Optical transmission measurements were made on 98% porosity silica aerogel samples under various degrees of uniaxial strain. Uniaxially compressed aerogels exhibit large birefringence, proportional to the amount of compression, up to the 15% strain studied. The birefringence is mostly reversible and reproducible through multiple compression-decompression cycles. Our study demonstrates that unia...

The oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are traditionally carried out with noble metals (such as Pt) and metal oxides (such as RuO₂ and MnO₂) as catalysts, respectively. However, these metal-based catalysts often suffer from multiple disadvantages, including high cost, low selectivity, poor stability and detrimental environmental effects. Here, we describe a meso...

Introduction: The STARDUST spacecraft captured dust samples from Comet 81P/Wild 2 at a relative velocity of 6.1 km⋅s in a low density silica aerogel and returned them to the Earth. One of the main of the scientific goals established for the mission was to determine whether comets contained complex organic materials and, contingently, the nature and abundance of this material. [1] Although conta...

Flexible supercapacitors(SCs) made by reduced graphene oxide (rGO)-based aerogel usually suffer from the low energy density, short cycle life and bad flexibility. In this study, a new, synthetic strategy was developed for enhancing the electrochemical performances of rGO aerogel-based supercapacitor via electrodeposition polyaniline arrays on the prepared ultralight rGO aerogel. The novel hybri...

Superelastic graphene aerogel with ultra-high compressibility shows promising potential for compression-tolerant supercapacitor electrode. However, its specific capacitance is too low to meet the practical application. Herein, we deposited polyaniline (PANI) into the superelastic graphene aerogel to improve the capacitance while maintaining the superelasticity. Graphene/PANI aerogel with optimi...

The coherent precession in bulk He A-phase is unstable due to the positive feedback of spin supercurrent to the gradient of phase of precession. It was predicted that the homogeneous precession will be stable if the orbital momentum could be oriented along the magnetic field. [7] We have found that the orbital part of order parameter in He A-phase immersed in aerogel orients along the direction...

The cometary tray of the NASA Stardust spacecraft’s aerogel collector has been examined to study the dust that was captured during the 2004 fly by of comet 81P/Wild-2. An optical scan of the entire collector surface revealed 256 impact features in the aerogel (width > 100 μm). 20 aerogel blocks (out of a total of 132) were removed from the collector tray for a higher resolution optical scan and...

We report theoretical calculations of the thermal conductivity of superfluid He impregnated into high-porosity aerogel and compare these results with available experimental data.