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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The same tiny cellulose crystals that give trees and plants their high strength, light weight and resilience, have now been shown to have the stiffness of steel.
The nanocrystals might be used to create a new class of biomaterials with wide-ranging applications, such as strengthening construction materials and automotive components.
Calculations using precise models based on the atomic structure of cellulose show the crystals have a stiffness of 206 gigapascals, which is comparable to steel, said Pablo D. Zavattieri, a Purdue University assistant professor of civil engineering.
"This is a material that is showing really amazing properties," he said. "It is abundant, renewable and produced as waste in the paper industry."
Findings are detailed in a research paper featured on the cover of the December issue of the journal Cellulose.
"It is very difficult to measure the properties of these crystals experimentally because they are really tiny," Zavattieri said. "For the first time, we predicted their properties using quantum mechanics."
The nanocrystals are about 3 nanometers wide by 500 nanometers long - or about 1/1,000th the width of a grain of sand - making them too small to study with light microscopes and difficult to measure with laboratory instruments.
Every gardener knows the look of a ripe tomato. That bright red color, that warm earthy smell, and the sweet juicy flavor are hard to resist. But commercial tomato plants have a very different look from the backyard garden variety, which can grow endlessly under the right conditions to become tall and lanky. Tomatoes that will be canned for sauces and juice are harvested from plants that stop growing earlier than classic tomato varieties, and are therefore more like bushes. While the architecture of these compact bushy plants allows mechanical harvesters to reap the crop, the early end of growth means that each plant produces fewer fruits than their home garden cousins.
Sharks’ ages are usually estimated by counting the alternating opaque and translucent band pairs deposited in succession in their vertebrae.
A January 8 news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center announced the latest finding that adult great white sharks may live 70 years or longer, based on the results of a study that determined age estimates for great whites in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean by using radiocarbon dating.
Akin to measuring the rings on trees to determine age, sharks’ ages are usually estimated by counting the alternating opaque and translucent band pairs deposited in succession in their vertebrae. Scientists do not know if these band pairs deposit on the animals’ vertebrae annually, so accurately estimating the age of sharks or speculating on the lifespan of individual species is a major challenge for scientists.
The analyzed fossils are comprised of skeletal remains, in addition to dark skin patches holding masses of micrometer-sized, oblate bodies.
According to a January 8 news release from Lund University, scientists at SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden and MAX IV Laboratory have analyzed pigment preserved in the fossilized skin of a 55 million-year-old leatherback turtle, an 85 million-year-old mosasaur, and a 196-190 million-year-old ichthyosaur. The result? The study scientists determined for the first time the color scheme of any extinct marine mammal.
“This is fantastic! When I started studying at Lund University in 1993, the film Jurassic Park had just been released, and that was one of the main reasons why I got interested in biology and palaeontology. Then, 20 years ago, it was unthinkable that we would ever find biological remains from animals that have been extinct for many millions of years, but now we are there and I am proud to be a part of it,” said Johan Lindgren, a scientist at Lund University, and leader of the international research team that studied the fossils.
When someone mentions flying cars it conjures up images of a sporty little number that takes to the air like something out of the Jetsons. But what about one that’s a cross between a 4x4, an octocopter, and a blackhawk helicopter? That’s what Advanced Tactics of El Segundo, California is seeing with its ambitions to produce a roadable VTOL aircraft capable of unmanned autonomous operations as a more flexible way to recover casualties, move supplies, and support special forces.
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A carbon nanotube sponge capable of soaking up water contaminants, such as fertilisers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals, more than three times more efficiently than previous efforts has been presented in a new study published today.
The carbon nanotube (CNT) sponges, uniquely doped with sulphur, also demonstrated a high capacity to absorb oil, potentially opening up the possibility of using the material in industrial accidents and oil spill clean-ups.
The results have been published today, 17 January, in IOP Publishing's journal Nanotechnology.
Your furniture could kill you. According to the US National Fire Protection Association, nearly 20 percent of home fire deaths between 2006 and 2010 occurred in fires where upholstered furniture was the first item to ignite. It's actually not so much the exterior fabric that burns, as it is the foam beneath it. With that in mind, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used carbon nanotubes to create a coating for that foam, that reduces its flammability by 35 percent.
The coating was made by inserting a layer of the heat-dissipating nanotubes between two layers of polymer, then stacking four of those three-layer sandwiches to form one sheet. Despite the fact that it's made up of a total of 12 layers, that sheet has a thickness of less than one-hundredth the diameter of human hair.
Natural 3D counterpart to graphene discovered | e! Science NewsThe discovery of what is essentially a 3D version of graphene -- the 2D sheets of carbon through which electrons race at many times the speed at which they move through silicon -- promises exciting new things to come for the high-tech industry, including much faster transistors and far more compact hard drives. A collaboration of researchers at the U.S Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has discovered that sodium bismuthate can exist as a form of quantum matter called a three-dimensional topological Dirac semi-metal (3DTDS). This is the first experimental confirmation of 3D Dirac fermions in the interior or bulk of a material, a novel state that was only recently proposed by theorists. "A 3DTDS is a natural three-dimensional counterpart to graphene with similar or even better electron mobility and velocity," says Yulin Chen, a physicist with Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) when he initiated the study that led to this discovery, and now with the University of Oxford. "Because of its 3D Dirac fermions in the bulk, a 3DTDS also features intriguing non-saturating linear magnetoresistance that can be orders of magnitude higher than the materials now used in hard drives, and it opens the door to more efficient optical sensors."
The ocean has been described as our world's final frontier. For everything we know about the vast blue expanse that covers 71 percent of our globe, far more remains uncovered. As you probably know, humans don't breathe so well when you take away our oxygen. A new concept straight out of James Bond's bag of tricks aims to correct this evolutionary oversight.
Aptly called the Triton, this diminutive respirator is designed to offer you an indefinite stay under the waves — er, and alive. All you have to do is bite down on the mouth piece and breathe and oxygen will fill your lungs, even though you're not carrying a tank of the stuff on your back. The Triton actually functions just like your own set of gills, stripping oxygen from the water around you.
Based on a technology developed by a yet-unnamed Korean scientist, the Triton employs a filter made up of threads woven together too tightly for whole water molecules to pass through. A powerful micro compressor pulls oxygen through the filter, storing it in a small breath-sized tank. The only limit to your stay under the waves is how long the next-gen battery that powers the compressor can keep your gills working.
Supposedly, the battery in question is 30 times more compact than current off-the-shelf tech and can also charge 1,000 times faster. That, along with a couple other details of the Triton Respirator, sounds a bit fishy, but if this concept makes it through to testing, we'd love to take the plunge.
URBAN warehouses, derelict buildings and high-rises are the last places you'd expect to find the seeds of a green revolution. But from Singapore to Scranton, Pennsylvania, "vertical farms" are promising a new, environmentally friendly way to feed the rapidly swelling populations of cities worldwide.
In March, the world's largest vertical farm is set to open up shop in Scranton. Built by Green Spirit Farms (GSF) of New Buffalo, Michigan, it will only be a single storey covering 3.25 hectares, but with racks stacked six high it will house 17 million plants. And it is just one of a growing number.
Vertical farms aim to avoid the problems inherent in growing food crops in drought-and-disease-prone fields many hundreds of kilometres from the population centres in which they will be consumed. Instead, Dickson Despommier – an ecologist at Columbia University in New York City who has championed vertical farms since 1999 – suggests that food should be grown year-round in high-rise urban buildings, reducing the need for the carbon-emitting transport of fruit and vegetables.
The plant racks in a vertical farm can be fed nutrients by water-conserving, soil-free hydroponic systems and lit by LEDs that mimic sunlight. And they need not be difficult to manage: control software can choreograph rotating racks of plants so each gets the same amount of light, and direct water pumps to ensure nutrients are evenly distributed.
In the field of exotic new materials, we've examined one of the strongest ones and another declared to be impossible; scientists now report creating "forbidden" materials out of ordinary table salt that violate classical rules of chemistry. Not only does the development challenge the theoretical foundation of chemistry, but it is also expected to lead to the discovery of new exotic chemical compounds with practical uses and shed light on the deep interiors of planets.
The international team of researchers led by Artem R. Oganov, a Professor of Crystallography at Stony Brook University, predicted that taking table salt and subjecting it to high pressure in the presence of an excess of one of its constituents (either chlorine or sodium) would lead to the formation of totally unexpected compounds. In spite of salt being one of the most thoroughly studied chemical compounds out there, the researchers predicted the formation of compounds forbidden by classical chemistry, such as Na3Cl and NaCl3. Their predictions were proven by subsequent experiments.
In December of 2011 Superconductors.ORG announced the discovery of the first true room-temperature superconductor - a senary oxycuprate with transition temperature near 28.5 Celsius. Shortly after that Dr. Thom Mason, Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, viewed the data graphs of this discovery online and called them "tantalizing hints" of room-temperature superconductivity. Now O.R.N.L. SQUID tests have confirmed a diamagnetic transition is occuring at 28.5C.
Samples of the compound (Tl5Pb2)Ba2Mg2Cu9O17+ were delivered to Oak Ridge Labs on December 18, 2013, and tests were performed using a commercial SQUID magnetometer. Magnetization tests ranged from 250K to 350K with two different test criteria. Magnetic susceptibility was first measured with an applied magnetic field of 20 Gauss (red dots). This produced considerable scattering of the data points. Then another test was done with a higher applied magnetic field of 1 Tesla (blue dots). This produced a nearly straight line with much less scatter (see plot upper left). Readings were taken every 0.5K and the bulk material characterized as a "weak paramagnet" overall. However within the blue line representing the 1 Tesla data points was a visible negative shift near 302K, indicating a small diamagnetic component at 28.5 Celsius.
An interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers from The MITRE Corporation and Harvard University have taken key steps toward ultra-small electronic computer systems that push beyond the imminent end of Moore's Law, which states that the device density and overall processing power for computers will double every two to three years. In a paper that will appear this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes how they designed and assembled, from the bottom up, a functioning, ultra-tiny control computer that is the densest nanoelectronic system ever built.
The ultra-small, ultra-low-power control processor—termed a nanoelectronic finite-state machine or "nanoFSM"—is smaller than a human nerve cell. It is composed of hundreds of nanowire transistors, each of which is a switch about ten-thousand times thinner than a human hair. The nanowire transistors use very little power because they are "nonvolatile." That is, the switches remember whether they are on or off, even when no power is supplied to them.
You may soon be seeing on your local grocery stores shelves some exotic-sounding new fruits and veggies created by Monsanto. Theres the onion that wont make you cry, the better-for-you broccoli, and the melon that wont spoil when its ripe. But these arent the genetically-modified plants Monsanto has made its name on. Instead, biologists there are taking a high-tech approach to a very ancient kind of crop modification: crossbreeding.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Princess Leia stepped out as a hologram, setting the stage for the Turkish Prime Minister to do the same years later. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, attended a meeting in Izmir. That, in and of itself, shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Izmir is, after all, the third largest city in Turkey. What is surprising is that the PM attended said meeting as a hologram. Holographic technology has made major strides since the release of A New Hope.
HoloVision promises to bring life-sized holographic representations of real people into your very living room.Holho makes a tablet a holographic projection device. And interactive holographs are becoming the norm in some regions of the world. It's no longer science fiction to imagine a world in which holograms are part of our daily lives, and they do more than give us a chance to continuously reference Princess Leia in DVICE articles.
Holographs allow for a future in which a political leader can attend a meeting in a city he can’t reach. It allows for said political leader to address his congregation. In Turkey, the Prime Minster addressed the ruling Justice and Development Party, to deliver the following message: "We are going to the elections in the shadow of attacks prepared by treasonous networks. I urge all my mayoral candidates to not waste any of their time."
Office waste is a part of doing business. Although our world has become increasingly digital, paper copies of documents are still often used for reasons that nobody entirely understands. It's incredibly wasteful: about 40 percent of these documents end up being tossed into the trashcan shortly after being read. Also, the ink to print those documents isn’t cheap. A group of chemists from Jilin University in China, though, have a solution: they invented a printer that uses water instead of ink and paper that becomes blank again after 22 hours, making it 100 percent re-usable.
The most important element of this invention is the paper: it comes pre-treated with an invisible dye called oxazolidine that reacts to the water from the printer, creating a clear print that lasts for about a day. After that, the print slowly fades and becomes clear again, making it capable of being used as many times as needed. The only necessary component to make that happen is a temperature below 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The printer works like a standard inkjet, but instead of having to purchase a costly cartridge when it gets low, you just fill up its cartridges with water using a syringe.
To make paper, manufacturers must break down cellulose (chunks of wood pulp), a process that currently requires large amounts of energy and toxic chemicals like chlorine. Nature performs the same task using enzymes, non-toxic biodegradable proteins that accelerate chemical reactions using far less energy. The catch is that the enzymes required for the job, in this case xylanases, don't hold up to the high temperatures of the manufacturing process. This is only one of many examples of how the limitations of enzymes hamper the development of elegant solutions in the manufacture of everything from medicine to detergents.
"So the question is: can we improve on nature?" said George Makhatadze, a chaired professor in the Biocomputation and Bioinformatics research constellation, professor of biological sciences, and member of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "Can we take an existing protein and, using computation, redesign it to withstand higher temperatures?"
(Phys.org) —Plasmonic nanoparticles developed at Rice University are becoming known for their ability to turn light into heat, but how to use them to generate electricity is not nearly as well understood.
Scientists at Rice are working on that, too. They suggest that the extraction of electrons generated by surface plasmons in metal nanoparticles may be optimized.
Rice researchers led by chemist Stephan Link and graduate student Anneli Hoggard are endeavoring to understand the physics; they started by measuring the speed and efficiency of excited "hot" electrons drawn from gold nanoparticles into a sheet of graphene.
Three letters beamed across a lab bench may spark a revolution in wireless communication. The seemingly simple transmission of "IBM" was received by the first working radio chip to be made from the modern wonder material, graphene – sheets of carbon, each just one atom thick.
Graphene, with its flat, hexagonal lattice, was first isolated a decade ago. It won its discoverers a Nobel prize in physics, in part because its high electrical and thermal conductivity led to broad predictions that it would completely replace silicon transistors, the key component in many electronics. This latest achievement shows that analogue circuits such as radios can indeed make use of the material, potentially leading to cheaper, more efficient wireless devices.
