To all those who think being a scientist is not very exciting, Paul Steinhardt today at the American Physical Society meeting in Portland, OR, gave some reasons to think again.

Steinhardt has done lots of work leading to the discovery and characterization of quasicrystals, solids which are ordered but nonperiodic. Created in the lab in the mid ’80s, they have proven to be very hard to spot in nature. About 10 years ago, Steinhardt and his students started analyzing systematically large catalogs of powder diffraction spectra of naturally occurring minerals to search for the presence of quasicrystals. They would ask for samples of the possible candidates, so they could analyze them in more detail, but unfortunately not all were available, so they made an appeal in their paper to people who possessed these samples to make them available.

For a few years nothing happened. Then they were contacted by a curator of the Museum of Natural History in Florence, Italy, who had a sample called Khatyrkite, which had been found in 1978 in extreme northeastern Siberia. This sample, a complex mixture of aluminum-containing minerals, also comprised a quasicrystalline area, the first natural quasicrystal ever found, of composition Al63Cu24Fe13, similar to a known stable artificial quasicrystal.

Understanding more about this sample required finding out precisely where it was found in the first place, and at this point the scientists had to work like Da Vinci code characters, reconstructing the path of the sample through the notes of a dead private collector in Amsterdam, to a smuggler in Romania, then on to a museum in St. Petersburg and finally to the banks of the Kathyrkha river in northeast Siberia, and getting in touch with the person who physically found the mineral. They are now thinking of organizing an expedition to find out whether there are more quasicrystals in the area.

That is what Richard Wool suggested as apparently, when treated thermally near their melting temperature, the cheratin in the feathers develops tunnels around 7 Angstroms in size, which are very good for hydrogen storage. The material is not very efficient, but at least it is extremely low cost (3000kg waste feathers a year are produced in the US alone).

Wool presented also an interesting technology for prefab roofs. They would be made of recycled cardboard or other natural fibers and soybean oil resin, which is then cross linked by free radical polymerization, started by a cobalt based catalyst. Although this technology has been around for a few years (it was developed to make roofs able to withstand hurricanes) it has been recently picked up by the South African government which will deploy it on 2.2 million homes as an energy efficient substitute for steel and other materials currently used in housing there.

A nice, sunny afternoon in San Francisco, and my jet-lag seems to be under control. As it is my first time at the MRS, not to mention my first meeting as a Nature editor, not to mention my first attempt at blogging, I will try to keep this short and sweet. the meeting is of a manageable size (i.e. it doesn’t take half an hour to walk from one talk to the next), a big plus on my side.

There is plenty of interesting stuff to see. In particular a session on 3D architectures for energy storage: Debra Rolison talked about building batteries out of porous MnO2 networks, on which an electrolyte layer is then grown, and RuO2 anodes are deposited, which seems an intriguing idea.

Joanna Aizenberg showed nanorods which become humidity responsive when immersed in a polymer hydrogel, creating surfaces that can be hydrophilic in dry conditions, and superhydrophobic in wet conditions (when it rains?).

Another nice talk by Mike Crommie (of quantum corrals fame) was on STM studies of gated graphene, where he showed that shifting the gate voltage it is possible to image the presence of charge puddles on the sheet, and they are due likely to impurities trapped in the silica substrate.