plants that are exposed to sunlight use carefully organized nanoscale structures within their cells to rapidly separate charges pulling electrons away from the positively charged molecule that is left behind,
The polymer donor absorbs sunlight and passes electrons to the fullerene acceptor; the process generates electrical energy.
because the electrons sometimes hop back to the polymer spaghetti and are lost. The UCLA technology arranges the elements more neatly like small bundles of uncooked spaghetti with precisely placed meatballs.
The fullerenes inside the structure take electrons from the polymers and toss them to the outside fullerene
which can effectively keep the electrons away from the polymer for weeks. hen the charges never come back together,
led the team that created the uniquely designed molecules. e don have these materials in a real device yet;
UCLA Electron Imaging Center for Nanomachines imaged the assembled structure in a lab led by Hong Zhou.
maybe they could use our particles as well, Brandl says. hen we came up with the idea to use our particles to remove toxic chemicals, pollutants,
or hormones from water, because we saw that the particles aggregate once you irradiate them with UV LIGHT. trap for ater-fearingpollutionthe researchers synthesized polymers from polyethylene glycol,
a widely used compound found in laxatives, toothpaste, and eye drops and approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a food additive,
in a solution hydrophobic pollutant molecules move toward the hydrophobic nanoparticles, and adsorb onto their surface,
the stabilizing outer shell of the particles is shed, and now nrichedby the pollutants they form larger aggregates that can then be removed through filtration, sedimentation,
according to the researchers, was confirming that small molecules do indeed adsorb passively onto the surface of nanoparticles. o the best of our knowledge,
it is the first time that the interactions of small molecules with preformed nanoparticles can be measured directly,
and molecules. he interactions we exploit to remove the pollutants are nonspecific, Brandl says. e can remove hormones, BPA,
we showed in a system that the adsorption of small molecules on the surface of the nanoparticles can be used for extraction of any kind,
And if a radiation alarm goes off, the system can evaluate other data sources to determine if it actually dangerous,
During the program launch, Johannesburg Mayor Parks Tau said"This program will go a long way in improving IT skills and expertise in Johannesburg.
biotechs race to develop acute radiation drugs Since the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power station,
but those provide little protection against the harmful effects of high-dose radiation toxicity. Luckily, experimental products that combat cute radiation syndrome (ARS) have already been tested in people
and could be on the cusp of market approval, Nature Medicine reports. Nearly a quarter-million KI doses (pictured) have been amassed by evacuation centers near the site.
But while those guard against the long-term risks of thyroid cancer linked with chronic radiation exposure
the extreme radiation sickness associated with exposure to high doses of ionizing radiation over a short period of time.
using biologics and small molecules to halt radiation harmful effects in the field. Some block cell death and protect damaged tissue exposed to radiation;
others replace cells lost to exposure. CBLB502, developed by Cleveland Biolabs, binds an immune protein to activate a cell survival pathway.
The molecule has been tested safety in more than 50 people, with few adverse effects reported. CLT-008 from Cellerant Therapeutics replaces blood stem cells lost due to exposure.
Prochymal from Osiris Therapeutics is a stem cell therapy derived from adult bone marrow to treat organ damage due to radiation exposure.
AEOL-10150 of Aeolus Pharmaceuticals is a small molecule that reduces inflammation associated with radiation exposure.
and Ion Torrent PGM (Life Technologies) are sized laser-printer and offer modest setup and running costs.
The Ion Torrent PGM had the most throughput per hour. The 454 GS Junior generated the longest reads
China is astly increasingits risk of a nuclear accident by choosing older nuclear technology that lacks advanced cooling systems,
It is also has ambitious research and development underway in several other nuclear technologies, including molten salt reactors, thorium, fast neutron reactors, pebble bed reactors and fusion.
Some of these could be potentially safer and more effective than conventional designs e
#Climateminder helps farms be smarter about water usage California start-up Climateminder, which is selling technology that its founder first put to the test in Turkish greenhouses,
The radiation levels near the Fukushima site are spiking to record levels, but that hasn't stopped Google's Streetview from entering one area of the forbidden'zone.
which is deemed now a radiation hazard. Google has catalogued also the interiors of over 70 flood-damaged buildings in the region.
Volunteers brave arrest and elevated levels of radiation around Fukushima donning protective gear and carry Geiger counters.
What the NRC really knew about Fukushima Fukushima ocean radiation could pose sleeper threat Nuclear meltdowns nearly made northern Japan uninhabitable do need we to worry about radiation in our milk?
Elevated radiation levels widespread in eastern Japan Test show Japanese child exposed to radiation Rice crops threatened by radiation Radioactive tuna found in Pacific ocean Hydrofracking drives new water treatment solutions
Algae technology cleans up fracking Flushing toilets could heat future buildings The lost pets of Fukushima Radiation loving algae comes to Japan s rescu
#Knitted Supercapacitors to Power Smart Shirts Researchers from Drexel University in collaboration with the U s. Naval academy, have invented a way to embed activated carbon particles into different types of yarn to form a knitted textile that can store
the ionic liquid was mixed with carbon particles, and when the yarn was swelled partially, pressure was applied to it
Although we will probably not be using energy storage textiles to power our smartphones any time soon due to the low energy density of the current technology,
including diverse types of knitted sensors and low energy communication devices o
#Molecular electronics Takes Large Stride Forward Molecular electronics has promised long a day when individual molecules would serve as the basic building blocks for electronics.
That day has moved a bit closer thanks to research out of the Columbia University School of engineering and Applied science.
Researchers there have developed a new technique that makes it possible to produce a diode from a single molecule.
In research published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers claim that they have not only produced a single-molecule diode,
but that it greatly outperforms all previous designs. ur new approach created a single-molecule diode that has a high rectification and a high ncurrent,
in a press release. onstructing a device where the active elements are only a single molecule has long been a tantalizing dream in nanoscience.
Molecule-scale diodesabricated by attaching molecules to metal electrodes to form single-molecule junctions that serve as a host of different circuit elementsave been tried before.
have been less than satisfactory. hile such asymmetric molecules do indeed display some diode-like properties, they are explained not effective
To overcome this poor current flow in single-molecule diodes, the Columbia researchers, in cooperation with colleagues at the University of California Berkeley, looked at putting the asymmetry in the area around the molecular junctionhere the molecule meets the metal electrode.
To do this they simply covered the molecules with an ionic solution and then attached them to gold metal electrodes of differing sizes.
The results were impressive. As Venkataraman pointed out in the press release, the rectification ratios resulting from the new design are as high as 250,
which is notably high for a single-molecule diode, according to Venkataraman. t amazing to be able to design a molecular circuit,
In a dual-hormone pump, insulin serves as the accelerator and glucagon as the brake,
The aim of creating integrated circuits that use photons rather than electrons sometimes called integrated photonic circuits,
The cloak is very thinnly about a tenth the size of the wavelength of the photons it scatteringnd lossless
IBM researchers are trying to prop up Moore law using silicon-germanium transistor channels in effort to create a 7-nanometer chip within the next four years.
The key was to use a photocathodehe electrode that supplies electrons when illuminated by sunlightade from an array of gallium phosphide nanowires.
By adding platinum particles, its catalytic properties improved hydrogen production even more, report the researchers. At the same time, the nanowires allowed a drastic reduction in the use of Gap material
#Porous Silicon Battery electrodes from Reeds Natural structures in reed leaves could find use in advanced lithium-ion batteries,
Silicon-based materials can theoretically store more than 10 times charge than the carbon-based materials most commonly used in the anodes of commercial lithium-ion batteries,
because electrons can travel over such a hierarchically buckled sheath as easily as they can traverse a straight sheath.
The hope of spintronics stems from its use of the spin of electrons to encode information rather than the transport of electrical charge of electrons.
To date, to be able read the spin of the electrons, which is either por own,
electrons have had to be held in place in a ferromagnetic insulator material, like yttrium iron garnet (YIG.
With the electrons held up momentarily, a heat gradient is applied to the material to set the spin of the electrons in motion again.
they start communicating information about the orientation of their spin. In this way, just like an electrical current is a stream of electrons moving through a conductor,
a current of pure spin can be achieved in magnetic insulators. Stephen Wu, the postdoctoral researcher who made the discovery,
was looking at different materials that would make it possible to produce smaller spintronic devices and provide greater control over the thermal gradients that needed to be applied to the material to start the current spin of the electrons.
It was during this experimentation with different materials that Wu found himself working with YIG on a substrate of paramagnetic gadolinium gallium garnet (GGG.
Wu didn expect to see any spin because the paramagnet doesn generate a magnetic field. he spins in the system were not talking to each other.
But we still found measurable spin current, said Wu in the release. his effect shouldn happen at all.
What the researchers observered, in fact, was that the spin current was stronger in the GGG than in the YIG.
It is an amazing scientific discovery, but at this point, the best the scientists can do is speculate regarding why the phenomenon occurs at all. e think that there may be other new physics working here,
the objects that are moving the spin are not what we typically understand. Even while understanding of the physics that explain the phenomenon plays catch up,
and organic materials convert low energy photons into visible light that a solar cell can capture. Cadmium selenide nanocrystals with one kind of organic coating left produced violet light,
or pconvertedinto a higher energy photon that is readily absorbed by photovoltaic cells, generating electricity from light that would normally be wasted.
which capture the infrared photons, and organic molecules, which help combine the energy from these photons together into an upconverted photon.
In experiments lead selenide nanocrystals captured near-infrared photons, and the organic compound rubrene emitted visible yellow-orange photons.
The researchers noted that lead selenide nanocrystals and rubrene were relatively inefficient at upconversion. However, in experiments with a hybrid material made of cadmium selenide nanocrystals and the organic compound diphenylanthracene,
which absorbs green light and emits violet light, the investigators could boost upconversion up to a thousandfold by coating the nanocrystals with anthracene, a component of coal tar.
This suggests that similar coatings on lead selenide nanocrystals might boost their upconversion efficiency as well.
The scientists added that the ability to upconvert two low energy photons into one high-energy photon has potential applications in biological imaging, high-density data storage,
and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDS) L
#Google s Unified Privacy Policy Draws Threat Of $15m Fine In The netherlands The national data protection authority in The netherlands has warned Google that it could be fined up to $15 million
and 88 percent white (as Fusion reports) making them less diverse than the much-lambasted tech companies
#With $16m In Funding Helium Wants To Provide The Connective tissue For The Internet of things Over the next few years,
A startup called Helium Systems, which has been quietly operating in stealth over the last two years,
In addition to the funding, Helium has named former Qualcomm exec Rob Chandhok its president and COO. Hel also join the company board
along with Chairman Shawn Fanning, Helium cofounder Amir Haleem, and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito.
Prior to joining Helium, Chandhok had served as the president of Qualcomm Interactive Platforms and senior vice president at Qualcomm Technologies.
which should help Helium as it seeks to refine its products and go to market. Chandhok is a new hire he started at the company on Monday
That because the big idea behind Helium is to use unlicensed wireless bandwidth to transmit small amounts of data from various connected device
By leveraging low-power wireless bands and building a highly distributed network of ultra-affordable base stations (or Helium bridges), it could receive
While Helium hopes to build out its own network for devices to connect to it not ruling out letting devices add data through other networking solutions.
and lets administrators spin servers and software up and down as needs require much more quickly than with current methods.
What more, this ability to virtualize the entire data center dramatically speeds up the time it takes to spin up server clusters from days or weeks to hours or even minutes
and contributes weekly to art & culture magazine Beautiful/Decay. With online sales up 17%and physical retail down 11%,it no wonder retailers large and small are increasingly living online.
There even a built-in 37-watt lithium-ion battery and a USB plug so you can power your smartphone up to six times while on the go.
When a constant current is applied to an LED light bulb a constant stream of photons are emitted from the bulb
often via a number of accelerators which have sprung up, as well as crowdfunding campaigns. Among them, perhaps Flat 6 Labs is known the best.
#Rentecarlo Launches U k. Peer-to-peer Car rental Marketplace Rentecarlo, the U k. startup and graduate of accelerator Ignite100, is officially launching today with a peer-to-peer car rental marketplace that lets anybody rent out their own car.
The team is a prototypical mix of Harvard business students and MIT nuclear engineers, currently numbering around 20.
will use AOPTIX technology in New jersey to shave nanoseconds off the time it takes data to travel between the computers of Nasdaq Stock market and the New york stock exchange e
Aquion batteries use sodium ions from saltwater as their electrolyte. Electrical current moves through this brackish liquid from positive electrodes based on manganese oxide to negative ones based on carbon.
In two years I went from not being able to take 10 percent of a hundred to studying graduate-level quantum mechanics.
and that as soon as a part of our bodies is made of titanium atoms or something it s less human that you can't embed humanity into synthetics.
#Does Lockheed martin Really Have a Breakthrough Fusion Machine? Lockheed martin s announcement last week that it had developed secretly a promising design for a compact nuclear fusion reactor has met with excitement but also skepticism over the basic feasibility of its approach.
Nuclear fusion could produce far more energy far more cleanly than the fission reactions at the heart of today s nuclear power plants.
In decades of research nobody has produced yet more energy from fusion reaction experiments than was required to conduct the experiments in the first place.
This approach tries to contain plasma by reflecting particles from high-density magnetic fields to low-density ones.
Ian Hutchinson a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and one of the principal investigators at the MIT fusion research reactor says the type of confinement described by Lockheed had long been studied without much success. Hutchinson says he was only
Another startup General Fusion based in Vancouver British columbia tries to control plasma using pistons to compress a swirling mass of molten lead
and lithium that also acts as a coolant absorbing heat from fusion reactions and circulating it through conventional steam generators to spin turbines (see A New Approach to Fusion
because organic light-emitting molecules can be deposited over large surfaces. They also run cooler than LEDS,
which is known to enhance the dissociation of hydrogen molecules, making them easier to absorb. That is an interesting result that suggests some promising avenues for future research.
The presence of molecules that catalyze the absorption of hydrogen looks to be an important mechanism.
At the heart of this mechanism is Brownian motion which effectively mixes and jiggles molecules so that they rapidly find their place in incipient structures.
This is a powerful process that can form hugely complex machines such as the ribosome a molecular device for synthesizing proteins.
One recent idea is to use colloids rather than molecules as the building blocks for even more advanced structures.
nanometre scale particles mixed in water. These particles can be engineered chemically to bind together to form specific structures.
But as the building blocks become bigger, it takes longer for Brownian motion to jiggle the blocks into the appropriate locations.
So self-assembly take significantly longer. In fact, it can take thousands of seconds to synthesise a single colloidal molecule.
At that rate, a millimetre cube containing 1 billion colloidal molecules would take 30 years to form.
Clearly that is far too slow for any kind of industrial process, so chemists have been looking for ways to speed up colloidal self-assembly.
The new approach is to place the particles in a fluid flow and see whether this helps them assemble.
The particles they want to assemble are tiny droplets of fluorinated oil placed in water. These droplets are 50 micrometres in diameter
they begin to assemble into specific shapes that depend on the number and types of particles involved but not on the detail of the initial conditions.
Crucially, this process is orders of magnitude faster than with Brownian motion. And because it is possible to produce the structures in parallel using many self-assembling chambers at the same time,
and a yellow pad he sketched out a radical new way to study the molecule of life.
and require jugs of pricey chemicals this one measures DNA directly as the molecule is drawn through a tiny pore suspended in a membrane.
He had been trying to build artificial cells spherical blobs of fat that could pump molecules in
His flash of insight was that a molecule passing through one of these pores especially a long molecule like DNA would continuously change the blob's electrical properties.
and some differ by just an atom or two so they're hard to tell apart.
The other approach was attaching a molecule to the RNA that cells like to ingest tricking the cell into eating it.
So Alnylam turned to its second delivery approach attaching molecules to RNA to trick cells into ingesting it.
Researchers found just the right inducement attaching a type of sugar molecule. This approach allows for the drug to be administered with a simple injection that patients could give themselves at home.
To make the ceramic nano-trusses Greer s lab uses a technique called two-photon interference lithography.
and which also have the potential to store much more energy than conventional lithium-ion batteries (see onger-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices.
#Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum computer Google is about to begin designing and building hardware for a quantum computer a type of machine that can exploit quantum physics to solve problems that would take a conventional computer millions of years.
But independent tests published earlier this year found no evidence that D-Wave s computer uses quantum physics to solve problems more efficiently than a conventional machine.
That s because qubits working together can use the quirks of quantum mechanics to quickly discard incorrect paths to a solution
And research published in 2011 showed that the machine s chip harbors the right kind of quantum physics needed for quantum computing.
The qubits of D-Wave s machine can maintain superpositions for periods lasting only nanoseconds.
Earlier this year Siemens broke ground in Mainz Germany on what it says will be the world s largest proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer.
Poon and her team found a way to use electromagnetic induction through biological tissue without that exponential decay.
which refers to the exponentially decaying radiation and far-field which refers to the kind of radiation emitted from a cell tower).
The key Poon says is that instead of using a coil of wire they use a flat plate adorned with a specially designed four-line pattern of conductive material.
It also met safety regulations limiting the amount of radiation delivered to a given amount of tissue in humans.
including silicon germanium. Embedding motion sensors in clothing, mcube long-term goal, would require better ways of powering the devices
In solid-state batteries the liquid electrolytes normally used in conventional lithium-ion batteries are replaced with solid ones
but indirect indication of the molecules that are present. But molecular biologists would like a better system that measures the characteristics of the molecules involved
and so provides direct evidence of the sequence of nucleotides. Indeed various research teams are working on such systems some with significant success. Today Andrey Chernev at St petersburg Academic University in Russia
and a few pals say they have invented an entirely new way of identifying oligonucleotides using terahertz radiation.
or RNA molecule usually consisting of fewer than a hundred or so bases. The sequence of these bases determines the type of oligonucleotide.
Chernev and co s idea is based on the way these molecules resonate. They say that the sequence of bases in an oligonucleotide determines the way in
when the input spectra exactly matches the resonant modes of the molecule. That tells them exactly what sort of oligonucleotide they have.
This produces terahertz radiation inside the well where the oligonucleotide is deposited at a concentration that allows a single molecule to enter.
and dimer molecules that make up oligonucleotides. The signatures from these should provide a kind of alphabet from which to work out the resonances of more complex polymers.
which lots of good ideas are competing to become the standard technique for identifying the molecules of life quickly and cheaply.
known as an ion accelerator, can make fine sheets of other costly materials, so it could also lead to better and cheaper electronics and solar cells.
implanting the ions to a depth of 26 micrometers. The wafer can then be removed and heated up so that the hydrogen ions form hydrogen gas,
Thermoelectric materials can turn a temperature difference into electricity by exploiting the flow of electrons from a warmer area to a cooler one.
such as the transit of exoplanets across other stars, binary stars that eclipse, gamma ray bursts and so on. Capturing the changes associated with these events requires a much more rapid way of photographing the entire sky.
weeks or even months before supernovas or gamma ray bursts, looking for interesting precursor events. That will be an interesting piece of kit. vryscope systems o er a new capability:
The water is pretreated to remove oil and grease residue and solid particles. The company heats the saline water
when sunlight strikes a solar cell it produces some very high-energy electrons but within a few trillionths of a second those electrons shed most of their energy as waste heat.
The Sharp team found a way to extract these electrons before they give up that energy thereby increasing the voltage output of their prototype solar cell.
It s far from a practical device it s too thin to absorb much sunlight
and for now it works only with a single wavelength of light but it s the first time that anyone has been able to generate electrical current using these high-energy electrons.
which create a shortcut for high-energy electrons to move out of the solar cell. Another way to achieve ultra-high efficiencies now is by stacking up different kinds of solar cells (see Exotic Highly Efficient Solar cells May Soon Get Cheaper)
Meanwhile MIT researchers are studying the transient behavior of electrons in organic materials to find inexpensive ways to make ultra-efficient solar cells.
which increase efficiency by helping electrons flow more freely out of the material, and they use copper rather than silver electrodes to save costs.
The proposed plant would have more lithium-ion battery capacity than all current factories combined (see oes Musk Gigafactory Make sense?
he said. e are very serious about our quantum physics research and wee expanding. Microsoft has dedicated a quantum computing research lab, known as Station Q, on the campus of University of California,
Small-molecule drugs, which make up the majority of medicines, are compounds far smaller than less common biological medicines like antibodies.
DNA-templated synthesis allows researchers without a lot of expensive equipment to more quickly evaluate all the potential small molecule interactions that could occur from a library of building blocks. single student with only minimal equipment
and infrastructure can evaluate millions of potential small molecule-protein interactions in one to two weeks,
Lithium-ion batteries are just about everywherehey power almost all smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Yet Elon musk, CEO of Tesla motors, says he intends to build a factory in the United states three years from
now that will more than double the world total lithium-ion battery production. The plan is still in its early stages,
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