Carbon-boron clathrate cage with strontium inside, courtesy Tim Strobel
Matter at Extreme States

Washington, DC— A long-sought-after class of “superdiamond” carbon-based materials with tunable mechanical and electronic properties was predicted and synthesized by Carnegie’s Li Zhu and Timothy Strobel.

High Pressure

Washington, DC— Every school child learns about the water cycle—evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and collection.

High Pressure

Washington, DC— Pressure improves the ability of materials to turn heat into electricity and could potentially be used to create clean generators, according to new work from a team that includes Carnegie’s Alexander Goncharov and Viktor Struzhkin published in 

Matter at Extreme States

New materials can contribute potential solutions to many societal issues—from increasing access to clean drinking water to improving solar panel efficiency.

Planetary Science

A system of categorization that reflects not just a mineral's chemistry and crystalline structure, but also the physical, chemical, or biological processes by which it formed, would be capable of recognizing that nanodiamonds from space are fundamentally different from diamonds formed in Earth's depths.

Materials

Active materials can interchange types of energy. In a new cover article in the journal molecules, Geophysical Lab Staff Scientist Ronald Cohen and his colleague Haiwu Zhang report on predictions of a new class of polar metallocene crystals, which may be useful as active materials.

Department

The AGU Fall Meeting 2018 took place in Washington, DC from December 10-14.  Many staff members and postdoctoral associates from the Geophysical Laboratory attended.  

We posted live updates on each day's science presentations here, and on FacebookTwitterYouTubeand Instagram.

Mars’ organic carbon may have originated from a series of electrochemical reactions between briny liquids and volcanic minerals, according to new analyses of three Martian meteorites from a team led by the Geophysical Laboratory’s Andrew Steele published in Science Advances.

High Pressure, Matter at Extreme States

Lab-based mimicry allowed an international team of physicists including the Geophysical Laboratory’s Alexander Goncharov to probe hydrogen under the conditions found in the interiors of giant planets—where experts believe it gets squeezed until it becomes a liquid metal, capable of conducting electricity. Their work is published in Science.

Geochemistry, Matter at Extreme States, Mineralogy

Blue diamonds—like the world-famous Hope Diamond at the National Museum of Natural History—formed up to four times deeper in the Earth’s mantle than most other diamonds, according to new work by Carnegie’s Steven Shirey, Emma Bullock, and Jianhua Wang and published on the cover of Nature.

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