Amorphous

Scientists have developed amorphous silicon carbide, a strong and scalable material with potential uses in microchip sensors, solar cells, and space exploration. This breakthrough promises significant advancements in material science and microchip technology. An artist’s impression of amorphous silicon carbide nanostrings testing to its limit tensile strength. Credit: Science BrushA material that doesn’t just rival the strength of diamonds and graphene, but boasts a yield strength 10 times greater than Kevlar, renowned…

Ever since they first appeared in the late 1990s, Iceland’s Sigur Rós have occupied a fertile middle ground between post-rock and classical. However, in contrast to the harsh, at times industrial soundscapes of 2013’s Kveikur, their first album in a decade (and first since multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson returned to the fold) largely eschews percussion. Instead, the 10 tracks here, with strings from London Contemporary Orchestra very much foregrounded, tend towards slowly unfurling ambient washes of sound.Listened…

If you thought ice varieties got no more interesting than crushed versus cubed, think again: Researchers have discovered an ice form whose haphazard molecular structure resembles that of liquid water, despite being a solid.The peculiar ice, named medium-density amorphous ice (or MDA), also has a density similar to liquid water. Amorphous ice has been known before, but not at this middle ground for density. The researcher’s findings were published this week in Science.“We know of 20 crystalline forms of ice, but only two…