When dielectric materials are brought into contact and then separated, they develop static electricity. For centuries, it has been assumed that such contact charging derives from the spatially homogeneous material properties (along the material's surface) and that within a given pair of materials, one charges uniformly positively and the other negatively. We demonstrate that this picture of contact charging is incorrect. Whereas each contact-electrified piece develops a net charge of either positive or negative polarity, each surface supports a random "mosaic" of oppositely charged regions of nanoscopic dimensions. These mosaics of surface charge have the same topological characteristics for different types of electrified dielectrics and accommodate significantly more charge per unit area than previously thought.

Although multiple methods have been developed to detect metal cations, only a few offer sensitivities below 1 pM, and many require complicated procedures and sophisticated equipment. Here, we describe a class of simple solid-state sensors for the ultrasensitive detection of heavy-metal cations (notably, an unprecedented attomolar limit for the detection of CH(3)Hg(+) in both standardized solutions and environmental samples) through changes in the tunnelling current across films of nanoparticles (NPs) protected with striped monolayers of organic ligands. The sensors are also highly selective because of the ligand-shell organization of the NPs. On binding of metal cations, the electronic structure of the molecular bridges between proximal NPs changes, the tunnelling current increases and highly conductive paths ultimately percolate the entire film. The nanoscale heterogeneity of the structure of the film broadens the range of the cation-binding constants, which leads to wide sensitivity ranges (remarkably, over 18 orders of magnitude in CH(3)Hg(+) concentration).

We describe a new modeling approach to prediction of Young's modulus of segmented polyurethanes. This approach combines micromechanical models with thermodynamic considerations based on the theory of block copolymers. The resulting model predicts both the equilibrium morphology and the ''ideal'' Young's modulus of a segmented polyurethane polymer as a function of its formulation (hard segment chemical structure, hard segment weight fraction, soft segment equivalent weight) and temperature.

A typical configuration of an equilibrium 2D system of 2500 Lennard-Jones particles at melting is found to be a mosaic of crystallites and amorphous clusters. This mosaic significantly changed at times around the period τ of local vibrations, while most particles retain their nearest neighbors for times much longer than τ. In a system of 2500 particles, we found no phase separation for length scales larger than that of a crystallite. With decreasing density, the number of small amorphous clusters increased, and proliferation and percolation of amorphous matter separated the crystalline-ordered parts so that correlations between local order orientations of remote crystallites disappeared. We suggest that the mosaic is a manifestation of diminished stability of the crystalline structure resulting from competition between attraction and repulsion forces.

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