trip to Pandora unnecessary.
 
Stunning work. It's also amazing to see how deeply international this study is.

Every soldier, public servant or volonteer could now be part of a gigantic sensing unit that track and locate any harmful and rogue radiation.
 
I have a few materials specialist mates and none of them can speak here, one day maybe ;-) think the craziest thoughts you can on materials behaviour for any given task and then triple it..... (or the opposite depending on what it is meant to do!) :)
 

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