Nearly 500 K-12 students from NYC schools visited NYU MRSEC laboratories for science demonstrations as part of the MRSEC Scientific Frontiers Program Developed class modules for 70 9th graders in the Urban Assembly Institute for Math and Science for Young Women, an all-girls school in Brooklyn for the underrepresented and underprivileged Science demonstrations, in Spanish, for more than 80 students at Don Pedro Albizu Campos elementary school, which primarily serves economically disadvantaged Hispanic student

Ordered double perovskites, such as Sr2FeMoO6, are among the very few materials that allow electrons of one spin direction to move through them as though they were passing through a normal metal, while blocking electrons of the opposite spin.  Materials that behave this way at room temperature are even more exotic.

Widely used in small electronic devices and in the nascent market for HEVS (Hybrid Electric Vehicles), lithium ion batteries store more energy for theirweight, operate at a higher voltage, and hold a charge much longer thanother rechargeable batteries. As a new approach, Belcher and Ceder of the MIT MRSEC IRG-I have explored a biological way to create new charge storage materials for lithium ion batteries by using a virus as a scaffold totemplate the growth and assembly of nanoscale electrode

Topological insulators are a new class of insulators in which a bulk gap for electronic excitations is generated by strong spin-orbit coupling.

Two self-assembled colloidal clusters, as seen under the optical microscope. The cluster on the left, a tri-tetrahedron, and the cluster on the right, an octahedron, have the same energy. But in an experiment where both clusters are allowed to form randomly in solution, the less symmetric tri-tetrahedron occurs more than twenty times as often as the highly symmetric octahedron because of the many more ways to form the tri-tetrahedron.

We have identified a composition in Sm doped BiFeO3 which exhibits a complex mixture of ferroelectric phase and an antiferroelectric phase. Left shows a high resolution TEM image of a region displaying an interface between a rhombohedral ferroelectric phase (FE matrix) and antiferroelectric (antipolar clusters).

Acclaimed chef Jose Andres visited the Harvard MRSEC to collaborate with Center researchers and speak to students in the ES139. Innovations in Science and Engineering class; the laboratory and classroom discussions were filmed for a feature on 60 Minutes through a special agreement with the

Banana shaped molecules, like the one shown in the figure, like to pack into layers but when they do, they have a hard time making flat ones.  Their layers have a strong tendency to buckle up into saddles, and when the saddles try to fill space interesting things happen.  If the layers are crystal-like they can only form the twisted nanofilaments in the top of the image.  If the layers are fluid, like in a liquid crystal, then they form the "plumbers nightmare" of nested tubes and connections, the "sponge phase",at the

On June 1st -4th, 2010, CMU hosted 67 scientists from around the world at the 1st Summer School on 3D Microstructure Studies. MRSEC Faculty, graduate students and researchers introduced the techniques that were developed and continue to be developed here at CMU to characterize of the internal structure of polycrystalline materials. The school consisted of a mix of lectures, demonstrations and hands-on interactive activities for the participants. Sections were taught on measuring the