#Artificial skin That Can Send Pressure sensation To Brain cell Stanford engineers have created a plastic"skin"that can detect how hard it is being pressed
Alex Chortos, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering; and Andre Berndt, a postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering, were the lead authors on the Science paper.
Five years ago, Bao's team members first described how to use plastics and rubbers as pressure sensors by measuring the natural springiness of their molecular structures.
which further compresses the plastic's molecular springs. To exploit this pressure-sensing capability electronically,
If the number of zinc ions increases following transient severe brain damage, these ions dock in greater numbers onto a switch, the so-called metal-regulatory transcription factor 1 (MTF1.
features a sensor created by sandwiching a conductive carbon black powder between two sheets of silicone.
This is significant because previous methods required using precious metals, whereas nickel is inexpensive, abundant, and offers great stability. here are many catalysts that are sophisticated considerably more than nickel
and often involving obscure and expensive precious metals, said Doug Macfarlane, co-author of the research, in an interview with Ashley Hall at the ABC. o nickel is a rather ordinary catalyst in many respects expect for one thing,
It an inexpensive metal and it produces a very, very stable action in its water electrolysis cell.
it becomes tinted to about 30 percent light transmittance, and this allows the energy to be captured more efficiently."
"After discharge, the team reports that light transmittance rises to approximately 60 percent.""How did they make the electrodes so thin?
said Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab Materials sciences Division, in a press release. ur ultra-thin cloak now looks like a coat.
"It stores data using the same material that found in rewritable CDS and DVDS-a phase-change alloy of germanium-antimony-tellurium known as GST."
like a metal, by using either electrical or optical pulses, "the press release explains.""These two states have very different physical properties,
"The chip is built by placing on a small section of GST on top of a silicon nitride ridge-known as the waveguide
#Scientists figure out how to make flexible materials 3 times stronger than steel Australian scientists have published an'instruction manual'that makes it a whole lot easier and cheaper to create metallic glass-a type of flexible
but ultra-tough alloy that's been described as"the most significant materials science innovation since plastic".
but when it cools it's three times stronger than steel. Researchers have been dabbling with the creation of metallic glass-or amorphous metal-for decades,
and have made a range of different types by mixing metals such as magnesium, palladium, or copper-but only after an expensive and lengthy process of trial and error.
"Until now, discovering alloy compositions that form these materials has required a lengthy process of trial and error in the laboratory,
"The difference between metallic glasses and regular metals is their atomic structure. Normal metals are crystalline when solid,
which means their atoms are arranged in a highly organised way. Metallic glass alloys, on the other hand, have disordered a highly structure,
with their atoms arranged irregularly. The new model, which is described in Nature Communications, looks at the atomic structure of different metals and identifies
whether they'd be able to create a metallic glass. Using this model, the UNSW researchers have predicted already successfully more than 200 new metallic glass alloys based on magnesium, silver,
copper, zinc, and titanium.""We will also be able to engineer these materials on an atomic scale
What's really exciting about it is that it might finally make the bulk production of these awesome materials commercially viable. etallic glass alloys are expensive to manufacture
Because, let's face it, plastic is great and all but we could all use a little more durability in our lives v
But now, for the first time, Liu and his colleagues have reproduced the 3d atomic structure of PRC2 crystals,
using an imaging technique called x-ray crystallography. This means we can finally compare exactly how it behaves in normal and diseased cells,
they use a flexible polymer substrate covered in gold nanoparticles to which the VOCS attach. By applying electrodes and a voltage to the resulting film,
Solar energy heats the zeolite and increases the methanol vapor pressure, the refrigerant is condensed and stored in a tank flowing to the evaporator."
or Antimony-Telluride (Sb2te3) alloys and had a peak efficiency (zt) of 1. 1, meaning the electricity going in was only slightly less than the heat coming out.
Since the 1960's there have been incremental advancements in alloy technology used in Peltier devices.
and Materials science department at California Institute of technology California, USA have formulated a new method for creating a novel and much more efficient TE alloy.
TE alloys are special because the metals have an incredibly high melting point. Instead of melting the metals to fuse them,
they are combined through a process called sintering which uses heat and/or pressure to join the small,
metallic granules. The joint team, including IBS researchers, used a process called liquid-flow assisted sintering
which combined all three antimony, bismuth and telluride granules into one alloy (Bi0. 5sb1. 5te3).
Additional melted tellurium was used as the liquid between the Bi0. 5sb1. 5te3 granules to help fuse them into a solid alloy,
By creating the alloy this way, the joints between the fused grains, also known as the grain boundaries, took on a special property.
This new thermoelectric alloy paves the way for the future of modern TE devices s
#Researchers discover N-type polymer for fast organic battery The discovery relies upon a"conjugated redox polymer"design with a naphthalene-bithiophene polymer,
The breakthrough, described in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and featured as ACS Editors'Choice for open access, addresses a decades-long challenge for electron-transport conducting polymers,
Researchers have recognized long the promise of functional organic polymers, but until now have not been successful in developing an efficient electron-transport conducting polymer to pair with the established hole-transporting polymers.
The lithium-doped naphthalene-bithiophene polymer proved both to exhibit significant electronic conductivity and to be stable through 3,
000 cycles of charging and discharging energy, Yao said. The discovery could lead to a cheaper alternative to traditional inorganic-based energy devices,
Liang said conventional inorganic metal-based batteries and energy storage devices are expensive partly because the materials used to make them,
Organic polymers can be processed at relatively low temperatures, lowering the cost. They also produce less CO2,
organic polymers could potentially be synthesized from biomass.""Organic-conjugated polymers are emerging as a materials class for energy-related applications,
enabling a path to a more sustainable energy landscape without the need of energy-intensive, expensive and sometimes toxic metal-based compounds,
"the researchers wrote, concluding that"a model polymer, P (NDI2OD-T2), was stably and reversibly n-doped to a high doping level of 2. 0,
a significant progress for electron-transporting? -conjugated polymers...With rational molecular design? -conjugated redox polymers will establish new design space in polymer chemistry
and see widespread applications, especially in energy-related ones such as batteries, supercapacitors and thermoelectrics.""The basic polymer used in the work was discovered in 2009;
Yao said it was provided by members of the research team from Polyera Corporation, a technology company based in Illinois
. Although naphthalene-bithiophene has been used for transistors and other applications since its discovery, this is the first time it has been converted for use in energy storage.
and raised the polymer's doping level from a previously reported 0. 1 to 2. 0. The results are record-setting.
The polymer exhibits the fastest charge-discharge performance for an organic material under practical measurement conditions,
His group also will continue to do basic scientific research on the polymer to learn more about it,
#First metal-free catalyst created for rechargeable zinc-air batteries Zinc-air batteries are expected to be safer, lighter, cheaper and more powerful and durable than lithium-ion batteries common in mobile phones and laptops and increasingly used in hybrid and electric cars.
and metal-free catalysts can reduce cost while improving performance,"said Liming Dai, professor of macromolecular science and engineering at Case Western Reserve University and senior author of the study."
and North Texas University's Zhenhai Xia, professor of materials science and engineering, and Zhenghang Zhao, a Phd student, who performed theoretical simulations.
even recently developed carbon-based catalysts with metals. Moving forward, Dai's team has begun to further optimize the process
or better than more expensive metal-based catalysts used in alkaline and acidic fuel cells and in dye-sensitized solar cells."
"Maybe it's time to push for metal-free catalysts in commercial devices, "Dai said d
a certain portion of them will act more like metals than semiconductors--an unforgiving flaw that fouls the film,
It is a gel-like material called an electroactive polymer that can potentially mimic human movement
Initially working with Lew Meixler on a federal Cooperative Research and development Agreement in the Plasma Surface Laboratory, she solved the problem by treating the metal (steel or titanium) with a plasma.
This changed the metal's surface and made the gel adhere more closely to the metalpppl was also involved with crucial tests of the material last summer,
Using X-ray crystallography, the team obtained the first high-resolution 3d structural images of the single protein
#Hyper-stretchable elastic-composite energy harvester Scientists have developed a hyper-stretchable elastic-composite energy harvesting device called a nanogenerator.
A research team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee of the Department of Materials science and engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science
and Technology (KAIST) has developed a hyper-stretchable elastic-composite energy harvesting device called a nanogenerator. Flexible electronics have come into the market
and hyper-stretchable elastic-composite generator (SEG) using very long silver nanowire-based stretchable electrodes. Their stretchable piezoelectric generator can harvest mechanical energy to produce high power output (4 V) with large elasticity (250%)and excellent durability (over 104 cycles.
such an experiment represents a two-dimensional analog of a classical problem of scattering from a homogeneous sphere (Mie scattering), the solution to
when materials with high values of refractive index are involved. In the study, the scientists used ordinary water whose refractive index can be regulated by changing temperature.
As it turned out, high refractive index is associated with two scattering mechanisms: resonant scattering, which is related to the localization of light inside the cylinder,
and nonresonant, which is characterized by smooth dependence on the wave frequency. The interaction between these mechanisms is referred to as Fano resonances.
The researchers discovered that at certain frequencies waves scattered via resonant and nonresonant mechanisms have opposite phases
Materials with corresponding refractive index are known either long or can be developed at will,"said Mikhail Rybin, first author of the paper and senior researcher at the Metamaterials Laboratory in ITMO University.
and solidify a composite without the need for massive ovens. When connected to an electrical power source,
and wrapped over a multilayer polymer composite, the heated film stimulates the polymer to solidify.
The group tested the film on a common carbon-fiber material used in aircraft components,
energy saving method for manufacturing virtually any industrial composite, says Brian L. Wardle, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT."
After it has fused the underlying polymer layers, the film itself--a fraction of a human hair's diameter--meshes with the composite, adding negligible weight.
The team, including MIT graduate students Jeonyoon Lee and Itai Stein and Seth Kessler of the Metis Design Corporation, has published its results in the journal ACS Applied materials and Interfaces.
why not use it to make the composite itself? How hot can you go? In initial experiments, the researchers investigated the film's potential to fuse two types of aerospace-grade composite typically used in aircraft wings and fuselages.
Normally the material, composed of about 16 layers, is solidified, or cross-linked, in a high-temperature industrial oven.
then applied a current to heat both the film and the underlying polymer in the Cycom composite layers.
or cross-link, the polymer and carbon fiber layers, finding that the CNT film used one-hundredth the electricity required for traditional oven-based methods to cure the composite.
Both methods generated composites with similar properties, such as cross-linking density. Wardle says the results pushed the group to test the CNT film further:
As different composites require different temperatures in order to fuse, the researchers looked to see whether the CNT film could,
some of the highest-temperature aerospace polymers require temperatures up to 750 F in order to solidify.""We can process at those temperatures,
"The team is working with industrial partners to find ways to scale up the technology to manufacture composites large enough to make airplane fuselages and wings."
"Gregory Odegard, a professor of computational mechanics at Michigan Technological University, says the group's carbon nanotube film may go toward improving the quality and efficiency of fabrication processes for large composites, such as wings on commercial aircraft.
"This could lead to more innovation in the composites sector, and perhaps improvements in the performance and usage of composite materials."
"This research was funded in part by Airbus Group, Boeing, Embraer, Lockheed martin, Saab AB, Tohotenax, ANSYS Inc.,the Air force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air force base,
including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels. Scientists with the U s. Department of energy (DOE)' s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria
"says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab's Materials sciences Division and one of the leaders of this study."
"Our system represents an emerging alliance between the fields of materials sciences and biology, where opportunities to make new functional devices can mix
and 52-percent for the renewable and biodegradable plastic PHB. Improved performances are anticipated with further refinements of the technology."
In this phase solid, organic and inorganic matter as well as heavy metals are removed by precipitation and gravity; and a sludge settles at the bottom of the reactor.
In addition to the HZDR, the Technische Universitt Dresden, Leibniz-Institute of Polymer Research Dresden (IPF), the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technology and Systems (IKTS) and the Namlab ggmbh all participate in running the structured doctoral program m
#Efficient method of producing metallic nanoparticles VTT's aerosol technology reactor for nanoparticle production can generate a variety of pure metal particles, particles of various alloys and carbon-coated particles.
nano-metal composites are scarce and often available in small quantities only. We wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to produce nanomaterials in considerable quantities cost-effectively,"comments Ari Auvinen of VTT, head of the research team.
The tests showed that reflection can be reduced by even 10,000 times in polymers, by adding particles
include high permeability polymers, nanomagnets for medical diagnostics applications, materials for the 3d printing of metal articles,
and help to improve processes such as preparation of inorganic ceramics and thin-film solar cells. The experiments were performed with the help of Yu-chen Karen Chen-Wiegart, Feng Wang, Jun Wang and their co-workers at Beamline X8c
which is covered in turn by an even harder tissue, the enamel. When a dental lesion appears,
#From metal to insulator and back again Metals are compounds that are capable of conducting the flow of electrons that make up an electric current.
At low temperatures, all materials can be classified as either insulators or metals. New work homes in on the physics underlying the recently discovered fact that some metals stop being metallic under pressure.
New work from Carnegie's Russell Hemley and Ivan Naumov hones in on the physics underlying the recently discovered fact that some metals stop being metallic under pressure.
Their work is published in Physical Review Letters. Metals are compounds that are capable of conducting the flow of electrons that make up an electric current.
Other materials, called insulators, are not capable of conducting an electric current. At low temperatures, all materials can be classified as either insulators or metals.
Insulators can be pushed across the divide from insulator to metal by tuning their surrounding conditions,
particularly by placing them under pressure. It was believed long that once such a material was converted into a metal under pressure,
it would stay that way forever as the pressure was increased. This idea goes back to the birth of quantum mechanics in the early decades of the last century.
But it was discovered recently that certain groups of metals become insulating under pressure-a remarkable finding that was thought not previously possible.
Hemley and Naumov wanted to determine the unifying physics framework underlying these unexpected metal-to-insulator-to-metal transitions."
when metals will become insulators under pressure, as well as the reverse, the when-insulators-can-become-metals transition,
"Naumov said. The onsets of these transitions can be determined by the positions of electrons within the basic structure of the material.
Hemley and Naumov demonstrated that for a metal to become an insulator, these reduced-spacing overlaps must be organized in a specific kind of asymmetry that was recognized not previously.
#Scientists create cheaper magnetic material for cars, wind turbines Karl A. Gschneidner and fellow scientists at the U s. Department of energy's Ames Laboratory have created a new magnetic alloy that is an alternative to traditional rare-earth permanent magnets.
The new alloy--a potential replacement for high-performance permanent magnets found in automobile engines and wind turbines--eliminates the use of one of the scarcest and costliest rare earth elements, dysprosium,
and instead uses cerium, the most abundant rare earth. The result, an alloy of neodymium, iron and boron co-doped with cerium and cobalt
is a less expensive material with properties that are competitive with traditional sintered magnets containing dysprosium.
and Mahmud Khan (now at Miami University) demonstrated that the cerium-containing alloy's intrinsic coercivity--the ability of a magnetic material to resist demagnetization--far exceeds that of dysprosium-containing magnets at high temperatures.
because it reduces the Curie temperature--the temperature above which an alloy loses its permanent magnet properties.
But the research team discovered that co-doping with cobalt allowed them to substitute cerium for dysprosium without losing desired magnetic properties.
It's a lot like attaching a drop of solder on the string of a guitar--it changes its vibration frequency and also its tone."
"A common way to decipher molecular structures is to use x-ray crystallography. This complicated method involves purifying and crystallising the molecules,
TUW has developed therefore new polymers.""These are so-called thermoplastic polyurethanes, "explains Robert Liska from the Institute of Applied Synthetic Chemistry of Vienna University of Technology."
"By selecting very specific molecular building blocks we have succeeded in synthesizing a polymer with the desired properties."
"A thin polymer thread spun into tubesto produce the vascular prostheses, polymer solutions were spun in an electrical field to form very fine threads and wound onto a spool."
"The wall of these artificial blood vessels is very similar to that of natural ones, "says Heinz Schima of the Medical University of Vienna.
The polymer fabric is slightly porous and so, initially, allows a small amount of blood to permeate through
"The researchers resorted to the computational approach because of the difficulty of capturing the structure via X-ray crystallography or single-particle transmission electron microscopy, two of the most common imaging methods at the atomic scale.
"The electrical performance of our materials was comparable to that of reported results from single crystals of molybdenum disulfide,
but instead of a tiny crystal, here we have a 4-inch wafer, "Park said. Molybdenum disulfide,
They found that their crystals grew perfectly stitched together, but only with a little bit of hydrogen and in completely dry conditions, for example.
Distinguished Professor of Materials science and engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper describing the work.
The CNT films made using the microcombing technique had more than twice the tensile strength of the uncombed CNT films--greater than 3 gigapascals for the microcombed material,
but it suffers from the difficulty of growing large-size high-quality single crystals, making it difficult and expensive to incorporate in commercial detectors.
Moreover, the detector materials need to have excellent carrier transport efficiency to make sure radiation-generated charges effectively diffuse through the crystal
causing carrier trapping and scattering, thus harming the carrier transport process. Studying the native defects and their effects on charge transport in a material are hence essential for the performance improvement of a radiation detector.
thus reducing carrier scattering and trapping.""The defect and dielectric properties, combined with other good properties such as large band gap, high density,
"Besides medical applications, multimodal tomography could also open up new possibilities in materials science, for instance, in studies of extremely durable and lightweight carbon fibers and other fibrous materials,
The platform is a disposable flexible polyester chip with implanted electrodes. HIV-1 antibodies are added to whole blood
a polyester film with microfluidic channels to capture the T cells, and a detection technology known as lensless shadow imaging.
A single drop of whole blood from a fingerprick was applied to the polyester film, where capillary forces pull the blood into the microfluidic channels.
The shadow of the CD4+T cells that adhere to the channels can then be visualized on the polyester film.
"This study highlights the importance of integrating advances in 3d printing, with those in materials science, to realise a biological outcome,
In past research Salahuddin and his colleagues found that directing electrical current through the rare metal tantalum creates polarity in magnets without an external magnetic field.
strain develops in the diamond's crystal structure. This in turn, influences the spin of the electrons,
Lithium metal, for example, can store about 10 times as much energy per gram, but is extremely dangerous,
who has a joint appointment in MIT's Department of Materials science and engineering.""We came up with the method serendipitously,
and atomic nuclei within molecules that take place in less than a tenth of a trillionth of a second--information that will benefit groundbreaking research in materials science, chemistry and biology.
and it was seen by some as a black sheep of the transition metal dichalcogenides TMD) family and purposefully ignored.
A TMD crystal follows an MX2 format: there is one transition metal, represented by M m can be Tungsten, Molybdenum, etc.)
and two chalcogenides, the X2 (Sulfur, Selenium, or Tellurium. These atoms form a thin, molecular sandwich with the one metal and two chalcogenides,
and depending on their fabrication method can exist in several slightly different shaped atomic arrangements. The overwhelming majority of microchips that exist in electronics now are made from silicon,
and make one 2d crystal that was composed of the semiconducting 2h-Mote2 and the metallic 1t'-Mote2.
and Mechanical Science & Engineering Professor Andrew Alleyne, embedded QDS in novel polymer materials that retain strong quantum efficiency.
They then used electrohydrodynamic jet (e-jet) printing technology to precisely print the QD-embedded polymers onto photonic crystal structures.
Key to the process is the strong Van der waals interaction that exists between graphene and hexagonal boron nitride, another 2d material within
Thanks to strong Van der waals interactions between graphene and boron nitride, CVD graphene can be separated from the copper
Raman spectroscopy and transport measurements on the graphene/boron nitride heterostructures reveals high electron mobilities comparable with those observed in similar assemblies based on exfoliated graphene.
"Raman spectroscopy uses the way light interacts with matter to produce'unique scattering,'the equivalent of a molecular fingerprint,
a technology applied to create electronic devices on a roll of flexible plastics or metal foils.
Phd, a team from Drexel's Department of Materials science and engineering created the material-making method, that can sandwich 2-D sheets of elements that otherwise couldn't be combined in a stable way.
"By'sandwiching'one or two atomic layers of a transition metal like titanium, between monoatomic layers of another metal, such as molybdenum,
as well as superstrong composites--like the ones used in phone cases and body armor. Each new combination of atom-thick layers presents new properties
it is safe to say that this discovery enables the field of materials science and nanotechnology to move into an uncharted territory,
An Elemental Impasse Four years later, the researchers have worked their way through the section of the Periodic table with elements called"transition metals"
it can use this method to make as many as 25 new materials with combinations of transition metals, such as molybdenum and titanium,
"Anasori plans to make more materials by replacing titanium with other metals, such as vanadium, niobium,
structural composites and many other fields, enabling a new level of engineering on the atomic scale
which recur repeatedly to form objects such as snowflakes, ferns and cauliflowers, making their structure appear more complex than it often actually is.
researchers in Brunger's laboratory at the Stanford School of medicine found a way to grow crystals of the complex.
They used a robotic system developed at SSRL to study the crystals at SLAC's LCLS, an X-ray laser that is one of the brightest sources of X-rays on the planet.
The researchers combined and analyzed hundreds of X-ray images from about 150 protein crystals to reveal the atomic-scale details of the joined structure.
The valleys in the surface roughness typically need to be less than one micron in width, the researchers found.
and without the key surface roughness and submerged them in water. Samples with the nanoscale roughness remained dry for up to four months
"The researchers also report that nature uses the same strategy of surface roughness in certain aquatic insects, such as water bugs and water striders.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011