when designing nuclear reactors is finding materials that can withstand the massive temperatures, radiation, physical stress and corrosive conditions of these extreme environments.
Exposure to high radiation alone produces significant damage at the nanoscale, so scientists at Los alamos National Laboratory, New mexico, have been working on a mechanism that allows nanocrystalline materials to heal themselves after suffering radiation-induced damage.
This gives hope for materials that will improve the reliability, safety and lifespan of nuclear energy systems.
Radiation can cause individual atoms or groups of atoms to be jarred out of place, leaving behind an empty space known as a vacancy.
The displaced atoms are called interstitials and they, and the vacancies they cause, build up over time in a material, causing effects such as swelling, hardening or brittleness in the material and lead to catastrophic failure.
The nanocrystalline materials the scientists have been working on are created those from nanosized particles, in this case from copper.
A single nanosized grain is the size of a virus or even smaller. Nanocrystalline materials comprise a mixture of grains and the interface between those grains, called grain boundaries.
so scientists have thought that these materials would be more tolerant to radiation than their larger-grain counterparts.
which allows for effective self-healing of radiation-induced defects. Using three different computer simulation methods
On the shorter timescales, radiation-damaged materials underwent a oadingprocess at the grain boundaries, in
which interstitial atoms became trapped or loaded into the grain boundary. After trapping interstitials, the grain boundary later nloadedinterstitials back into vacancies near the grain boundary,
or accelerate the design of highly radiation-tolerant materials for the next generation of nuclear energy applications.
"The device contains 100 billion rubidium atoms packaged with micro-optics. The light from a low-power infrared laser interacts with the atoms
and is transmitted through the fiber-optic cable to register the magnetic field strength. While the performance isn't quite the same as SQUIDS,
which have had copper atoms attached to them. While electrons ordinarily flow freely through the nanotubes,
any ethylene molecules present in the vicinity will bond with the copper atoms, obstructing the flow of those electrons.
Tiny beads of polystyrene are used also, which absorb ethylene and concentrate it near the nanotubes.
By measuring how much the electron flow has been slowed, the sensors are able to determine ethylene levels.
As a result, the sensors can reportedly measure concentrations as low as 0. 5 parts per million for context
Another system, developed at the UK's National Physical Laboratory, uses radio frequencies, microwaves, terahertz radiation and far-infrared light to determine the ripeness of strawberries
Zheng's color photodetector consists of an ultra-thin oxide coating atop a thin layer of aluminum that was deposited onto a silicon photodetector using a common technique called electron-beam evaporation.
It's these approximately 100-nanometers-wide slits that allow the device to differentiate between colors with plasmons waves of electrons that flow across metal surfaces) excited by light of a specific wavelength.
ever since the first Lunar rover went for a spin during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.
With DNATRAX the bacteria is replaced by particles of non-biological DNA that can be collected with simple forensic swabs
By applying the DNA particles to the exterior of the suit it is possible to identify
since it comes in super fine particles. Previous methods of binding it to larger matter have already been used
Panasonic has found a way to bind the Tio2 to another particle zeolite (a commercial adsorbent and catalyst)
because the two particles are bound together by electrostatic force. When the novel photocatalytic particles are stirred Tio2 is released from the zeolite and dispersed throughout the water.
As a result reaction speed is much faster than other methods of fixing Tio2 on the surface of substrates
The glass can be used as an electrode material in lithium-ion batteries to almost double the amount of time they last between charges.
they're made using carbon particles which are mediocre conductors at best and are only really good for a limited scope of simple low-power applications.
Voxel8 a Harvard spin-off founded by professor Jennifer Lewis has designed a new ink that replaces carbon with highly conductive silver particles
The tiny gelatin particles have a huge benefit: They can be administered nasally a noninvasive and direct route to the brain.
the small molecule adenosine, or by powerful synthetic small molecule drugs invented at the NIH prevents
or reverses pain that develops slowly from nerve damage without causing analgesic tolerance or intrinsic reward (unlike opioids).
and fellow chemical engineers coated one-atom-thick tubes of carbon with protein fragments found in bee venom,
with the ability to detect even single molecules of the chemicals, and further, they can even detect the molecules the explosive chemicals form into as they break down.
The sensors can provide experts with a ingerprintof each explosive as well as the state of its breakdown.
and the team is still working out a compression system to ensure that any molecules in the air come into contact with the tubes
##A detector attached to the rear windshield can scan the air for increased radiation levels,
##The device, powered by rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and worn on the outside, is about three times heavier than a human heart,
Startup incubators and accelerators are popping up everywhere. Business incubators were all the rage before the dot-com bubble (700 for profit, many more nonprofit.
which large molecules are broken down into smaller ones, releasing energy in the process. This mainly occurs in the mitochondria the##powerhouses##of cells.
#Ana Gomes#at Harvard Medical school and her colleagues compared the levels of MESSENGER RNA (mrna) molecules that convey genetic information around a cell for the cellular components needed for respiration in the skeletal muscle of 6 and 22-month-old mice.
But another molecule called NAD+keeps SIRT1 on the job; crucially, the amount of NAD+present in the cell declines with age,
they 22-month-old mice twice daily for a week with nicotinamide mono nucleotide (NMN) a molecule known to increase levels of NAD.
We could even control thought speeds, shifting from 100 milliseconds, the response time of todays brains, to 50 nanoseconds, millions of times faster.
Notably, the signals broadcast by any ibeacon-compatible radio (which broadcast signals known as Bluetooth Low energy) can also be picked up by Android and Windows phones,
This is called#sensor fusion, a task that is basic to all big data projects. Knowing where you are throughout the day won t mean much,
#Tesla batteries are powering an energy revolution Solarcity generator Tesla motors lithium-ion battery packs aren t just powering electric luxury sports sedans for wealthy any more.
Another Silicon valley company,#Stem, has begun installing 54-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery packs for corporate customers, allowing them to store electricity from the grid
Lithium-ion batteries remain expensive and Rive and Solarcity spokesman Jonathan Bass was sketchy on the details on how the economics pencil out
The mobile app accelerator program is funded by the school, along with Nokia and Microsoft, and is set up to spur app development for Windows phones.
Coin communicates with your iphone using low energy Bluetooth and securely stores the data on the card.
Thankfully, there are those who fully appreciate that plastic has a higher energy value than anything else commonly found in the waste stream.
#China and India race to fully harness thorium for nuclear power Thorium is an alternative to uranium as a way of doing nuclear fission.
Although the chemical element thorium sounds like the kind of material used as a plot device in a comic book blockbuster,
Thorium is being hailed as the key in the bid to find safer and more sustainable sources of nuclear energy to provide our electricity.
thorium has taken almost 200 years to be taken seriously as an energy contender. After a period in the 1950s and 1960s in which it flirted with thorium,
the US government shut down its research into the radioactive element, preferring to go the uranium route.
Critics say thorium was pushed aside because uranium was an easier component for nuclear weapons. But times have changed,
and thorium s status as a safer alternative to uranium is now a help, not the hindrance it was during the Cold war.
India, which has hundreds of thousands of tonnes of the metal amid its terrain has announced plans to build a thorium-based nuclear reactor by 2016.
But it faces competition from China, where the schedule to deliver a thorium-based nuclear power plant was overhauled recently,
meaning scientists in Shanghai have been told to deliver such a facility within the next ten years. While thorium nuclear exploration is had not New britain its own reactor in Dorset carrying out tests 40 years ago the will to make it a viable energy source is growing stronger.
Professor Roger Barlow from the University of Huddersfield is part of a team researching thorium power generation.
Thorium is an alternative to uranium as a way of doing nuclear fission he told Metro.
He said thorium is safer because an overheating thorium reactor can be switched simply off, avoiding the problem that occurred at Fukushima, for instance.
Thorium also produces less radioactive waste than uranium, waste which needs to be secured for hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years.
He added that it is extremely difficult to weaponise. Thorium is not fissile, meaning it cannot be split to release energy alone,
but when exposed to neutrons it will react to produce a particular isotope of uranium (U-233) that becomes the nuclear fuel.
Proponents say this is less dangerous and produces less waste than the usual uranium power plant reaction that generates plutonium,
which can be used to make weapons. But who will be the first across the line in the thorium race?
The Chinese have thrown a lot of resources at it, said Prof Barlow. I don t know if they ll succeed or not.
They know they ve got a large population and as their standard of living improves, people are going to want more and more energy.
Thorium is not without its critics, who point to its nuclear reaction producing U-232, the decay products
of which contain gamma radiation. And many supporters of green energy believe the nuclear equation should be abandoned not solved.
But Prof Barlow thinks those campaigning solely for alternative energy sources such as wind and solar are missing the bigger picture.
And we need to incorporate zero waste and low energy technologies into the task of food production. What can achieve the intensification of food supply we require,
and filters out the tubes with the right properties for transistors using a modified version of a machine used to filter molecules such as proteins in the pharmaceutical industry.
Devices that manipulate the spin of individual electrons are the closest possible candidate but they re less mature,
and lower energy costs for storage and server providers. There hasn been a real hardware advancement in decades.
#Researchers discover 3d material that behaves like graphene This illustration depicts fast-moving, massless electrons inside cadmium arsenide.
100 miles between charges using a combination of aluminum-air and lithium-ion storage technologies.##The Phinergy aluminum-air battery at 100 kilograms (220 pounds) weight contained enough on board energy to allow the vehicle to travel up to 3, 000 kilometers (over 1, 860 miles.
Compare that to the best, current lithium-ion batteries in the Tesla Model S sedan.
it was outfitted with both an aluminum-air and lithium-ion battery system. The notion behind this was that the EV could run on its lithium-ion charge
when driving on short urban trips of 50 kilometers (31 miles) or less, but when used for longer trips the aluminum-air battery would kick in.
#Researchers discover new treatment for diabetes Researchers discovered a small molecule that inhibits an enzyme that degrades insulin.
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,
and runs on a rechargeable lithium-ion battery and offers about 8 hours of continuous use.
what happens after subatomic particles collide has been a long struggle for physicists. For decades, the best tool involved basic sketches (called Feynman diagrams) of each possible result.
The shape s dimensions length, width, height and other parameters (hencemultidimensional) represent information about the colliding particles,
and the equation describing its volume also describes the particles that emerge from the collision.
Unlike the older methods for exploring particle collisions, the amplituhedron is rooted not in a world where a particle starts in one place
and time before moving to the next location and moment. That is the shape does not exist in space-time it does not rely on a conception of the universe that theoretical physicists suspect might be incorrect.
When they try to knit together large-scale and small-scale forces, such as gravity and those that hold atoms together, the assumption of space-time leads to mathematical inconsistencies, a clue that something s amiss with current assumptions
about the universe. We ve known for decades that space-time is doomed, says Arkani-Hamed. We know it is not there in the next version of physics.
says physicist Lance Dixon, a pioneer in the field of particle collisions, but he cautions that so far it can only describe particle collisions within a simplified version of quantum theory the results don t yet translate to the real world.
Arkani-Hamed acknowledges it is ababy example; he calls itstep zero in the journey to create a new kind of physics a project on par with the discovery of the probabilistic particle collisions themselves.
For now, the amplituhedron offers a hint of what this strange new world could look like. Via Discover Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorat c
lithium ions travel from the anode to the cathode through the electrolyte, creating a chemical reaction that allows electrons to be harvested along the way.
In the immediate future, electric cars at least from dominant players Tesla and Nissan are betting on lithium ion chemistry for batteries.
the amount of sunlight that hits it varies greatly as the geosynchronous satellite and Earth spin.
otherwise known as ununseptium, was discovered originally back in 2010 by a group of American and Russian physicists with the Joint Institute for Nuclear research (JINR).
The newest instance of element 117 was created by a team at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy ion Research in Germany,
Like the team at the JINR, the group managed to create the element by firing Calcium isotopes at radioactive Berkelium
#$150 smartphone spectrometer can tell the number of calories in your food If you wanted to look up the calorie content of a specific food you are eating you could take it to a lab and run it through a spectrometer.
But accurate spectrometers are huge, expensive machines that are owned often only by institutions and require training to use.
A new startup, however, wants to make it easy as running an app and pairing a bluetooth dongle.
In a few seconds, the associated smartphone app will take the spectrometer reading, send it to SCIO servers,
Other companies working in the portable spectrometer space have used also the technology to track calories eaten and nutritional intake through a user sweat.
and other components needed for tiny lithium-ion batteries. Other projects include printed sensors fabricated on plastic patches that athletes could one day wear to detect concussions and measure violent impacts.
she hoped to treat them the same way as materials composed of synthetic particles. That idea might have been a bit naïve, she now acknowledges.
Also since lithium-ion battery costs have dropped, electric car prices have dropped also, meaning that there are now several electric cars with price tags around $30, 000.
the strands can be made to unravel on contact with specific molecules say, those on a diseased cell.
When the molecule unravels, out drops the package wrapped inside. A bug life The team has injected now various kinds of nanobots into cockroaches.
the turbine helium-inflated housing is durable enough for deployment in either the blazing sun or freezing snow.
A gelatin-based ink acts as extracellular matrixhe structural mix of proteins and other biological molecules that surrounds cells in the body.
This week Tesla revealed more details about its plans to build a massive the largest of its kind in the world battery factory in the U s. that will produce enough lithium-ion batteries by 2020 to outfit 500,000 electric cars.
In terms of global lithium ion and advanced battery production beyond just for electric cars Tesla so-called igafactoryis still massive;
over 90 percent, are lithium-ion batteries) in 2012. The bulk of those batteries 23 gigawatt hours were for consumer electronics,
Lower-cost lithium-ion batteries could make clean energy much more viable. Pairing battery farms with wind and solar panel farms would enable clean power to store energy
and the principles of quantum mechanics are together allowing scientists to build virtual materials atom by atom.
One reason for the high cost is that real-time simulations of ultrafast phenomena require small time steps to describe the movement of an electron
This allows them to simulate ultrafast phenomena for systems of around 100 atoms, and opens the door for efficient real-time simulations of ultrafast processes and electron dynamics,
such as excitation in photovoltaic materials and ultrafast demagnetization following an optical excitation.""We demonstrated a collision of an ion Cl with a 2d material Mose2 for 100 femtoseconds.
We used supercomputing systems (NERSC Cray XE6 system, Hopper) for 10 hours to simulate the problem great increase in speed,
Reducing the Dimension of the Problem Conventional computational methods cannot be used to study systems in which electrons have been excited from the ground state,
an excited system can be modeled with time-dependent quantum mechanical equations that describe the movement of electrons.
"By eliminating higher energy terms, you significantly reduce the dimension of your problem, and you can also use a bigger time step,
the predicted energies and velocities of an atom passing through a layer of material are the same for both models,
applications latency level of 610 nanoseconds and message rate of 149.5 million messages per second,
This reference design utilizes the Seagate Nytro Flash Accelerator Card, Supermicro Superserver SYS-4048b-TRFT system and Microsoft SQL SERVER 2014 Enterprise Edition to deliver a fully-optimized,
vice president of marketing and business development at Supermicro. ur Microsoft certified solution comes preconfigured with quad Intel Xeon E7 processors, Seagate Nytro Flash Accelerator cards, memory,
Many scientists have assumed that bottom feeders get most of their energy from tiny particles of organic matter that settle on the seafloor.
In these samples the researchers looked at the concentration of stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes
From an animal's isotope levels scientists can partially reconstruct its diet and place in the food web.
causing the particles to fall out of the air. There is an increase in the number of nozzles used and the water flow in marginally increased, in comparison to standard spray setups.
which cause implosions that generate high energy levels. ith over 30 years of experience from many different applications in the mines we have developed a level transmitter that will optimise the mineral recovery in Flotation Cells
#This unique new large-format micro-X-ray fluorescence (micro-XRF) spectrometer provides a scan range up to 800 x 600 mm2
the S2 RANGER X-ray spectrometer achieves superb light element performance and analytical precision for applications in cement, minerals and mining, petrochemistry, and research.
With a larger detector area the spectrometer achieves higher sample throughput and lower detection limits.
The ELF built by Organic Transit isn quite as luxurious as the Twike but it a lot cheaper $5495 for the standard model.
It's also possible to extend the range by adding extra e-bike type li-ion battery packs.
"It's very light, low energy-consuming, it's completely biological.""The potential applications for the invention are countless.
"Luminescent solar concentrators generate electricity by concentrating radiation most often, non-ionizing solar radiation. They convert it by luminescence
and operate on the principle of collecting radiation over a large area. The MSU team's breakthrough uses specially-developed,
small organic molecules to absorb specific nonvisible wavelengths of sunlight.""We can tune these materials to pick up just the ultraviolet and the near infrared wavelengths that then'glow'at another wavelength in the infrared,
Einstein struggled mightily with many of the theoretical consequences of quantum theory perhaps none more so than the notion of entanglement the phenomenon that makes teleportation possible.
Entanglement is the weird instantaneous link that has been shown to exist between certain particles such as photons
or electrons even if they are separated by vast distances. Although entangled particles do not appear to have any physical connection they are capable of acting in concert.
For instance if you change the spin of one the spin of the other will also be altered.
All of this happens instantaneously even if the two particles exist at opposite ends of the universe
as if they are one. How exactly the phenomenon happens is a complete mystery. That it happens
Entangled particles are frustratingly fickle difficult to capture and even more difficult to manipulate. But the breakthrough made by the Kavli Institute scientists could be a game-changer.
Previous attempts to teleport information by manipulating entangled particles have been promising but have fallen short of practical application.
They did so by producing quantum bits using electrons trapped in diamonds at extremely low temperatures. These ultra-cold gemstones effectively acted as prisons trapping the electrons
and allowing the scientists to accurately establish their spin or value. If they can repeat the experiment over distances significantly larger than 10 feet it could mean that incomprehensibly fast quantum computers
and a quantum internet are just around the corner. here is a big race going on between five
"Polymers, such as plastics and polystyrene, are long chains of molecules connected through chemical bonds. The main failings of these materials are their poor recyclability
We're now able to predict how molecules will respond to chemical reactions and build new polymer structures with significant guidance from computation that facilitates accelerated materials discovery.
The billboard's air filtration system is also capable of scrubbing the air of some pretty heavy-duty pollutants such as the dust metal and stone particles common around construction zones.
which are made up of strands of molecules called amino acids. Ultimately, the researchers aim to create organisms that can produce artificial proteins.
who explores a much greater diversity of structures in the small-molecule drugs they synthesize,
"We hope to be able to combine the best of both small-molecule and protein drugs."
Researchers have figured out how to use ordinary kitchen blenders to create thin sheets of graphene, a marvelous high-tech material that is just one atom thick but 100 times stronger than steel.
and so-called junk DNA (not known to encode proteins the molecules that perform vital tasks inside cells) including so-called jumping genes
The new tool relies on a weird principle of quantum mechanics, in which two particles can become entangled
so that even when separated by large distances, say light-years, they are connected intimately. Using such entangled photons,
or particles of light, the microscope reveals things that are completely transparent, visualizing them in a much better quality than could be done with ordinary light.
Physics guru Albert Einstein once famously called it"spooky action at a distance.""This unique property is already being looked at as a potential mechanism for quantum information technologies, such as quantum cryptography and quantum computation.
Creative microscopy The idea of using entangled photons to beat this limit was suggested first in a theoretical paper by physicist Jonathan Dowling and his colleagues at Louisiana State university in 2001.
they first generated entangled photons by converting a laser beam into pairs of photons that were in opposite polarization states
Quantum particles can be in two states at once something called superposition. The physicists used special nonlinear crystals to achieve the superposition of the photons'polarization states,
which in this case were horizontal and vertical. The two photons in the pair would be considered entangled,
and an action on one of them should affect the other regardless of the distance between them.
The researchers then focused the entangled photons on two adjacent spots on a flat glass platewith A q-shaped pattern made in relief on the plate's surface.
Entangled photons however, significantly improve the visibility of this pattern. The Hokkaido University researchers say the signal-to-noise ratio,
and measuring the difference in the phase of the light between the two photon states
Measuring this difference with entangled photons is much more precise, because a measurement on one entangled photon provides information about the other,
so together they provide more information than independent photons, resulting in the larger detection signal and sharper image.
As a result, with the same number of photons, the signal-to-noise ratio using entangled photons is better than that with ordinary light.
Importance for biology One classical way to image smaller objects without using entangled photons is to use shorter and shorter wavelengths of light.
This way, one could improve resolution by switching from visible light to X-rays. But X-ray microscopesare difficult to use and coherent X-ray sources like X-ray lasers, in
The biggest one is entangled that the photon light sources currently available are said very faint Dowling, and while they give the improved resolution, the rate at
"In this experiment the entangled photons arrive at about 5 photons per second. It's likely that to produce the image shown above they had to wait hours or days,
a much brighter source of entangled photons must be developed, as biologists and doctors are unlikely to be prepared to wait hours for an image to form. o
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