News

A Polymer That Defies Nature: The First Molecularly Impermeable Plastic

For decades, scientists believed all plastics shared one unavoidable weakness: no matter how dense or strong, gases could always slip through. Even the toughest polymers, from bulletproof Kevlar to everyday food packaging, may look solid, but at the molecular level, tiny gas molecules can still sneak through. That’s why potato chips go stale and packaged food loses its crispness.   Now, a collaboration between researchers at Boston University’s College of Engineering, MIT, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Massachusetts and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has overturned that assumption. In a study published today in Nature, the team reports the discovery of the first polymer that is molecularly impermeable; a man-made material that acts as a perfect barrier to gas molecules. More

Skyward Bound

The successful launch of Icarus, a liquid-fueled rocket designed and built by BU students. More

lunar lander

ENG Faculty and Students Power BU to the Moon

At 2 am on a Sunday in March 2025, a dozen scientists were gathered in a College of Engineering lab at Boston University in a tense, nail-biting silence. Almost 240,000 miles away, a shiny, golden spacecraft was slowly dropping toward the moon’s surface after traveling through space for 40 days. Mounted on top was a specially designed telescope, built at BU and known as LEXI, sent to capture views of Earth’s protective magnetic field that have never been seen before. More