Versatile, organic glow-in-the-dark materials closer to matching the performance of their inorganic counterparts.

Glow-in-the-dark paints that have improved flexibility and transparency while also being cheaper and easier to manufacture are on the horizon courtesy of research from Kyushu University. In a demonstration, light emission lasting more than one hour was achieved from organic materials, which are also promising for unlocking new applications such as in bio-imaging.

The successful future of fuel cells relies on improving the performance of the catalysts they use. Gold nanoparticles have been cited as an ideal solution, but creating a uniform, useful catalyst has proven elusive. However, a team of researchers at Kyushu University's International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research (I2CNER) devised a method for using a new type of catalyst support.

Demonstrating a strategy that could form the basis for a new class of electronic devices with uniquely tunable properties, researchers at Kyushu University were able to widely vary the emission color and efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes based on exciplexes simply by changing the distance between key molecules in the devices by a few nanometers.