or a car that never needs a new coat of paint. A study done at The University of Akron may be able to make this a reality in the near future.
Research performed at UA sought to recreate structural color patterns found in bird feathers to generate color without the timely and outdated use of pigments and dyes.
Structural color should never diminish in hue and could even potentially be altered at someones preference.
This African Starling displays its iridescent structural colors produced by ordered melanosomes. Photo by Liliana DALBA) UA associate professor of biology, Dr. Matthew Shawkey;
his colleague Dr. Ali Dhinojwala, Morton Professor of Polymer Science; and Ming Xiao, graduate student, recently published a paper in a joint project with the University of California,
San diego. Shawkey and his team sought to produce synthetic particles that mimic the tiny packets of melanin found in feathers.
Milestone in biomimicry research These tiny packets of synthetic melanin produce structural color, like in a birds feather,
when they are packed into layers. Structural color occurs through the interaction of light with materials that have patterns on a tiny scale,
The discoveries published in the journal ACS Nano("Bio-Inspired Structural Colors Produced via Self-Assembly of Synthetic Melanin Nanoparticles")reflect a milestone in biomimicry research.
According to Dhinojwala, One could think about applications as sensors, photo-protectors, and even perhaps an approach to create a wide range of colors without using any pigments,
he says. Shawkey praises the benefits of structural color, saying, Pigments are both financially and environmentally costly,
and can only change color by fading. Structural colors can, in theory, be produced from more common,
environmentally friendly materials and could potentially be changed depending on the environment or your whims s
#Diamond-like coatings save fuel (Nanowerk News) Scientists already know how to coat components with diamond-like carbon to minimize friction.
But now Fraunhofer researchers have developed a laser arc method with which layers of carbon almost as hard as diamond can be applied on an industrial scale at high coating rates and with high thicknesses.
By applying carbon coatings to engine components such as piston rings and pins, fuel consumption can be reduced. Systematic application of our new method could save more than 100 billion liters of fuel each year over the next ten years
and thus more resistant to wear than conventional diamond-like coatings. Unfortunately, you cant just scrape off diamond dust and press it onto the component.
the laser arc method generates an arc between an anode and a cathode (the carbon) in a vacuum.
This produces a plasma consisting of carbon ions, which is deposited as a coating on the workpiece in the vacuum.
a pulsed laser is scanned vertically across a rotating graphite cylinder as a means of controlling the arc.
The cylinder is converted evenly into plasma thanks to the scanning motion and rotation. To ensure a consistently smooth coating
a magnetic field guides the plasma and filters out any particles of dirt. The laser arc method can be used to deposit very thick ta-C coatings of up to 20 micrometers at high coating rates.
High coating thicknesses are crucial for certain applications especially in the auto industry, where components are exposed to enormous loads over long periods of time,
The automotive and motorcycle manufacturer BMW is working intensively on the industrial-scale implementation of ta-C engine components in its various vehicle models with the aim of reducing their fuel consumption.
And as a motorcycle aficionado himself he also sees another positive effect stemming from this development:
#Engineers develop state-by-state plan to convert US to 100 percent renewable energy (Nanowerk News) One potential way to combat ongoing climate change,
eliminate air pollution mortality, create jobs and stabilize energy prices involves converting the world's entire energy infrastructure to run on clean, renewable energy.
This is a daunting challenge. But now, in a new study, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford,
and colleagues, including U. C. Berkeley researcher Mark Delucchi, are the first to outline how each of the 50 states can achieve such a transition by 2050.
and the ways we currently consume energy, but indicate that the conversion is technically and economically possible through the wide-scale implementation of existing technologies."
who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Precourt Institute for Energy."
"The study is published in the online edition of Energy and Environmental sciences("100%clean and renewable wind, water,
and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for the 50 United states")."An interactive map summarizing the plans for each state is available at http://www. thesolutionsproject. org.
Jacobson and his colleagues started by taking a close look at the current energy demands of each state,
To create a full picture of energy use in each state, they examined energy usage in four sectors:
residential, commercial, industrial and transportation. For each sector, they then analyzed the current amount and source of the fuel consumed-coal oil, gas, nuclear,
if all fuel usage were replaced with electricity. This is a significantly challenging step-it assumes that all the cars on the road become electric,
and that homes and industry convert to fully electrified heating and cooling systems. But Jacobson said that their calculations were based on integrating existing technology,
and the energy savings would be significant.""When we did this across all 50 states, we saw a 39 percent reduction in total end-use power demand by the year 2050,
but the bulk is the result of replacing current sources and uses of combustion energy with electricity."
"The next step involved figuring out how to power the new electric grid. The researchers focused on meeting each state's new power demands using only the renewable energies-wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric,
and how many south-facing, non-shaded rooftops could accommodate solar panels. They developed and consulted wind maps
and determined whether local offshore wind turbines were an option. Geothermal energy was available at a reasonable cost for only 13 states.
The plan calls for virtually no new hydroelectric dams but does account for energy gains from improving the efficiency of existing dams.
The report lays out individual roadmaps for each state to achieve an 80 percent transition by 2030,
as they already generate nearly 30 percent of their electricity from wind power. California, which was the focus of Jacobson's second single-state roadmap to renewables after New york,
The plan calls for no more than 0. 5 percent of any state's land to be covered in solar panels or wind turbines.
So the overall cost spread over time would be roughly equal to the price of the fossil fuel infrastructure, maintenance and production."
"When you account for the health and climate costs-as well as the rising price of fossil fuels-wind,
reduce pollution-related health problems and eliminate emissions from the United states. There is very little downside to a conversion, at least based on this science."
the reduction of air pollution in the U s. could prevent the deaths of approximately 63,000 Americans who die from air pollution-related causes each year.
Dmitry Fedyanin and Yury Stebunov, have developed an ultracompact highly sensitive nanomechanical sensor for analyzing the chemical composition of substances and detecting biological objects,
such as viral disease markers, which appear when the immune system responds to incurable or hard-to-cure diseases,
including HIV, hepatitis, herpes, and many others. The sensor will enable doctors to identify tumor markers,
whose presence in the body signals the emergence and growth of cancerous tumors. The sensitivity of the new device is characterized best by one key feature:
according to its developers, the sensor can track changes of just a few kilodaltons in the mass of a cantilever in real time.
One Dalton is roughly the mass of a proton or neutron, and several thousand Daltons are the mass of individual proteins and DNA molecules.
So the new optical sensor will allow for diagnosing diseases long before they can be detected by any other method,
which will pave the way for a new-generation of diagnostics. The device, described in an article published in the journal Scientific Reports("All-nanophotonic NEMS biosensor on a chip"
is an optical or, more precisely, optomechanical chip.""We've been following the progress made in the development of micro
-and nanomechanical biosensors for quite a while now and can say that no one has been able to introduce a simple and scalable technology for parallel monitoring that would be ready to use outside a laboratory.
So our goal was not only to achieve the high sensitivity of the sensor and make it compact,
but also make it scalabile and compatibile with standard microelectronics technologies, "the researchers said. Unlike similar devices, the new sensor has no complex junctions
and can be produced through a standard CMOS process technology used in microelectronics. The sensor doesn't have a single circuit
and its design is very simple. It consists of two parts: a photonic (or plasmonic) nanowave guide to control the optical signal,
and a cantilever hanging over the waveguide. A cantilever, or beam, is a long and thin strip of microscopic dimensions (5 micrometers long,
1 micrometer wide and 90 nanometers thick), connected tightly to a chip. To get an idea how it works,
imagine you press one end of a ruler tightly to the edge of a table
and allow the other end to hang freely in the air. If you touch the latter with your other hand
That's how the cantilever works. The difference between the oscillations of the ruler and the cantilever is only the frequency,
There are two optical signals going through the waveguide during oscillations: the first one sets the cantilever in motion,
The inhomogeneous electromagnetic field of the control signal's optical mode transmits a dipole moment to the cantilever,
impacting the dipole at the same time so that the cantilever starts to oscillate. The sinusoidally modulated control signal makes the cantilever oscillate at an amplitude of up to 20 nanometers.
The oscillations determine the parameters of the second signal, the output power of which depends on the cantilever's position.
which create a strong electric field intensity gradient, are key to inducing cantilever oscillations. Because the changes of the electromagnetic field in such systems are measured in tens of nanometers,
researchers use the term"nanophotonics"-so the prefix"nano"is used not here just as a fad!
Without the nanoscale waveguide and the cantilever, the chip simply wouldn't work. Abig cantilever cannot be made to oscillate by freely propagating light,
Cantilever oscillations make it possible to determine the chemical composition of the environment in which the chip is placed.
which changes during a chemical reaction between the cantilever and the environment. By placing different reagents on the cantilever
researchers make it react with specific substances or even biological objects. If you place antibodies to certain viruses on the cantilever,
it'll capture the viral particles in the analyzed environment. Oscillations will occur at a lower
or higher amplitude depending on the virus or the layer of chemically reactive substances on the cantilever,
and the electromagnetic wave passing through the waveguide will be dispersed by the cantilever differently, which can be seen in the changes of the intensity of the readout signal.
Calculations done by the researchers showed that the new sensor will combine high sensitivity with a comparative ease of production and miniature dimensions
allowing it to be used in all portable devices, such as smartphones, wearable electronics, etc. One chip, several millimeters in size, will be able to accommodate several thousand such sensors,
configured to detect different particles or molecules. The price, thanks to the simplicity of the design, will most likely depend on the number of sensors,
being much more affordable than its competitors s
#'Nano-raspberries'could bear fruit in fuel cells (Nanowerk News) Researchers at the National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) have developed a fast, simple process for making platinum"nano-raspberries"microscopic clusters of nanoscale particles of the precious metal("Stability and phase transfer of catalytically active platinum nanoparticle suspensions").
"The berrylike shape is significant because it has a high surface area, which is helpful in the design of catalysts.
Even better news for industrial chemists: the researchers figured out when and why the berry clusters clump into larger bunches of"nano-grapes."
"Colorized micrographs of platinum nanoparticles made at NIST. The raspberry color suggests the particles? corrugated shape,
which offers high surface area for catalyzing reactions in fuel cells. Individual particles are 3-4 nm in diameter
Curtin/NIST)( click on image to enlarge) The research could help make fuel cells more practical.
Nanoparticles can act as catalysts to help convert methanol to electricity in fuel cells. NIST's 40-minute process for making nano-raspberries, described in a new paper,*has several advantages.
the metal is expensive and was used only as a model. The study will actually help guide the search for alternative catalyst materials
For fuel cells, nanoparticles often are mixed with solvents to bind them to an electrode. To learn how such formulas affect particle properties,
For applications such as liquid methanol fuel cells, catalyst particles should remain separated and dispersed in the liquid,
"The NIST team measured conditions under which platinum particles, ranging in size from 3 to 4 nanometers (nm) in diameter,
This is a very poor suspension quality for catalytic purposes. Because the nanoparticles clumped up slowly and not too much in methanol,
the researchers concluded that the particles could be transferred to that solvent, assuming they were to be used within a few dayseffectively putting an expiration date on the catalyst t
#Stretchy sensors can detect deadly gases and UV radiation (Nanowerk News) RMIT University researchers have created wearable sensor patches that detect harmful UV radiation and dangerous, toxic gases such as hydrogen and nitrogen dioxide (Small,"Stretchable
and Tunable Microtectonic Zno-Based Sensors and Photonics")."These transparent, flexible electronics which can be worn as skin patches
or incorporated into clothing-are bringing science fiction gadgets closer to real life. Dr Madhu Bhaskaran, project leader
and co-leader of the RMIT Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group, said the sensors can be placed on work
and safety gear to detect dangerous gases. Hydrogen leaks can lead to explosions as happened with the Hindenburg disaster
and nitrogen dioxide is a major contributor to smog, she said. The ability to monitor such gases in production facilities and coal fired power stations gives vital early warning of explosions
while the ability to sense nitrogen dioxide allows for a constant monitoring of pollution levels in crowded cities.
The latest development follows RMITS Micronano Research Facility breakthrough in bendable electronics which has paved the way for flexible mobile phones.
Lead author, Phd researcher Philipp Gutruf, says the unbreakable, stretchy electronic sensors are also capable of detecting harmful levels of UV radiation known to trigger melanoma.
Much like a nicotine patch, they can be worn on the skin. In future, they will be able to link to electronic devices to continuously monitor UV-levels
and alert the user when radiation hits harmful levels. Gutruf said the research used zinc oxide-present in most sunscreens as a fine powder mixed into a lotion-as the UV sensing material.
Zinc oxide was used in the form of very thin coatings over a hundred times thinner than a sheet of paper.
This thin zinc oxide layer is engineered with a platelike structure that we call micro-tectonics, these plates can slide across each other bit like geological plates that form the earths crust allowing for high sensitivity
and the ability to bend and flex the devices, he said. Dr Bhaskaran said the sensors are cheap and durable attributes
which will see flexible electronics and sensors become an integral part of everyday life e
#Mimicking the body on a chip for new drug testing Scientists in an EU-supported project have developed a microfluidic chip that simultaneously analyses the reactions of several human organ tissues
when they come into contact with candidates for new drugs. The ground-breaking device could save millions of euros in drug development costs.
One of the biggest challenges for pharmaceutical companies is reducing the multi-million-euro cost of drug development
and shortening the time to market of medicines in order to fully exploit them before patents run out.
This led the EU to back an early-stage research project called Body-on-a-Chip (BOC), replacing the 2d cell culture conventionally used for drugs testing with a multi-tissue device that better mimics real-life conditions in the body, by combining several organ
-specific 3d cultures into a single chip. Researchers then created a prototype BOC to assess the toxicological risk of new candidate compounds
and their effectiveness prior to formal clinical testing. he pharma industry loses a lot of money by keeping drug candidates in the development process for too long,
only to find out at a late stage that the drug is not working, explained BOC coordinator, Dr Jan Lichtenberg,
of Swiss startup Insphero. ail fast and fail early is the industry paradigm. They want to know the drug toxic liability
as soon as possible to eliminate failures from their programme, thus saving millions, and occasionally even billions, in attrition costs.
Understanding the long-term toxicity of drugs Traditionally the potential harmfulness of drugs has been tested on cells grown on plates in a 2d format.
The problem with this is that 2d cell cultures can lose their functionality within about 48 hours, in the case of liver cells for instance
so the tests only reveal results for acute toxicity, i e. drugs that would harm patients almost as soon as they are administered.
Scientists on the BOC project loaded 3d cell cultures (spheroid micro-tissues representative of human organs such as the liver or heart) into compartments connected by tiny tubes,
thus mimicking the physiological context and conditions of a complex organism. Developing the 3d micro-tissues off the chip,
instead of culturing them in situ, means they can last a remarkable 60 days, allowing for testing of longer-term toxicity effects.
The drug being tested passes in a nutrient solution across these various compartmentalised rgansand the plate is connected with analytical methods such as mass spectroscopy to analyse the drug metabolites produced.
The BOC allows these drug metabolites to be identified and their effect on other tissues studied.
The tested compound may be transformed by liver enzymes into metabolites more powerful than the original compound,
but they might also be toxic. This metabolite toxicity can't be detected by classic 2d culture.
Commercial multi-tissue device could be ready in three years A device comprising rat cells,
representing two tissue types, liver and tumour, was proven during the project. Known anticancer agents such as staurosporine and cyclophosphamide,
and more commonly used drugs known to be toxic to the liver such as paracetamol, were passed over these tissues to test the device worked correctly.
The partners also experimented with four tissues on the same chip, representing a liver, tumour, heart muscle and neurological system,
and they developed early prototypes with six and eight compartments that the project demonstrated could be extended to human cell cultures. arly-stage backing from the EU has helped really us develop a robust prototype
Body-on-a-Chip involved five partners in four countries and received EU investment of EUR 1. 4 million n
#3d printing of metal with microscale droplets A team of researchers from the University of Twente has found a way to 3d print structures of copper and gold,
Their work is published in Advanced Materials 3d printing is a rapidly advancing field, that is sometimes referred to as the'new cornerstone of the manufacturing industry'.
'However, at present, 3d printing is limited mostly to plastics. If metals could be used for 3d printing as well, this would open a wide new range of possibilities.
Metals conduct electricity and heat very well, and they're very robust. Therefore, 3d printing in metals would allow manufacturing of entirely new devices and components,
such as small cooling elements or connections between stacked chips in smartphones. However, metals melt at a high temperature.
This makes controlled deposition of metal droplets highly challenging. Thermally robust nozzles are required to process liquid metals,
but these are hardly available. For small structures in particular (from 100 nanometres to 10 micrometres) no good solutions for this problem existed yet.
Researchers from FOM and the University of Twente now made a major step towards high-resolution metal printing.
They used laser light to melt copper and gold into micrometre-sized droplets and deposited these in a controlled manner.
In this method, a pulsed laser is focused on a thin metal film. that locally melts and deforms into a flying drop.
The researchers then carefully position this drop onto a substrate. By repeating the process, a 3d structure is made.
For example, the researchers stacked thousands of drops to form micro-pillars with a height of 2 millimetres and a diameter of 5 micrometres.
They also printed vertical electrodes in a cavity as well as lines of copper. In effect, virtually any shape can be printed by smartly choosing the location of the drop impact.
High energy In this study, the researchers used a surprisingly high laser energy in comparison to earlier work,
In previous attempts, physicists used low laser energies. This allowed them to print smaller drops,
They had predicted previously this speed for different laser energies and materials. This means that the results can be translated readily to other metals as well.
One remaining problem is that the high laser energy also results in droplets landing on the substrate next to the desired location.
At present this cannot be prevented. In future work the team will investigate this effect, to enable clean printing with metals, gels, pastas or extremely thick fluids s
#Engineers'synthetic immune organ produces antibodies Cornell engineers have created a functional, synthetic immune organ that produces antibodies
and can be controlled in the lab, completely separate from a living organism. The engineered organ has implications for everything from rapid production of immune therapies to new frontiers in cancer or infectious disease research.
The immune organoid was created in the lab of Ankur Singh, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering,
who applies engineering principles to the study and manipulation of the human immune system. The work was published online June 3 in Biomaterials("Ex vivo Engineered Immune Organoids for Controlled Germinal Center Reactions)
"and will appear later in print. lymphoid tissue The synthetic organ is inspired bio by secondary immune organs like the lymph node or spleen.
It is made from gelatin-based biomaterials reinforced with nanoparticles and seeded with cells, and it mimics the anatomical microenvironment of lymphoid tissue.
Like a real organ, the organoid converts B cells which make antibodies that respond to infectious invaders into germinal centers,
which are clusters of B cells that activate, mature and mutate their antibody genes when the body is under attack.
Germinal centers are a sign of infection and are not present in healthy immune organs.
The engineers have demonstrated how they can control this immune response in the organ and tune how quickly the B cells proliferate,
get activated and change their antibody types. According to their paper, their 3-D organ outperforms existing 2-D cultures and can produce activated B cells up to 100 times faster.
The immune organ, made of a hydrogel, is a soft, nanocomposite biomaterial. The engineers reinforced the material with silicate nanoparticles to keep the structure from melting at the physiologically relevant temperature of 98.6 degrees.
The organ could lead to increased understanding of B cell functions, an area of study that typically relies on animal models to observe how the cells develop and mature.
What more Singh said, the organ could be used to study specific infections and how the body produces antibodies to fight those infections from Ebola to HIV. ou can use our system to force the production of immunotherapeutics at much faster rates,
he said. Such a system also could be used to test toxic chemicals and environmental factors that contribute to infections or organ malfunctions.
The process of B cells becoming germinal centers is understood not well, and in fact, when the body makes mistakes in the genetic rearrangement related to this process,
blood cancer can result. n the long run, we anticipate that the ability to drive immune reaction ex vivo at controllable rates grants us the ability to reproduce immunological events with tunable parameters for better mechanistic understanding of B cell development and generation of B cell tumors,
as well as screening and translation of new classes of drugs, Singh said g
#3d potential through laser annihilation (Nanowerk News) Whether in the pages of H g wells, the serial adventures of Flash gordon,
or that epic science fiction saga that is Star wars, the appearance of laser beamsor rays or phasers or blastersultimately meant the imminent disintegration of our hero
or perhaps something a little larger, say, an entire planet. Top image: An intense Gaussian-shaped x-ray pulse (transparent blue shape) has passed just through a cluster of Argon atoms (pink spheres.
used in targeted surgeries, precision manufacturing and in the exploration of materials at the nanoscale.
Understanding the effects that these ultra-intense x-ray pulses will have on their potential targets will take the team work of Argonne National Laboratorys Advanced Photon Source (APS) and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), both
of which are U s. Department of energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facilities. But first, many atoms and molecules will have to meet with a sci-fi appropriate demise.
and decipher the innumerable quantum interactions that will occur on ridiculously small time scales will require the calculating power of ALCFS IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer,
and other substances that are important in understanding biological mechanisms without crystallization by simply throwing an ultra intense burst of x-rays onto the sample
These scatterings are captured as images by photon detectors inside the machine. From the dizzying cascade of lines
and provide an accurate interpretation of the data recorded in diffraction patterns, explains Phay Ho, an assistant physicist with APS.
all of them creating those frantic lines etched on the detectors. To read between the lines, quite literally, Young
The team uses a hybrid code employing both molecular dynamics (MD) and Monte carlo (MC) algorithms.
the MC algorithm uses a pre-computed database to update and track the electronic configuration of every particle interacting with an x-ray pulse.
more efficiently balanced workloads across many processors, and optimized I/O. A key result is that the time spent in MC was reduced from 60 to less than 10 percent of the hybrid simulations runtime,
and nanodiamond materials composed of 1-100 million particles, with an end goal of mapping the electron pathways created by XFEL bursts.
All of the work with the XFEL was performed at the Linac Coherent light Source (LCLS) at Stanford universitys SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
While the APSS own synchrotron is a powerful source for high-energy x-ray beams, the APS will not conduct single-shot single-particle imaging studies,
what happens on a nanoscale, you have to follow it out to mesoscale. So its even more complicated at the APS,
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