Nature Materials is producing live tweets from the Materials Research Society Meeting over at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston.

This afternoon’s came from a meeting on energy-critical elements

Abundance of chemical elements a huge issue! #mrsfall10

On its website, the MRS says that “increasingly cross-disciplinary worldwide activity in materials research manifests itself every year in the MRS Fall Meetings.” Forty-nine talks are grouped into clusters: Materials for Information Processing, Materials for Infrastructure and Mechanical Applications, Materials Processing and Device Fabrication, Materials for Energy, Biological and Environmental Applications of Materials, and Materials Exploration. "

For more, see the official meeting blog, including this post on a Sunday talk by Harvard’s Charles M. Lieber :

The first application that Dr. Lieber discussed was nanowire based photovoltaics, a topic near and dear to my heart. Some good photovoltaic power conversion efficiencies (~ 8 %) were presented for Silicon nanowire solar cells, although Dr. Lieber himself commented that these may not necessarily be the paradigm changing solar cells that can be mass produced at low cost to save the world’s energy crisis. High series resistance at the nanowire-electrode contact (and hence poor fill factors) are to blame for this. I would imagine charge carrier recombinations would pose yet another challenge. Nevertheless, as Dr. Lieber pointed out, it is the fundamental science behind such novel devices that is worth pursuing, even if they are not exactly practical.

The true gem of the lecture was the work that interfaced these nanowire based devices with biology (cardiac cells and brain tissue). Possible future applications might even include growing entire biological structures (organs perhaps?). In Dr. Lieber’s own words the objective is to “blur the distinction between electronic devices, living cells & tissue!”