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Materials in news

Six materials have been in the news since August: a thermoelectric crystal, a printed bone graft, jute geotextile, a piezoelectric peptide, a jammed microgel and the lab grown diamond. What links them is that each is defined by an arrangement rather than an ingredient, and that most are built to be absorbed, by the body or by the soil.

UPSC has asked

Prelims 2020: geotextiles in environmentally sustainable rural roads
Prelims 2018: applications of 3D printing

Where these materials get their properties

Most of them owe what they do to how their atoms or particles are arranged, not to what they are made of.
So the process is the material: a reactor route, a co-solvent or a sudden cooling can switch a property on without changing a chemical formula.
Piezoelectricity needs a non-centrosymmetric structure, one with no centre of symmetry, so that molecular dipoles line up instead of cancelling.
A thermoelectric material has to conduct electricity well but heat poorly, so the search is for crystals whose lattice carries heat badly.

Materials meant to be absorbed

A material put inside the body has to be non-toxic and tissue compatible, and the best of them are resorbable, dissolving as new tissue takes their place.
Outdoors the same logic is biodegradability: a fabric laid to hold a slope until vegetation roots need not outlast the plants.

Who does this work in India

The Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences (CeNS), the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) and the Raman Research Institute (RRI), all in Bengaluru, are autonomous institutes of the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
The Technology Development Board (TDB) is a statutory body under the Technology Development Board Act, 1995, and pays for a proven technology's move to commercial production rather than for the research behind it.

Piezoelectric material: A material, such as quartz, that produces electrical charge when pressed, bent or otherwise stressed.

Chiral self-assembly: Molecules arranging themselves, unaided, into a handed structure that cannot be superposed on its mirror image.

Thermoelectric material: A material that turns a temperature difference directly into electricity, the Seebeck effect.

zT: The thermoelectric figure of merit; higher is better.

Bioceramics: Ceramic materials the body accepts, used to repair bone and teeth, some absorbed as new bone grows.

Geotextile: A permeable fabric used with soil to separate, filter, drain, reinforce or protect it.

Microgel: A microscopic particle of cross-linked polymer gel that swells by absorbing water and shrinks when warmed.

Lab grown diamond: A diamond grown in a reactor, chemically identical to a mined stone rather than an imitation of it.

Kimberley Process: An international certification scheme meant to keep conflict diamonds, mined to pay for war, out of the legitimate trade.

What has happened

14 Sep 2026
JNCASR found heat moving through thallium copper selenide (TlCu₅Se₃) in a wave-like way rather than as phonons, the lattice vibrations that normally carry it.
- Its ultralow lattice thermal conductivity gives it a zT of 1.7, which suits recovering electricity from industrial waste heat.
PIB, 14 Sep 2026: Unusual wave-like heat transport in crystalline solid signals breakthrough converting waste heat in industries (opens in a new tab)
9 Sep 2026
The Technology Development Board funded a company to 3D print patient specific bone grafts.
- They are printed from hydroxyapatite, the calcium phosphate mineral of most bone and tooth enamel, and from beta-tricalcium phosphate.
- Two routes were named: Digital Light Processing (DLP), which cures a whole layer with a projected image, and extrusion, which pushes a paste through a nozzle.
PIB, 9 Sep 2026: TDB-DST Supports M/s Ceramat Private Limited for Commercialisation of 3D-Printed Patient-Specific Bone Grafts (opens in a new tab)
7 Sep 2026
A government backgrounder gathered jute's newer uses around jute geotextile, a biodegradable technical textile.
- It protects embankment and riverbank slopes, aids vegetation on degraded land and goes under road and railway formations.
- The fibre comes from Corchorus capsularis, white jute, and Corchorus olitorius, tossa jute.
PIB, 7 Sep 2026: Jute: India's Golden Fibre, Sustaining livelihoods through innovative policy interventions (opens in a new tab)
3 Sep 2026
CeNS found that one per cent of a co-solvent switches on piezoelectricity in peptides, the biodegradable building blocks of proteins.
- In water alone they form nanofibres with no response; the co-solvent triggers chiral self-assembly into a non-centrosymmetric order, the chemistry unchanged.
- Implantable sensors, electronic skin and wearables powered by a heartbeat are the uses claimed.
PIB, 3 Sep 2026: Tiny molecular switch enables nature-inspired biomaterials for self-powered healthcare (opens in a new tab)
2 Sep 2026
RRI jammed soft microgels into a glass, solid yet disordered like a liquid, and found that a thermal shock briefly liquefies it and erases its memory of past heating and cooling.
- They swell when cool and collapse above 34 °C, just below body temperature, so a loaded microgel releases its drug at a target such as a tumour.
PIB, 2 Sep 2026: New study on temperature change induced structure recovery patterns could help drug delivery (opens in a new tab)
4 Aug 2026
Lab grown diamonds were set out as an alternative to mined stones as natural mines deplete.
- High Pressure, High Temperature (HPHT) synthesis mimics conditions in the Earth's mantle; Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) deposits carbon from a gas onto a diamond seed.
- The stone is cheaper and easier to trace, and conflict diamonds still evade the Kimberley Process; India is investing in its own production and research.
The Hindu, 4 Aug 2026: Lab-grown diamonds as an alternative to mined stones (opens in a new tab)