and block light Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated experimentally for the first time the phenomenon of Brillouin Scattering Induced Transparency (BSIT)
This method uses magnetic fields to break the time-reversal symmetry with certain specialized garnet and ferrite materials.
We have demonstrated a method of obtaining linear optical non-reciprocity that requires no magnets can be implemented in any common optical material system without needing ferrites
Brillouin-Mandelstam scattering originally discovered in the early 1920s is the coupling of light waves and sound waves through electrostrictive optical forces and acousto-optic scattering.
and even plasmas stated Junhwan Kim a graduate student at Illinois and first author of the paper Nonreciprocal Brillouin Scattering Induced Transparency appearing in the journal Nature Physics.
The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE is a single layer of cells that accomplishes multiple functions such as providing survival molecules that prevent photoreceptors from dying.
Tissue engineering is like other kinds of engineering except instead of using steel or computer code to make things living cells from skin muscle
Makerbot has supplied also the Feinstein Institute with early samples of its just-announced Makerbot PLA Composite Filaments in Limestone (calcium carbonate) and Iron
This method keeps the chainlike molecules in the plastic stretched out, which is important for good lithium-ion conductivity between the electrodes,
Kotov is a professor of chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, materials science and engineering and macromolecular science and engineering g
#Researchers use oxides to flip graphene conductivity A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania;
An organic compound 1 3-propenediol can be formulated into industrial products including composites adhesives laminates and coatings It's also a solvent
Researchers found a few all-silica zeolites with superior performance that contain pores and channels with the ability to accommodate ethanol molecules
and materials science professor Michael Tsapatsis'lab was found to be so effective that it could change the ethanol/water separation process from a multi-step distillation process to a single-step adsorptive process.
and reproduced in plastic with a 3d printer. Then, using the same procedure the personalized device that the surgeon uses to determine the optimal points
steel. The engineered structural material possesses the ability to control the increase of acoustical or elastic waves.
The material was made in a single steel sheet using lasers to engrave"chiral, "or geometric microstructure patterns,
"In its current state, the metal is a passive material, meaning we need to introduce other elements that will help us control the elastic waves we send to it,
Once heating to close to their melting point the gold discs--diameter one micron-don't spread out over the surface
Furthermore De Vreede expects the'gold method'to be applicable to other ceramic materials as well.
that allows growth of highly efficient and reproducible solar cells from large-area perovskite crystals.""These perovskite crystals offer promising routes for developing low-cost, solar-based, clean global energy solutions for the future,"said Aditya Mohite,
the Los alamos scientist leading the project. State-of-the-art photovoltaics using high-purity, large-area, wafer-scale single-crystalline semiconductors grown by sophisticated,
resulting in devices showing hysteresis-free photovoltaic response, which had been a fundamental bottleneck for stable operation of perovskite devices."
#Transparent artificial nacre: A brick wall at the nanoscale Natural materials have extraordinary mechanical properties,
Scientists have developed now a nacre-inspired nanocomposite that combines exceptional mechanical properties with glass-like transparency and a high gas-and fire-barrier.
The structure of nacre resembles a brick wall at the microscopic scale: Calcium carbonate platelets('bricks')alternate with soft biopolymer layers('mortar'.
energy can be dissipated into the soft polymer segments. Together, this results in a lightweight material that is considered as the gold standard of natural materials
Previous approaches to synthesize nacre-mimetics were not feasible on the large scale due to energy-intensive and laborious multistep procedures.
Also, it was not possible to synthesize transparent nacre-mimetic films and foils. Andreas Walther and his team decided to use synthetic nanoclays for their nacre-mimetic materials.
This significantly improved the material's transparency. The Aachen-based research group also refined the underlying preparation procedure"Mussels grow nacre in a lengthy process.
For our nanocomposites, we instead apply a rapid self-assembly process, "the chemist explains. First, the researchers coat the clays with a layer of polyvinylalcohol('mortar on the brick')and subsequently,
"The nacre-mimetics based on small clays are very tough. However, if we use large clays with an aspect ratio of 3500,
the resulting nacre-mimetics are both extremely stiff and strong. Their mechanical properties actually reach close to those of fiber composites,
which are far more laborious to prepare, "says Phd student Paramita Das. The glass-like transparency and the high gas barrier of the nanocomposite are an extra benefit of the material.
This outstanding combination of features makes the nacre-mimetic material a promising candidate for future applications,
which means that the skin's permeability value needs to be known. In order to establish this, the blood sugar value has to be determined via a blood sample and the glucose concentration on the skin measured.
Based on these readings, the permeability can then be calculated and the sensor calibrated. A different method to previous sensors Glucolight spares the premature babies blood samples
Preventing reflections requires controlling an abrupt change in"refractive index, "a property that affects how waves such as light propagate through a material.
Adding a coating with an intermediate refractive index at the interface eases the transition between materials
The scientists started by coating the top surface of a silicon solar cell with a polymer material called a"block copolymer,
The resulting surface nanotexture served to gradually change the refractive index to drastically cut down on reflection of many wavelengths of light simultaneously, regardless of the direction of light impinging on the solar cell."
including glass and plastic, for antiglare windows and coatings for solar panels. This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science e
an urban research and business park specializing in biotechnology, materials science and information technology. Wake Forest Baptist clinical, research and educational programs are ranked annually among the best in the country by U s. News & World Report u
#Laser-generated surface structures create extremely water-repellent self-cleaning metals Super-hydrophobic materials are desirable for a number of applications such as rust prevention anti-icing or even in sanitation uses.
-and nanoscale structures to give the metals their new properties. This work builds on earlier research by the team in which they used a similar laser-patterning technique that turned metals black.
Guo states that using this technique they can create multifunctional surfaces that are not only super-hydrophobic but also highly-absorbent optically.
Guo adds that one of the big advantages of his team's process is that the structures created by our laser on the metals are intrinsically part of the material surface.
And it is these patterns that make the metals repel water. The material is so strongly water-repellent the water actually gets bounced off.
Unlike Guo's laser-treated metals the Teflon kitchen tools are not super-hydrophobic. The difference is that to make water to roll off a Teflon coated material you need to tilt the surface to nearly a 70-degree angle before the water begins to slide off.
You can make water roll off Guo's metals by tilting them less than five degrees. As the water bounces off the super-hydrophobic surfaces it also collects dust particles
It currently takes an hour to pattern a 1 inch by 1 inch metal sample
but ultra-short laser pulses to change the surface of the metals. A femtosecond laser pulse lasts on the order of a quadrillionth of a second
Guo is keen to stress that this same technique can give rise to multifunctional metals. Metals are naturally excellent reflectors of light.
That's why they appear to have a shiny luster. Turning them black can therefore make them very efficient at absorbing light.
The combination of light-absorbing properties with making metals water repellent could lead to more efficient solar absorbers--solar absorbers that don't rust
#Hierarchically-porous polymers with fast absorption Professor Myungeun Seo and his research team from the Graduate school of Nanoscience
and Technology at KAIST has developed a method to form micropores of less than 2 nanometers within porous polymers where 10 nanometers long mesopores connect like a net.
The advantage of the porous polymers is fast absorption of molecules. Porous polymers with micropores of less than 2 nanometers like a zeolite have a large surface area.
They are used as a means to store hydrogen-based molecules or as a catalytic support that can be used as a surface to convert a material into a desired form.
The research team solved the issue by implementing a self-assembly of block polymers to easily form a netlike nanostructure from mesopores of 10 nanometers.
The team created hierarchically-porous polymers consisting of two different types of pores by using a hypercrosslinking reaction along with the self-assembly method.
The reaction creates micropores within the chain after the polymer chain is confined by a chemical bond.
This porous polymer has micropores that are smaller than 2 nanometers on the walls of mesopores
This is the first case where a porous polymer has both well-defined mesopores and micropores. The research team verified the effect of hierarchically-porous structures on absorption of molecules by confirming that the porous polymer had faster absorption speeds than a polymer consisting only of micropores.
Professor Seo said The study has found a simple way to create different sizes of pores within a polymer.
He expected that the hierarchically-porous polymers can be used as a catalytic support in which fast diffusion of molecules is essential or for molecule collection.
The research was sponsored by National Research Foundation of Korea and published online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society y
However the lifetime of this kind of component is reduced greatly due to the fact that the thermal expansion coefficients of these elements are significantly different from that of silicon.
Instead of making their microscopes more powerful they have discovered a method that enlarges tissue samples by embedding them in a polymer that swells
Their idea was to make specimens easier to image at high resolution by embedding them in an expandable polymer gel made of polyacrylate a very absorbent material commonly found in diapers.
and are limited in their ability to image large samples by optical scattering and other aberrations.
An alternative means to bend X-rays is to use crystals. A crystal lattice diffracts X-rays, as the German physicist Max von Laue discovered a century ago.
artificial crystals can be tailor-made to sharply focus X-rays by depositing different materials layer by layer.
The researchers manufactured a wedged lens from 5500 alternating layers of silicon carbide (Sic) and tungsten (W), varying in thickness.
Specifically diode lasers bars in the wavelength range 930 to 970 nm are the fundamental building blocks for pump sources for Ytterbium-doped crystals in large laser facilities,
resulting in a more realistic representation than current training tools that use materials such as Styrofoam and latex.
The Johns Hopkins students instead used silicone layers of different densities to more closely represent the physiology of skin,
health workers will be able to make practice incisions through replaceable silicones layers that respond more like human skin."
and built a prototype low energy x-ray device for the foodstuffs industry with the aim of measuring the tenderness of meat and detecting the presence of unwanted plastic objects in meat products.
Arrayarraythe researchers'printing surface consists of a sandwich-like structure made up of two thin films of silver separated by a"spacer"film of silica.
Between the top and bottom films lies a 45-nanometer silica dielectric spacer. The researchers created a scaled-down template of the athletic logo and drilled out tiny perforations on the top layer of the metamaterial structure.
""Unlike the printing process of an inkjet or laserjet printer, where mixed color pigments are used, there is no color ink used in our structural printing process--only different hole sizes on a thin metallic layer,
and the hysteresis in the current-voltage curves depending on the direction of the voltage sweeps.
the group said it had employed ultrafast femtosecond lasers to produce a three-dimensional single crystal capable of guiding light waves through glass with little loss of light.
"The article's lead author, Adam Stone, received his Ph d. in materials science and engineering from Lehigh in 2014.
The coauthors are Himanshu Jain, professor of materials science and engineering, and Volkmar Dierolf, professor of physics, both at Lehigh,
to prevent light from scattering as it is being transmitted and, second, to transmit and manipulate light signals fast enough to handle increasingly large quantities of data.
Crystals, with their highly ordered specific lattice structure, have the requisite optical qualities.""Amorphous waveguides fundamentally lack second-order optical nonlinearity due to their isotropically disordered atomic structure,
"The ability to pattern nonlinear optical crystals in glass is therefore essential for 3d laser-fabrication of PICS to achieve its full potential."
"To pattern crystals in glass, the Lehigh-led group employed femtosecond lasers, whose speed and precision make them useful for cataract and other eye surgeries.
Scientists have been attempting for years to make crystals in glass in order to prevent light from being scattered as light signals are transmitted,
The task is complicated by the"mutually exclusive"nature of the properties of crystal and glass. Glass turns to crystal when it is heated
says Jain, but it is critical to control the transition.""The question is, how long will this process take
and will we get one crystal or many. We want a single crystal; light cannot travel through multiple crystals.
And we need the crystal to be in the right shape and form.""After conducting experiments at Lehigh and at Kyoto University and Polytechnique Montreal,
the group built a single crystal in glass, demonstrated its waveguiding capabilities and quantified its transmission efficiency.
The glass and crystal both were composed of lanthanum borogermanate (Labgeo5), a ferroelectric material.""We achieved quality,
"says Dierolf,"by guiding light from one end of the crystal to the other with very little loss of light."
"We have made the equivalent of a wire to guide the light. With our crystal, it is possible to do this in 3d
so that the wire--the light--can curve and bend as it is transmitted. This gives us the potential of putting different components on different layers of glass."
"The fact that the demonstration was achieved using ferroelectric materials is another plus, says Dierolf.""Ferroelectric crystals have demonstrated an electrical-optical effect that can be exploited for switching
and for steering light from one place to another as a supermarket scanner does. Ferroelectric crystals can also transform light from one frequency to another.
This makes it possible to send light through different channels.""""Other groups have made crystal in glass
but were not able to demonstrate quality, "says Jain.""With the quality of our crystal, we have crossed the threshold for the idea to be useful.
As a result, we are now exploring the development of novel devices for optical communication in collaboration with a major company."
or almost melt, until it is transformed into a crystal.""The unique focus of the femtosecond laser also makes it possible to"write"the crystal inside the glass and not on its surface."
we make use of the fact that a heat current passing through a magnetic material creates a separation of electron spins.
a Donald B. Willett Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Materials science and engineering at Illinois."The physics of separating spins with heat currents is related to the operation of thermocouples and the thermoelectric generators that power deep space
who recently completed his Phd in materials science and engineering at Illinois."Spin transfer torque has often been realized by passing electrical currents through magnetic layers.
and Kyung-Jin Lee, Department of Materials science and engineering and KU-KIST Graduate school of Converging Science and Technology, Korea University, Seoul l
because it creates a new class of devices for controlling X-rays,"added Paul Evans, a professor of materials science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison."
In this new research, the authors aimed to determine changes in gut barrier function (as determined by intestinal permeability and antimicrobial peptide concentrations) as well as disease markers in CD, in response to Vitamin d supplementation.
that patients treated with the supplementation were more likely to maintain their intestinal permeability, whereas this deteriorated in the placebo group.
Increased intestinal permeability is considered a measure of gut leakiness which is shown to predict and precede clinical relapse in CD.
"This is the first reporting of effects of Vitamin d supplementation on intestinal permeability and antimicrobial peptide measures in a CD cohort.
made from electroactive dielectric elastomer, a soft, compliant smart material, can effectively copy the action of biological chromatophores.
"The researchers investigated making bio-inspired artificial skin embedded with artificial chromatophores using thin sheets (five to ten millimetre) of dielectric elastomer--a soft,
but often breathe compounds based on metals--typically forms of solid iron. Scientists had witnessed previously decreasing concentrations of uranium in groundwater
So just like bacteria pick up resistance to things like antibiotics and heavy metal toxicity, this bacterium"picked up a genetic element that's now allowing it to detoxify uranium,
a hard plastic core surrounded by a softer silicone rubber shell.""Anytime you have a corner,
""The composite post geometry,"Turner said, "achieves the same effect as the mushroom shape. The soft rubber conforms to the roughness of the surface,
The shortcoming of conventional honeycombs is that they lose their full protective properties after only one impact due to plastic buckling of the material.
the darker the skin's pigment, the more ultraviolet B radiation necessary to trigger the precursor chemicals in the body to produce Vitamin d."
Dr Borg's team at Monash University were able to visualise the crystal structure of the Anapn1 protein for the first time, providing valuable insights.
This natural polymer is an ideal"cocoon"that can stabilize compounds such as enzymes antibodies and growth factors while lending itself to many different mechanically robust formats, said Fiorenzo Omenetto, Ph d.,senior author on the paper and associate dean for research and Frank C. Doble Professor
Omenetto and Kaplan are pioneers in the use of silk as an alternative to plastics. Omenetto's 2011 TED Talk called silk a"new old material"that could have a profound impact in many technical fields.
where one in seven composite fillings fail within seven years and 86 percent of these failures are caused by bacterial infection.
and Pertinax the £25 000 Materials science Venture Prize awarded by The Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers.'
and also allows for the coating of larger plastic carrier surfaces, "Wöll says. Thanks to their mechanical properties, MOF thin films of a few hundred nanometers in thickness can be used for flexible solar cells or for the coating of clothing material or deformable components.
"says Joshua Robinson, a Penn State assistant professor of materials science and engineering whose student, Yu-Chuan Lin, is first author on a paper appearing online today, June 19, in the journal Nature Communications.
Nanoscale mirrored cavities that trap light around atoms in diamond crystals increase the quantum mechanical interactions between light and electrons in atoms.
He and his colleagues therefore came up with the idea of investigating a compound consisting of the transition metal niobium (Nb
an exciting world-record performance,'said study co-author Yi Cui, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and of photon science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
typically platinum and iridium, two rare and costly metals. But in 2014, Stanford chemist Hongjie Dai developed a water splitter made of inexpensive nickel and iron that runs on an ordinary 1. 5-volt battery.
is actually more stable than some commercial catalysts made of precious metals.''We built a conventional water splitter with two benchmark catalysts, one platinum and one iridium,
The new technique relies on polymer self-assembly, where molecules are designed to spontaneously assemble into desired structures.
Here, an intensely hot laser swept across the sample to transform disordered polymer blocks into precise arrangements in just seconds."
To further exploit the power and precision of LZA, the researchers applied a heat-sensitive elastic coating on top of the unassembled polymer film.
the scientists converted the polymer base into other materials. One method involved taking the nano-cylinder layer
These molecules then glom onto the self-assembled polymer, converting it into a metallic mesh.
A wide range of reactive or conductive metals can be used, including platinum, gold, and palladium.
where a vaporized material infiltrates the polymer nano-cylinders and transforms them into functional nanowires.
"We can stack metals on insulators, too, embedding different functional properties and interactions within one lattice structure."
allowing it to drive polymer self-assembly even on top of complex underlying layers. This versatility enables the use of a wide variety of materials in different nanoscale configurations."
"says Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics at MIT and a cofounder of 24m (and previously a cofounder of battery company A123).
and colleagues including W. Craig Carter, the POSCO Professor of Materials science and engineering. In this so-called"flow battery,"the electrodes are suspensions of tiny particles carried by a liquid
rather than functional things,"said Dr Stoyan Smoukov of the University's Department of Materials science and Metallurgy,
Smart polymers were developed first several decades ago, but multiple functions have not been combined effectively in the same material,
an ionic electro-active polymer (i-EAP), which bends or swells with the application of voltage and are used in soft robotics;
and a two-way shape memory polymer (SMP), which can be programmed to adopt and later recall specific shapes, in a type of muscle memory.
Making IPNS has been tried before with a type of plastic known as a block copolymer, but it has been difficult to fine-tune their exact structure because of difficult synthetic procedures.
In this case the researchers were able to use phase separation combined with ordinary polymer syntheses to achieve the complex structures.
"Our artificial neuron is made of conductive polymers and it functions like a human neuron, "says lead investigator Agneta Richter-Dahlfors, professor of cellular microbiology."
"This birefringence can be measured very precisely and is a very sensitive indicator for the shape and orientation of the particle.""
and Steven P. Levitan, Ph d.,John A. Jurenko professor of electrical and computer engineering, integrated models for self-oscillating polymer gels and piezoelectric micro-electric-mechanical systems to devise a new
so Bosch focussed instead on bottom-up techniques such as the thermal decomposition of silicon carbide, and chemical vapour deposition onto metal surfaces.
who in the case of their magnetic sensor settled on hexagonal boron nitride. This is for reasons of both cost and technical performance.
whereas with the boron nitride and graphene device the figure is 7, 000. That is a two orders of magnitude improvement.
continuously becomes commercially available in North america Indigo-Clean#is a light fixture manufactured through an exclusive licensing agreement with the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland,
Indigo-Clean#was unveiled just before the annual meeting of theassociation for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) in Nashville."
"Indigo-Clean#represents a breakthrough in helping to reduce HAIS, "said Jim Hawkins, CEO of Kenall."
"Indigo-Clean#uses a narrow spectrum of visible indigo-colored light at an output of 405 nanometers (nm) on the light spectrum.
The ability of Indigo-Clean#to continuously treat the air as well as hard and soft surfaces,
Indigo-Clean#is automatic and continuous.""As an innovator in healthcare lighting and a leader in LED lighting and controls, we can bring healthcare providers this effective,
""The material we studied is an unconventional semiconductor made of alternating atomically thin layers of metals
""Our goal was to develop an eco-friendly herding molecule as an alternative to the current silicone-based polymers,
such as seawater, reduce the surface tension. In the case of oil spills, when they are added along the periphery of an oil spill slick,
and duration by creating a gel with 3d microscopic structures of a polymer compound called polyethylene glycol (PEG) that resembles"reservoirs."
"CMOS, or complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, is based the silicon technology used to make transistors in microchips.
Compared to other polymers like plastics, the wood nanomaterial is biocompatible and has relatively low thermal expansion coefficient,
which means the material won't change shape as the temperature changes. All these superior properties make cellulose nanofibril an outstanding candidate for making portable green electronics.
Ma's team employed silicon nanomembranes as the active material in the transistor--pieces of ultra-thin films (thinner than a human hair) peeled from the bulk crystal
They have been able to make further chemical modifications to the pores of the 3dom hydrogels by grafting with organic compounds and polymers.
such as responsive materials, organic-inorganic composites and bioactive hydrogels for digestion or separation of bio (macro) molecules s
to pass through two separate"quantum dots"--small crystals that have quantum properties.""If we could detect a superconducting current,
an assistant professor in the Materials science and engineering Department who led the research team.""As renewable energy becomes more prevalent,
#Producing biodegradable plastic just got cheaper, greener Biodegradable drinking cups or vegetable wrapping foil: the bioplastic known as polylactic acid (PLA) is already a part of our everyday lives.
And yet, PLA is considered not yet a full alternative to traditional petroleum-based plastics, as it is costly to produce.
Researchers from the KU Leuven Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis now present a way to make the PLA production process more simple and waste-free.
which in turn is a building block for polylactic acid. PLA degrades after a number of years in certain environments.
PLA is also one of the few plastics that are suitable for 3d printing. However, PLA is not yet a full alternative for petroleum-based plastics due to its cost.
The production process for PLA is expensive because of the intermediary steps.""First, lactic acid is fed into a reactor and converted into a type of pre-plastic under high temperature and in a vacuum,
"Professor Bert Sels explains.""This is an expensive process. The pre-plastic--a low-quality plastic--is broken then down into building blocks for PLA.
In other words, you are first producing an inferior plastic before you end up with a high-quality plastic.
And even though PLA is considered a green plastic, the various intermediary steps in the production process still require metals and produce waste."
"The KU Leuven researchers developed a new technique.""We have applied a petrochemical concept to biomass,
"says postdoctoral researcher Michiel Dusselier.""We speed up and guide the chemical process in the reactor with a zeolite as a catalyst.
and without using metals. In addition, the production process is cheaper, because we can skip a step."
Of course, PLA will never fully replace petroleum-based plastics. For one thing, some objects, such as toilet drain pipes, are meant not to be biodegradable.
And it is not our intention to promote disposable plastic. But products made of PLA can now become cheaper and greener.
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