full-color 3d printer Mcor Iris 3d printer Most people think 3d printing involves a machine that either extrudes molten plastic, in a way similar to how a hot glue gun works,
Plastics are the only materials that can be melted, and then quickly hardened in a safe environment that doesn t require a tremendous amount of heat.
That s right, no expensive polymers, resins, or other materials are required. That s what makes the Mcor line of 3d printers both unique and refreshing to those tired of the tremendous expenses associated with 3d printing in general.
It uses electric charge to separate semiconducting nanotubes useful for transistors from those that conduct electricity like metals
Just a thin layer of this amazing polymer will hide anything under it from being perceived by your sense of touch.
#New recyclable plastics discovered by accident A collection of new plastics that are recyclable and adaptable have been developed by researchers
stiff plastics and flexible gels that can mend themselves if torn. The findings, reported in the journal Science, could lead to cheaper and greener cars, planes and electronics.
It is the first time that durablethermoset plastic has been produced in a recyclable form. Dr Jeanette Garcia, from IBM s Almaden Research center in San jose, stumbled upon the first new class of thermosets in many years when she accidentally left one of three components out of a reaction.
That chunk of plastic, produced from unexpectedly simple ingredients, proved to be tremendously hard and stable.
or monomers, to be reused. It was definitely fortuitous, Dr Garcia said. The first thing I did,
often mixed with carbon fibers to form composites. Some 50%of the new Airbus a350 jet, for example, will be made from composites.
Yet until now, none of this thermoset plastic could be recycled. The potential impact here is said phenomenal
Dr Charl Faul, a materials chemist at the University of Bristol. He says the study offers avery simple, elegant answer to a very old problem.
Beyond replacing thermoset-based composites in current technology, Dr Hedrick sees the potential for many more innovative applications.
Every time you discover a new polymer-forming reaction it leads to all sorts of new materials.
As well as very hard and durable plastics the researchers adapted their procedure to a different monomer and produced flexible, self-healing gels.
These could be useful in anything from cosmetics, to paint, to the design of drug capsules, because of their particular solubility properties.
and chairs by extruding plastic in layers 0. 3 inches wide. Chairs recently on display at the RAPID conference each took about 2 hours and 30 minutes to print.
or treating the plastic with a chemical like acetone, which is used commonly to make desktop printed items smooth.
The Robox, for example, uses one extruder that prints a large volume of plastic, while a second extruder prints thin strands to add detail.
Phinergy is also experimenting with other metal-air technologies. They have developed a zinc-air battery that has some advantages over aluminum.
which would enable a piece of plastic to create the shape by self-folding. The second paper presents designs that show how to build electrical components (such as resistors, inductors, capacitors, sensors and actuators) with self-folding laser-cut materials.
For example, a PVC sheet sandwiched between two films of rigid polyester featuring slits of different sizes contracts
The PVC becomes deformed creating different angles where the edges of the polyester films press against each other.
Producing the pattern of slits is quite a difficult process as every edge in the system moves at the same time,
because it doesn contain rare earth materials and metals. Activated carbon can come from a variety of low cost, easily-available sources.
emitting an electrostatic charge that sucks that loosened dirt right into its own metal frame.
#Self-healing plastic grows back after damage The newly-developed self-healing plastic can take rather extensive damage
A plastic developed by the University of Illinois is one of the latest plastics developed that regenerates when damaged.
The difference between this plastic and scratch-healing gadgets presently available is the amount of damage that can be tolerated.
The newly-developed self-healing plastic can take rather extensive damage and heal it through a process of regeneration,
A key example was steel minimills such as Nucor. Originally, they could only produce the lowest quality steel
and weren seen as a serious threat to the big integrated mills. Nevertheless, as the technology improved
but most commonly only out of plastics. Even manufacturers using an advanced version of the technology known as additive manufacturing typically have expanded the material palette only to a few types of metal alloys.
But what if 3-D printers could use a wide assortment of different materials, from living cells to semiconductors, mixing
Other projects include printed sensors fabricated on plastic patches that athletes could one day wear to detect concussions and measure violent impacts.
Before coming to Harvard from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last year, Lewis had spent more than a decade developing 3-D printing techniques using ceramics, metal nanoparticles, polymers,
Cryptocurrency is following the same path as precious metals in ancient civilization. Where gold was valued for its color, easy malleability, purity and its anti-corrosive properties,
Precious metals may have been the first and last good to become universally adopted as a means of exchange,
FDM printers melt string-like plastic bit by bit and lay it down in layers to create an object.
Spectrom adds dye to the plastic as it melts, allowing printers to shift between colors. hat we find really innovative in our approach is we went back to the roots of paper printing
#New 3d printed materials lighter than water and as strong as steel A Nanoscribe 3d printer can print models of the Empire state building in a space the width of a human hair using precision lasers.
believe such 3d printers may help craft a new generation of materials lighter than water and strong as steel.
Today, the sturdiest materials tend to be the densest (like metals and the least dense materials tend to be the weakest (like foams.
and hardens a droplet of liquid plastic on a slide. A computer moves the plate under the laser,
and to further strengthen the polymer, they coated it with a thin film of alumina (aluminum oxide).
it would floatand as strong as some steel alloys. See video of their experimentation at the bottom.
In a recent article, Scientific American predicted supercomputerswill yield a Golden age of materials science. The article went on to note that the powerful modeling capabilities of supercomputers
the tiny pigment-containing and light-reflecting organs in cephalopods. The reflective background is like leucophores (white chromatophores found in some cephalopod species;
Bug-Inspired'Plastic'Made from Shrimp Shells If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then insects have a lot to be flattered about.
and now two scientists working at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering are looking to replace plastic with a new material based on the hard shells of insects.
Traditional plastics are the children of oil. They are derived from the petrochemical process. Some take thousands of years to naturally degrade
The exoskeleton is made out of cuticle a composite of the natural polymer chitin and silklike strands of a rubbery substance called resilin.
This extends its potential uses beyond consumer plastics and into medical sutures scaffolds and protective burn coverings that dissolve over time Making Shrilk required carefully analyzing the chemistry of insect chitin.
Hard insect exoskeletons are made from layers of polysaccharide polymer and a protein in a plywoodlike structure.
but vital for extracting metals such as gold from its ore. Currently sodium cyanide is transported to and from a site,
with flange mounting options and a colour display controller mounted in a stainless steel enclosure. They can measure all types of Flotation Cell,
It opens unique possibilities for 3d imaging and exact modeling of geological materials in oil and gas exploration, composite materials, fuel cells and electronic assemblies.
For al fresco driving the central plastic canopy is removable. The Cincinnati guys tell me it can get quite warm with the top in place.
IBM created the chip as part of DARPA's Synapse program (short for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics.
copper and a shape-memory polymer that folds when heated to more than 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius).
The engineers also said they're looking into the use of materials that can also unfold themselves, something shape-memory polymers,
is guided to the edge of a clear plastic panel where it is converted then to electricity using thin strips of photovoltaic solar cells.
IBM accidentally creates the first new polymer in 30 years When you leave a key ingredient out of a recipe,
She ended up with a beaker filled with hard white plastic that was so tough she needed to break the glass to get to the material.
The accident has led to the discovery of two amazing new polymers the first new polymers created in 30 years.
the polymers code-named"Titan"and"Hydro"are incredibly strong, lightweight and able to heal themselves.
"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
The new polymers solve these problems. IBM said the materials could even potentially be used in airplanes, where their strength, light weight,
Beyond the initial accident, the new polymers were developed through a combination of chemistry and high-performance computing,
which allowed them to quickly figure out how the new polymers would react with other materials.
when they reinforced the polymer with carbon nanotubes, it became 50 percent stronger. IBM Research's James Hedrick, who co-authored the new paper,
and build new polymer structures with significant guidance from computation that facilitates accelerated materials discovery.
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.
or tiny crystals that exhibit quantum mechanical properties. The cells were further able to communicate with each other
The physicists used special nonlinear crystals to achieve the superposition of the photons'polarization states,
said the main achievement is the demonstration that refractive index microscopes can be enhanced fundamentally. The Japanese scientists said their research is especially important for applications in optics and biology."
and is made of hard metal and other materials. The pressurized suit has four 1. 6-horsepower thrusters to propel the diver up down forward backward or to the side.
Making the muscles is as simple as twisting and coiling high-strength polymer fishing line and sewing thread (usually twisting with the aid of a power drill).
The polymer-muscles generate about 3 horsepower per lb. 7. 1 hp/kilogram) or the equivalent of a jet engine.
I know about that does coiled as well as these polymer muscles Baughman said. Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+.
and navigate around obstacles in tight spaces lead researcher Ali Javey of Berkeley Lab's Materials sciences Division said in a news release.
Our electronic whiskers consist of high-aspect-ratio elastic fibers coated with conductive composite films of nanotubes and nanoparticles.
as researchers can use Summit to model everything from climate change and weather behavior to materials science and nuclear-weapons performance.
But 3-D printers aren't just laying down plastics resins and nanoparticles they're also printing with dough vegetables and even meats.
To get an idea of just how water-repellent this metal is you may have to see it to believe it.
Water dropped over the metal appears like candy-dispenser bouncy balls as it richochets off.
Because they are etched in at such a microscopic level they do not rub off meaning that metals etched with these structures never lose their water-resistance.
or increase the column spacing and they'll know immediately how much more or less steel and concrete might be needed and its impact on cost.
I am in awe of a system that can not only quantify steel and concrete costs but that now can also produce real data on social value pollution health and yes even happiness a
etched into the shape needed to make an electrode, onto pieces of polymer. The polymers they used are transparent,
and one polyethylene terephthalate (PET) can be bent, whereas the other polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is stretchable. The resulting films conduct electricity better than any other sample of graphene produced in the past.
Until recently high-quality graphene has been hard to make on a large scale. To produce their graphene,
Hong and his colleagues used a technique that is well known in the semiconductor industry chemical vapour deposition.
And when stamped onto the polymer, they can be bent or stretched by as much as 11%without losing their conductivity.
says Alistair Steel, executive director of the Brussels-based industry group Euro Chlor. Traditionally, chlorine production has used a mercury electrode in the electrolysis of sodium chloride,
or China's use of mercury catalysts in the manufacture of plastics. In addition, coal fired power plants, which emit mercury because of its natural presence in coal,
Both teams made diamonds with defects in their crystal structure#a single nitrogen atom next to a missing carbon atom, a few nanometres below the surface.
Rugar s team did a similar experiment with an organic polymer, and probed a volume of about the same size.
The idea would be to place a diamond crystal onto the tip of a scanning microscope,
#Ceramics surprise with durable dryness Coatings that repel water are found in myriad applications#they keep car windscreens clear in storms, for example,
following the discovery that a well-known family of durable ceramics can repel water. That is surprising because most ceramics are hydrophilic.
When water meets a ceramic such as aluminium oxide the water s oxygen atoms share some of their electrons with vacant electron orbitals on the aluminium atoms,
and the oxygens in the ceramic share their electrons with hydrogen in the water. This binds the two together.
But what if a ceramic failed to accept electrons from water? Then the ceramic might actually be reasoned hydrophobic
Kripa Varanasi, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT) in Cambridge. He looked to the oxides of the lanthanides#the row of metals nestled almost at the bottom of the periodic table, from cerium to lutetium.
The lanthanides'empty orbitals are buried beneath shells of other electrons, which should make them much less attractive to water s oxygen,
thought Varanasi. Proving that sometimes the simplest experiments are the best, he and his colleagues tested the idea by making small ceramic discs of the oxides of all the lanthanides except radioactive promethium.
The team then dropped water onto the pellets and watched what happened. Every single one repelled the liquid.
And cerium oxide#the cheapest and most widely available of the lanthanide oxides#remained hydrophobic even after a two-hour sauna at 1, 000#C,
or a thorough grinding with abrasive silicon carbide. The results are published today in Nature Materials1. Gisele Azimi and Adam T. Paxsona thin film made of a water-repelling ceramic material#here a rare-earth oxide#can help you stay dry.
Indeed, most chemists would have failed to spot the hydrophobicity of the lanthanide oxides, Cheung speculates,
Cheung suggests that Varanasi's ceramics were particularly hydrophobic because they had very few oxygen defects-perhaps a consequence of their formation in dry air at high temperatures of around 1,
500#C. Varanasi says that hydrophobic ceramics could improve the efficiency of energy generation. As steam passes through the turbines of a thermal power station
A hydrophobic coating made of tough ceramic would prevent films of water forming on the blades,
to test the ceramics in real-world applications a
#Novel solar photovoltaic cells achieve record efficiency using nanoscale structures Here's how to make a powerful solar cell from indium and phosphorus:
scientifically minded scriptwriters would do well to turn their attention to cubic boron nitride, a material that in many ways resembles diamond.
Boron nitride can be compressed into a superhard, transparent form#but unlike diamond and many other materials known for their extreme hardness,
Computer simulations have indicated that a rare crystalline form of boron nitride would resist indentation even better than diamond
Now a new set of experiments on a nanostructured form of boron nitride have yielded even greater measures of hardness than before.
As such, a polycrystal made of nanotwin domains is a bit like a slab of plywood where the wood grain reverses direction in each successive layer.
In the boron nitride polycrystals synthesized by Tian and his colleagues, the nanotwin segments are just 3. 8 nanometers wide on average.
The researchers fabricated their samples from round nanoparticles of boron nitride in which the atoms of nitrogen and boron form an onionlike structure of nested layers.
contain numerous defects where crystals can nucleate under high temperature and pressure but resist rapid crystal growth,
000 kilograms-force per square centimeter), the boron nitride pellets formed round lumps about two millimeters across that were"colorless and totally transparent,
for instance, which the new study s authors used to measure the hardness of nano-twinned boron nitride,
Boron nitride already finds use in cutters that can slice through extremely tough materials, and Dubrovinskaia cites drilling for resource extraction as another application."
In some respects, such as stability at high temperatures, boron nitride is superior to diamond. More from Scientific American. As such, she notes,
if researchers proved that polycrystalline boron nitride boasted hardness values over 100 gigapascals.""The paper doesn t provide any proof that the material is so hard,
The data in the new study only show how the nano-twinned boron nitride responded to indentation loads with up to seven newtons of force."
the true value for the boron nitride samples might be closer to 80 or 85 gigapascals.
and her colleagues reported in 2007 for another high-pressure, high-temperature synthesis of nanostructured boron nitride. In that work, published in Applied Physics Letters, Dubrovinskaia and her colleagues presented data from Vickers testing with loads of up to 10 newtons n
Quantum dots are crystals about 10 nano#metres in diameter, made from a semiconductor material, commonly cadmium selenide.
with material for a similar product. 3m will make a polymer film seeded with quantum dots that does the same jobas QD Vision s glass tube.
"This paper opens up the possibility that the standard of mass can be redefined in term of an atomic quantity instead of a lump of metal,
Molecular machines inspired by biology could eventually enable chemists to build materials with a specific sequence of molecules#a strand of polystyrene in which each component bears one of a range of extra chemical groups, for example.
The device is sensitive enough to pick up a signal even from materials that are barely luminescent, such as metals.
and troughs of the wave travel through the material#is so fast that it is travelling effectively in a vacuum, the explanation for the material s overall refractive index of zero (E.#J.#R.#Vesseur et al.
They then stuck the peptide to commercially available polystyrene nanobeads. The beads also carried a dye
or a polymer that hardens#either naturally or after being sintered by a laser#into a particular structure.
So-called"bioprinters naturally use cells rather than plastics to create organic structures. However this technique can damage the printed cells,
#Taking the crystals out of X-ray crystallography The technique that revealed DNA's double helix
A method described in Nature this week1 makes X-ray crystallography of small molecules simpler, faster and more sensitive,
largely doing away with the laborious task of coaxing molecules to form crystals. Instead, porous scaffolding holds molecules in the orderly arrangement needed to discern their structure with X-rays.
You could call it crystal-free crystallography, says Jon Clardy, a biological chemist at Harvard Medical school in Boston,
X-ray crystallography is one of the most important techniques in science, because it is one of only a few ways to directly determine the shape of large molecules.
Clardy says, the biggest bottleneck in X-ray crystallography.""Some crystallize easily, some crystallize hardly and some are impossible to crystallize,
"Our next grand challenge is to apply this method to protein crystallography, he says
#Synthetic vaccine could prevent future outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease Virologists have devised a way to create an entirely synthetic vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease.
2."Before this there was no crystal structure for any serotonin receptor. A lot of what was theoretical is known now with a great degree of certainty,
Roth and his colleagues uncovered the receptor structures using X-ray crystallography in which X-ray beams are fired at crystals of the compound,
and the structure is deduced from how the beams scatter. The teams focused on two receptors, called 1b and 2b.
but is used in everything from stainless steel to rechargeable batteries. Rare-earth elements are concentrated much less at around 0. 1,
so a polymer that is both flexible and biocompatible is perfect for neural implantation. Multiple functionalities:
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,
and are limited in their ability to image large samples by optical scattering and other aberrations. he exciting part is that this approach can acquire data at the same high speed per pixel as conventional microscopy,
The tiny robot is made of pre-cut polystyrene or paper panels which when heated, fold themselves into a very specific and asymmetrical shape.
The mesh is made of a polymer material with electronics embedded inside. After an injection several centimeters into the brain of a laboratory mouse
researchers made extremely small perforations in a structure made of two thin films of silver separated by a film of silica.
where mixed color pigments are used, there is no color ink used in our structural printing process only different hole sizes on a thing metallic layer, Dr. Jie Gao,
Artists Discover 3-D Printingthe Missouri S&t team believes the mechanical coloring on the silver/silica materials provide a much higher printing resolution than conventional color printing, according to Gizmag.
The technique incorporates some nickel atoms into the diamond crystal structure, forming what is called an 3 defect center.
a rare-earth metal that is highly magnetic and sometimes given to patients to increase contrast in an MRI.
coaxing a cell to envelop a tiny plastic sphere that acts like a resonant cavityhown in green in the micrograph abovehus placing a whole laser within a cell.
In conventional, oxygen-conducting SOFCS, the membrane is made from a ceramic called yttria-stabilized zirconia,
In recent years, researchers have begun exploring alternative membranes made from ceramics called yttrium-doped barium zirconates (BZY.
Mixing the different ceramic components typically requires heating them to temperatures as high as 1700°C But at that extreme temperature,
which makes it harder to mix it uniformly throughout the ceramic. Oayre and his colleagues have helped recently pioneer an alternative mixing scheme called solid state reactive sintering,
Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.
Next Mars rovers get a speed boost IT'S time for Martian rovers to put the pedal to the metal.
but are rich in carbon rather than silica and may contain large layers of diamond. His team reported on models of such a world dubbed 55 Cancri e in October 2012.
Analysing its microscopic crystals Birger Schmitz at Lund University and his colleagues found that the rock dates to the same time period
Then there are rare-earth metals that could be retrieved from discarded electronics along with bits of tin copper and gold.
Cockell's team found that the altered crystal structure of the rocks absorbed and reflected UV rays.
Snowflakes shorelines and most recently black holes (see Turbulent black holes grow fractal skins as they feed) also exhibit such fractal behaviour.
and steel wires that hangs from an uncrewed spacecraft. The net is fitted with sensors that look for light reflecting from small pieces of debris
Then they shot the ice with a steel pellet travelling at about 7 kilometres a second to simulate the comet smacking into a planet
so they can be assembled from building blocks made of polymer chains carrying either an organic MRI contrast agent called a nitroxide
or a fluorescent molecule called Cy5. 5. When mixed together in a desired ratio these building blocks join to form a specific nanosized structure the authors call a branched bottlebrush polymer.
Furthermore the authors of the Nature Communications paper show that incorporation of Rajca s nitroxide in Johnson s branched bottlebrush polymer architectures leads to even greater improvements in the nitroxide lifetime.
In that process, steel sheets are fed into one side of a machine, where theye continuously rolled into a spiral,
and Dan Ainge 2 Keystone system allows the steel rolls to be tapered and made of varying thickness,
and uses steel to make the whole tower, instead of concrete. his makes it much more cost-effective to build much taller towers,
Theye built using very thick steel walls at the base (requiring more than 100 tons of excess steel),
or pieced together with many steel elements using thousands of bolts. f you were to design a 500-foot tower to get strong winds,
industrial-sized machine and the trapezoid-shaped sheets of steel needed to feed into the system.
and feed aluminum coils into one end of a specialized machine that shapes the metal into a seamless gutter. t a better alternative to buying individual sections
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