thecraftychemist:

Above: This is the largest sheet ever made of a metamaterial that can bend near infrared light backward.

2011: The year in Materials

Metamaterials

[These] offer another approach to invisibility: instead of absorbing light, metamaterials bend it around an object. Until this year, researchers have only been able to make metamaterials on a small scale—less than a millimeter across. Now they’ve made them big enough to be practical. They don’t work yet for all wavelengths of light (such as visible light), but they could render objects invisible to night vision equipment.

Novel nanostructured materials

could greatly enhance the power output of solar panels and make them cheaper by capturing light that would have otherwise been reflected. They could also achieve these goals by converting near infrared light into colors that conventional silicon solar cells can absorb.

Quantum-dot displays

Tiny crystals called quantum dots emit intense, sharply defined colors and could use far less energy than LCDs. Another ingenious way to reduce energy use is make displays that emit no light at all, but instead reflect ambient light, an approach being taken by Qualcomm with its full-color Mirasol displays, which use only a tenth of the energy of an LCD. The technology has started to appear in tablet computers in South Korea.

Conductive polymer

inexpensive materials that can store 10 times as much energy as conventional graphite electrodes in lithium-ion batteries. Paired with an equally high-capacity opposite electrode, these could transform portable electronics and electric vehicles.

fingerprint proof displays

A new coating based on soot from a candle flame could provide a cheap oil-repelling layer that could eliminate smudges