#The world's first full-color, flexible skin-like display Imagine a soldier who can change the color and pattern of his camouflage uniform from woodland green to desert tan at will.
Or an office worker who could do the same with his necktie. Is someone at the wedding reception wearing the same dress as you?
A breakthrough in a University of Central Florida lab has brought those scenarios closer to reality.
A team led by Professor Debashis Chanda of UCF Nanoscience Technology Center and the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) has developed a technique for creating the world first full-color,
flexible thin-film reflective display. Chanda research was inspired by nature. Traditional displays like those on a mobile phone require a light source, filters and a glass plates.
But animals like chameleons, octopuses and squids are born with thin flexible, color-changing displays that don need a light source their skin. ll manmade displays LCD, LED,
CRT are rigid, brittle and bulky. But you look at an octopus, they can create color on the skin itself covering a complex body contour,
and it stretchable and flexible, Chanda said. hat was the motivation: Can we take some inspiration from biology
and create a skin-like display? As detailed in the cover article of the June issue of the journal Nature Communications("Polarization-independent actively tunable colour generation on imprinted plasmonic surfaces),
"Chanda is able to change the color on an ultrathin nanostructured surface by applying voltage.
A thin liquid crystal layer is sandwiched over a metallic nanostructure shaped like a microscopic egg carton that absorbs some light wavelengths
The interaction between liquid crystal molecules and plasmon waves on the nanostructured metallic surface played the key role in generating the polarization-independent
full-color tunable display. His method is groundbreaking. It a leap ahead of previous research that could produce only a limited color palette.
And the display is only about few microns thick, compared to a 100-micron-thick human hair.
Such an ultrathin display can be applied to flexible materials like plastics and synthetic fabrics. The research has major implications for existing electronics like televisions,
computers and mobile devices that have considered displays thin by today standards but monstrously bulky in comparison.
But the potentially bigger impact could be whole new categories of displays that have never been thought of. our camouflage
your clothing, your fashion items all of that could change, Chanda said. hy would I need 50 shirts in my closet
Researchers used a simple and inexpensive nano-imprinting technique that can produce the reflective nanostructured surface over a large area. his is a cheap way of making displays on a flexible substrate with full-color generation,
#Spintronics advance brings wafer-scale quantum devices closer to reality (Nanowerk News) An electronics technology that uses the"spin
Now researchers at the University of Chicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering (IME) have made a crucial step toward nuclear spintronic technologies.
Light polarizes silicon nuclear spins within a silicon carbide chip. This image portrays the nuclear spin of one of the atoms shown in the full crystal lattice below.
Peter Allen)" Our results could lead to new technologies like ultra-sensitive magnetic resonance imaging, nuclear gyroscopes,
and even computers that harness quantum mechanical effects,"said Abram Falk, the lead author of the report on the research,
which was featured as the cover article of the June 17 issue of Physical Review Letters("Optical Polarization of Nuclear spins in Silicon Carbine").
so using silicon carbide (Sic), an industrially important semiconductor. Nuclear spins tend to be oriented randomly. Aligning them in a controllable fashion is complicated usually a and only marginally successful proposition.
Extreme experimental conditions such as high magnetic fields and cryogenic temperatures(-238 degrees Fahrenehit and below) are required usually to get even a small number of spins to line up.
In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), for example, only one to 10 out of a million nuclear spins can be aligned and seen in the image, even with a high magnetic field applied.
Using their new technique, Awschalom and his associates aligned more than 99 percent of spins in certain nuclei in silicon carbide (Sic).
Equally important, the technique works at room temperature--no cryogenics or intense magnetic fields needed. Instead, the research team used light to"cool"the nuclei.
While nuclei do not themselves interact with light, certain imperfections, or"color-centers,"in the Sic crystals do.
The electron spins in these color centers can be cooled readily optically and aligned, and this alignment can be transferred to nearby nuclei.
had tried the group to achieve the same degree of spin alignment without optical cooling they would have had to chill the Sic chip physically to just five millionths of a degree above absolute zero(-459.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Getting spins to align in room-temperature silicon carbide brings practical spintronic devices a significant step closer,
said Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Spintronics and Quantum Information. The material is already an important semiconductor in the high-power electronics and optoelectronics industries.
Sophisticated growth and processing capabilities are already mature. So prototypes of nuclear spintronic devices that exploit the IME researchers'technique may be developed in the near future.
Said Awschalom:""Wafer-scale quantum technologies that harness nuclear spins as subatomic elements may appear more quickly than we anticipated
#High-performance microscope displays pores in the cell nucleus with greater precision An active exchange takes place between the cell nucleus and the cytoplasm:
In the process, special pores embedded in the nucleus membrane act as transport gates. These nuclear pores are among the largest and most complex structures in the cell
for the first time, an University of Zurich research team headed by Professor Ohad Medalia has succeeded in displaying the spatial structure of the transport channel in the nuclear pores in high resolution (Nature Communications,
With the aid of cryo-electron microscopes, Medalia's team was able to display the miniscule nuclear pores,
"We discovered a previously unobserved structure inside the nuclear pore that forms a kind of molecular gate,
This"molecular gate"is the so-called spoke ring, which is sandwiched between two other rings and extends inside the nuclear pores.
The gate itself consists of a fine lattice, which enables small molecules to slip through unobstructed.
It also helps improve our understanding of the development of some diseases that involve a defective transportation to the nuclear pores-such as intestinal ovarian and thyroid cancer r
#Helium'balloons'offer new path to control complex materials (Nanowerk News) Researchers at the Department of energy's Oak ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method to manipulate a wide range of materials
"advances the understanding and use of complex oxide materials that boast unusual properties such as superconductivity and colossal magnetoresistance but are notoriously difficult to control.
Inserting helium atoms (visualized as a red balloon) into a crystalline film (gold) allowed Oak ridge National Laboratory researchers to control the material's elongation in a single direction.
pulling or pushing of the structure--triggers changes in many different electronic properties. This ripple effect complicates scientists'ability to study
but they anticipate the technique will be widely applicable to both functionality driven materials science research and fundamental physics studies."
The team's work is a step toward bringing complex materials into commercial applications, which would greatly benefit from the ability to tune material properties with processing similar to current semiconductor technologies."
"Our strain doping technique demonstrates a path to achieving this need, as it can be implemented using established ion implantation infrastructure in the semiconductor industry,
"Ward said. The method uses a low energy ion gun to add small numbers of helium ions into the material after it has been produced.
The process is also reversible; the helium can be removed by heating the material to high temperatures in vacuum.
are being developed by mechanical engineers at Drexel University as a part of a surgical toolkit being assembled by the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) in South korea.
Minjun Kim, Phd, a professor in the College of Engineering and director of the Biological Actuation, Sensing & Transport Laboratory (BASTLAB) at Drexel
is adding his team extensive work in bio-inspired microrobotics to an $18-million international research initiative from the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technologies (KEIT) set on creating a minimally invasive, microrobot
and very much in its infancy when it comes to medical applications, Kim said. project like this,
is an opportunity to push both medicine and microrobotics into a new and exciting place.
The beads are put in motion by an external magnetic field that causes each of them to rotate.
By controlling the magnetic field, Kim can direct the speed and direction of the microswimmers. The magnetism involve also allows the researchers to join separate strands of microswimmers together to make longer strings,
which was reported recently in the Journal of Nanoparticle Research("Minimal geometric requirements for micropropulsion via magnetic rotation),
Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, is classified by its spiral shape, which enables both its movement and the resultant cellular destruction.
is being designed by Bradley Nelson from ETH Zurich, a pioneer in the field of microrobotic surgery.
The team plan is to use a catheter to deliver the microswimmers and the drill directly to the blocked artery.
stenting and angioplasty. Stenting is a way of creating a bypass for blood to flow around the block by inserting a series of tubes into the artery,
while angioplasty pushes out the blockage by expanding the artery with help from an inflatable probe. urrent treatments for chronic total occlusion are only about 60 percent successful,
#University spinout signs deal to commercialize microchips that release therapeutics inside the body (Nanowerk News) An implantable,
microchip-based device may soon replace the injections and pills now needed to treat chronic diseases:
Earlier this month, MIT spinout Microchips Biotech partnered with a pharmaceutical giant to commercialize its wirelessly controlled, implantable,
microchip-based devices that store and release drugs inside the body over many years. Invented by Microchips Biotech cofounders Michael Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering,
and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, the microchips consist of hundreds of pinhead-sized reservoirs,
each capped with a metal membrane, that store tiny doses of therapeutics or chemicals. An electric current delivered by the device removes the membrane,
releasing a single dose. The device can be programmed wirelessly to release individual doses for up to 16 years to treat
for example, diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and osteoporosis. Michael Cima (left) and Robert Langer Now Microchips Biotech will begin co-developing microchips with Teva Pharmaceutical, the worlds largest producer of generic drugs,
to treat specific diseases, with licensing potential for other products. Teva paid $35 million up front, with additional milestone payments as the device goes through clinical trials before it hits the shelves.
Obviously, this is a huge validation of the technology, Cima says. A major pharmaceutical company sees how this technology can further their efforts to help patients.
Apart from providing convenience, Microchips Biotech says these microchips could also improve medication-prescription adherence a surprisingly costly issue in the United states. A 2012 report published in the Annals of Internal medicine estimated that Americans who dont stick to prescriptions rack up $100 billion
to $289 billion annually in unnecessary health care costs from additional hospital visits and other issues.
Failure to follow prescriptions, the study also found, causes around 125,000 deaths annually and up to 10 percent of all hospitalizations.
While its first partnership is for treating chronic diseases, Microchips Biotech will continue work on its flagship product, a birth-control microchip, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
that releases contraceptives and can be turned on and off wirelessly. Cima, who now serves on the Microchips Biotech board of directors with Langer
sees this hormone-releasing microchip as one of the first implantable artificial organs because it acts as a gland.
A lot of the therapies are trying to chemically trick the endocrine systems, Cima says. We are doing that with this artificial organ we created.
A version of Microchip Biotech's implantable, wirelessly controlled microchip. When an electrical current is delivered to one of the chip's tiny reservoirs,
a single dose of therapeutics is released into the body. Wild ideas Inspiration for the microchips came in the late 1990s,
when Langer watched a documentary on mass-producing microchips. I thought to myself Wouldnt this be a great way to make a drug-delivery system?
Langer says. He brought this idea to Cima, a chip-making expert who was taken aback by its novelty.
But being out-of-this-world is not something that needs to stop anybody at MIT,
Cima adds. In fact, that should be the criterion. So in 1999, Langer, Cima, and then-graduate student John Santini Phd 99 co-founded Microchips,
and invented a prototype for their microchip that was described in a paper published that year in Nature.
This entrepreneurial collaboration was the first of many for Cima and Langer over the next decade.
This dime-sized prototype contained only 34 reservoirs, each controlled by an individual wire connected to an external power source.
At the time, they considered a broad range of practical, and somewhat fantastical, applications beyond drug delivery, including disease diagnostics
and jewelry that could emit scents. We were trying to find the killer application. We thought,
I have a hammer, whats the right nail to hit? Cima says. For years, the technology underwent rigorous research and development at Microchips Biotech.
But in 2011, Langer and Cima, and researchers from Microchips, conducted the microchips first human trials to treat osteoporosis this time with wireless capabilities.
In that study, published in a 2012 issue of Science Translational Medicine, microchips were implanted into seven elderly women,
delivering teriparatide to strengthen bones. Results indicated that the chips delivered doses comparable to injections and did so more consistently with no adverse side effects.
After that, the Gates Foundation took interest. It wasnt just a pie-in-the-sky idea anymore were really treating patients
Cima says. That really captures peoples imaginations. That study, combined with ongoing efforts in contraceptive-delivery microchips,
led Cima to believe the microchips could someday, essentially, be considered the first artificial glands that could regulate potent hormones inside the body.
This may sound like a wild idea but Cima doesnt think so. Consider the thousands of people living today with pacemakers,
he says. Pacemakers are delivering an electrical signal, fixing the pace of a heart, or detecting if the heart is not beating correctly,
and trying to stimulate it, Cima says. The chip sends an endocrine or chemical signal
instead of an electrical signal. MEMS innovations Microchips Biotech made several innovations in the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) manufacturing process to ensure the microchips could be commercialized.
A major innovation was enabling final assembly of the microchips at room temperature with hermetic seals. Any intense heat during final assembly, with hermetic sealing, could destroy the drugs already loaded into the reservoirs
which meant common methods of welding and soldering were off-limits. To do so, Microchips Biotech modified a cold-welding tongue
and groove process. This meant depositing a soft, gold alloy in patterns on the top of the chip to create tongues,
and grooves on the base. By pressing the top and base pieces together, the tongues fit into the grooves,
and plastically deforms to weld the metal together. Each one of these reservoirs, until you open it,
must be sealed completely from any contaminant in the environment, Cima says. There was no precedent for that.
The company has also found ways to integrate electronics into the microchips to shrink down the device.
Moving forward, Langer adds, the company could refine the microchips to be even smaller, yet carry the same volume of drugs.
This means making the drugs take up more volume than the electrical and other components he says.
When the new iphone came out, customers complained that it could be bent--but what if you could roll up your too big 6 Plus to actually fit in your pocket?
That technology might be available sooner than you think, based on the work of USC Viterbi engineers.
For many decades, silicon has been the heart of modern electronics--but as a material, it has its limits.
As our devices get smaller and smaller, the basic unit of these devices, a transistor,
the size of the silicon transistor is reaching its physical limit. As silicon devices are based on
Consumers also demand phones to be lighter, faster, smaller, more flexible, wearable, bendable, etc. Yet silicon is also rigid--one can't bend your smart phone or computer.
These physical limitations have driven the race for new materials that can be used as semiconductors in lieu of silicon.
Atomic force microscope image of a black arsenic-phosphorus field-effect transistor. Image courtesy of Chongwu Zhou and Bilu Liu) The demand for a silicon material aided the discovery of graphene, a single layer of graphite
--which won the Nobel prize in Physics in 2010. Since this time, scientists and engineers have developed many two-dimensional (2d) material innovations--layered materials with the thickness of only one atom or a few atoms.
One such layered 2d material is black arsenic phosphorous. Now, a team of scientists at USC Viterbi, in collaboration with Technische Universitt Mnchen, Germany, Universitt Regensburg, Germany,
This method demands less energy and is cheaper and the synthesized materials have some incredible new properties.
Ahamad Abbas, graduate student; Han Wang, assistant professor; Rohan Dhall, graduate student; Stephen B. Cronin, associate professor; Mingyuan Ge, research assistant;
Xin Fang, graduate student; and Professor Chongwu Zhou of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical engineering, in concert with their collaborators, is documented in a paper in Advanced Materials("Black Arsenic-Phosphorus:
Layered Anisotropic Infrared Semiconductors with Highly Tunable Compositions and Properties"."What the researchers are excited most about is the ability to adjust the electronic and optical properties of these materials to a range that cannot be achieved by any other 2d materials thus far.
This includes manipulating the materials'chemical compositions during materials synthesis and the materials'ability to sense long wavelength infrared (LWIR) waves due to their small energy gaps.
This particular electromagnetic spectral range of LWIR is important for a range of applications such as LIDAR (light radar) systems,
basically because LWIR waves are highly transparent in earth atmosphere. This wave range also has great application for the soldiers in the military who rely on infrared thermal imaging technology and for flexible night vision glasses.
Another intriguing aspect of these new layeredsemiconductors is their anisotropic electronic and optical properties, which means the materials have different properties along x and y direction in the same plane.
The researchers believe these are marked improvement from existing materials and devices and would lead to unique applications.
In addition, the researchers anticipate that it could also lead to important improvement for devices that monitor the environment."
"We believe these materials are important members in a large family of 2d materials, because they fit into the long wavelength-infrared light range
we anticipate there is lots of exciting fundamental physics research as well as engineering work to be Done for example,
the common computer chip material (Nature Communications, "Experimental evidence of new tetragonal polymorphs of silicon formed through ultrafast laser-induced confined microexplosion").
and manufacture of superconductors or high-efficiency solar cells and light sensors, said leader of the research,
Professor Andrei Rode, from The Australian National University (ANU).""We've created two entirely new crystal arrangements,
or phases, in silicon and seen indications of potentially four more,"said Professor Rode, a laser physicist at the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering (RSPE)."
such as an altered band gap, and possibly superconductivity if properly doped.""From left are: Professor Jim Williams, Professor Andrei Rode and Associate professor Jodie Bradbury with the complex electron diffraction patterns.
By focusing lasers onto silicon buried under a clear layer of silicon dioxide, the group have perfected a way to reliably blast tiny cavities in the solid silicon.
This creates extremely high pressure around the explosion site and forms the new phases. The phases have complex structures,
the team discovered the new materials have crystal structures that repeat every 12, 16 or 32 atoms respectively, said Professor Jim Williams, from the Electronic Material Engineering group at RSPE."
"The micro-explosions change silicon's simplicity to much more complex structures, which opens up possibility for unusual and unexpected properties,
said Professor Eugene Gamaly, also from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. The new crystal structures have survived for more than a year now."
"These new discoveries are not an accident, they are guided by a deep understanding of how lasers interact with matter,
Conventional methods for creating materials with high pressure use tiny diamond anvils to poke or squeeze materials.
However, the ultra-short laser micro-explosion creates pressures many times higher than the strength of diamond crystal can produce.
"The semiconductor industry is a multi-billion dollar operation-even a small change in the position of a few silicon atoms has the potential to have a major impact
#Nanogenerator harvests power from rolling tires A group of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers and a collaborator from China have developed a nanogenerator that harvests energy from a car's rolling tire friction.
An innovative method of reusing energy, the nanogenerator ultimately could provide automobile manufacturers a new way to squeeze greater efficiency out of their vehicles.
The researchers reported their development, which is the first of its kind, in a paper published May 6, 2015, in the journal Nano Energy("Single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerator for scavenging friction energy from rolling tires").
"Xudong Wang, the Harvey D. Spangler fellow and an associate professor of materials science and engineering at UW-Madison,
and his Phd student Yanchao Mao have been working on this device for about a year. Xudong Wang has developed a new way to harvest energy from rolling tires.
The nanogenerator relies on the triboelectric effect to harness energy from the changing electric potential between the pavement and a vehicle's wheels.
The triboelectric effect is the electric charge that results from the contact or rubbing together of two dissimilar objects.
Wang says the nanogenerator provides an excellent way to take advantage of energy that is usually lost due to friction."
"The friction between the tire and the ground consumes about 10 percent of a vehicle's fuel,
"he says.""That energy is wasted. So if we can convert that energy, it could give us very good improvement in fuel efficiency."
"The nanogenerator relies on an electrode integrated into a segment of the tire. When this part of the tire surface comes into contact with the ground,
the friction between those two surfaces ultimately produces an electrical charge-a type of contact electrification known as the triboelectric effect.
During initial trials, Wang and his colleagues used a toy car with LED LIGHTS to demonstrate the concept.
They attached an electrode to the wheels of the car, and as it rolled across the ground,
the LED LIGHTS flashed on and off. The movement of electrons caused by friction was able to generate enough energy to power the lights
supporting the idea that energy lost to friction can actually be collected and reused.""Regardless of the energy being wasted,
we can reclaim it, and this makes things more efficient, "Wang says.""I think that's the most exciting part of this,
and is something I'm always looking for: how to save the energy from consumption."
"The researchers also determined that the amount of energy harnessed is directly related to the weight of a car,
as well as its speed. Therefore the amount of energy saved can vary depending on the vehicle -but Wang estimates about a 10-percent increase in the average vehicle's gas mileage given 50-percent friction energy conversion efficiency."
"There's big potential with this type of energy, "Wang says.""I think the impact could be huge."
"Source: University of Wisconsin-Madiso o
#Graphene flexes its electronic muscles Flexing graphene may be the most basic way to control its electrical properties, according to calculations by theoretical physicists at Rice university and in Russia.
The Rice lab of Boris Yakobson in collaboration with researchers in Moscow found the effect is pronounced
and predictable in nanocones and should apply equally to other forms of graphene. The researchers discovered it may be possible to access
what they call an electronic flexoelectric effect in which the electronic properties of a sheet of graphene can be manipulated simply by twisting it a certain way.
The work will be of interest to those considering graphene elements in flexible touchscreens or memories that store bits by controlling electric dipole moments of carbon atoms
the researchers said. Perfect graphene an atom-thick sheet of carbon is a conductor, as its atomselectrical charges balance each other out across the plane.
But curvature in graphene compresses the electron clouds of the bonds on the concave side and stretches them on the convex side,
thus altering their electric dipole moments, the characteristic that controls how polarized atoms interact with external electric fields.
The researchers who published their results this month in the American Chemical Society Journal of Physical chemistry Letters discovered they could calculate the flexoelectric effect of graphene rolled into a cone of any size and length.
The researchers used density functional theory to compute dipole moments for individual atoms in a graphene lattice
and then figure out their cumulative effect They suggested their technique could be used to calculate the effect for graphene in other more complex shapes, like wrinkled sheets or distorted fullerenes,
several of which they also analyzed. hile the dipole moment is zero for flat graphene or cylindrical nanotubes,
Carbon nanotubes, seamless cylinders of graphene, do not display a total dipole moment, he said. While not zero, the vector-induced moments cancel each other out.
in which the balance of positive and negative charges differ from one atom to the next, due to slightly different stresses on the bonds as the diameter changes.
he said. t can permit one to locally vary the work function and to engineer the band-structure stacking in bilayers or multiple layers by their bending.
more cidicor asic, depending on the curvature in the 3-D carbon architecture
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