Meet the mysterious electrides

These chemical oddities may explain why Earth seems to be deficient in certain elements. For close to a century, geoscientists have pondered a mystery: Where did Earth’s lighter elements go? Compared to amounts in the Sun and in some meteorites, Earth has less hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, as…

Did Edison accidentally make graphene in 1879?

Rice University chemists replicated Thomas Edison’s seminal experiment and found a surprising byproduct. Graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super…

Watch a robot swarm “bloom” like a garden

The Swarm Garden: An array of modular robot agents that adapt to changing conditions for living architecture. Researchers at Princeton University have built a swarm of interconnected mini-robots that “bloom” like flowers in response to changing light levels in an office. According to their new paper published in the…