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As long as humans have been forming gold into precious objects, goldsmiths have struggled to offset the metal’s softness. Traditionally, this issue has been addressed by alloying gold with other metals like silver, copper, and palladium (the percentages of which yield the familiar karat system for grading gold purity). However, ...

As long as humans have been forming gold into precious objects, goldsmiths have struggled to offset the metal’s softness. Traditionally, this issue has been addressed by alloying gold with other metals like silver, copper, and palladium (the percentages of which yield the familiar karat system for grading gold purity).

(PhysOrg.com) -- The eventual failure of metals, such as the aluminum in ships and airplanes, can often be blamed on breaks, or voids, in the material's atomic lattice. They're at first invisible, only microns in size, but once enough of them link up, the metal eventually splits apart.

Molecules that suddenly transform into new structures when stimulated by photons or electrons play key roles in many chemical and biological processes. Recently, chemists have discovered that adding transition metals such as copper to photo-responsive organic ligands produces materials with high solar conversion efficiencies, owing to the metal’s ready supply of light-activated electrons.