Science: In the past decade, there has been an explosion of academic and industrial interest in the use of organic conducting (“pi-conjugated”) materials in optoelectronics, flexible logic circuits, light emission, energy conversion, optical communications.Compared with inorganic materials, pi-conjugated materials can more easily be tuned through molecular design and cost less to manufacture.Advances in physical understanding, synthetic control of the chemical product, and computational molecular design now allow pi-conjugated materials to be tailored for a specific purpose or function. In Science, Joel M. Hales and associates report a promising new approach to the design of pi-conjugated materials for all-optical communications. Related linkDesign of polymethine dyes with large third-order optical nonlinearities and loss figures of merit
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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