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,
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+.
Our electronic whiskers consist of high-aspect-ratio elastic fibers coated with conductive composite films of nanotubes and nanoparticles.
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.
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,
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
Piggybacking on the fundraising bracelet trend of a few years ago, he sold silicone bracelets, raising $60, 000 to fund research on his brother disease.
For the new brain study the researchers delivered chemotherapy drugs via implantable microcapsules made of a biocompatible material called liquid crystal polymer.
a pretzel-shaped silicone tube that could be inserted into the bladder, slowly releasing lidocaine over two weeks.
the researchers developed a prototype device by using a laser to cut a hole in a silicone tube to add drugs. ight
Heejin then redesigned the device as a pretzel-shaped structure by incorporating a superelastic wire made from a special nitinol alloy.
A silica coating on the particles allows additional molecules to attach causing the particles to bind with specific structures within the cell.
Silica makes it completely flexible; it s a well developed material that can bind to almost anything Bawendi says.
and his students fabricated filaments from silicone-based rubber, and rigged a spool to automatically reel out the wire onto a conveyor belt.
Earlier lab demonstrations of similar systems could only produce devices a few centimeters on a side with expensive metal substrates so were not suitable for scaling up to commercial production he says.
While the team has demonstrated working devices using a formulation that includes a relatively expensive metal ruthenium we re very flexible about materials Chou says.
In theory you could use any metal that can survive these high temperatures. This work shows the potential of both photonic engineering
The group is now working to optimize the system with alternative metals. Chou expects the system could be developed into a commercially viable product within five years.
The coils are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA) a type of material that remembers an engineered shape
That s where shape-memory alloys may provide a solution. Such materials only contract when heated and can easily be stretched back to a looser shape when cool.
To find an active material that would be most suitable for use in space Holschuh considered 14 types of shape-changing materials ranging from dielectric elastomers to shape-memory polymers before settling on nickel-titanium shape
-memory alloys. When trained as tightly packed small-diameter springs this material contracts when heated to produce a significant amount of force given its slight mass ideal for use in a lightweight compression garment.
Shape-memory alloys like nickel-titanium can essentially be trained to return to an original shape in response to a certain temperature.
and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Civil and Environmental engineering, says the new material is essentially a layer of electro-active elastomer that could be adapted quite easily to standard manufacturing processes
Learning from nature Cephalopods achieve their remarkable color changes using muscles that can alter the shapes of tiny pigment sacs within the skin for example
The new synthetic material is a form of elastomer, a flexible, stretchable polymer. t changes its fluorescence and texture together,
in response to a change in voltage applied to it essentially, changing at the flip of a switch, says Qiming Wang,
that applying voltage can dynamically change surface textures of elastomers, Zhao says. he texturing and deformation of the elastomer further activates special mechanically responsive molecules embedded in the elastomer,
which causes it to fluoresce or change color in response to voltage changes, Craig adds. nce you release the voltage,
both the elastomer and the molecules return to their relaxed state like the cephalopod skin with muscles relaxed.
Using a system like this new elastomer, Zhao suggests, either on uniforms or on vehicles, could allow the camouflage patterns to constantly change in response to the surroundings. he U s. military spends millions developing different kinds of camouflage patterns,
Those crystals interfere with the normal magnetic spins of hydrogen atoms. When exposed to a powerful magnetic field hydrogen atoms align their spins in the same direction.
Tracking infectionhemozoin crystals are produced in all four stages of malaria infection including the earliest stages
the lead can simply be recycled into new solar panels. he process to encapsulate them will be the same as for polymer cells today,
The nanoparticles are made of a small polymer lipid conjugate; unlike liver-targeting nanoparticles these preferentially target the lung
the outer layers are composed of a shape-memory polymer that folds when heated. After the laser-cut materials are layered together a microprocessor
The researchers fabricated an array of the microhairs onto an elastic transparent layer of silicone.
Others have designed such magnetically actuated materials by infusing polymers with magnetic particles. However Wang says it s difficult to control the distribution and therefore the movement of particles through a polymer.
MIT engineers show their magnetic microhairs in action. Video: Melanie Gonick/MIT Instead she and Zhu chose to manufacture an array of microscopic pillars that uniformly tilt in response to a magnetic field.
and bonded the nickel pillars to a soft transparent layer of silicone. The researchers exposed the material to an external magnetic field placing it between two large magnets
Since the material s underlying silicone layer is transparent the group also explored the array s effect on light.
But if the graphene starts out with high electron concentration the pulse decreases its conductivity the same way that a metal usually behaves.
Our experiment reveals that the cause of photoconductivity in graphene is very different from that in a normal metal or semiconductors,
and weld even through a half-inch of steel at greater efficiencies than today s industrial lasers.
and fiber that first transfer energy from diode lasers into a medium usually a crystal before converting it into a laser beam.
Although his initial tests involved copper plates he says any conductive metal would do including cheaper aluminum.
A polymer solution is poured onto a glass plate Hyder explains; this casting plate is immersed then in a nonsolvent bath to induce precipitation to form a film.
The technique creates a bilayered polymer phase: One layer is polymer-rich and one is not.
As they precipitate out the polymer-rich phase develops the smaller pores; the polymer-lean phase makes the larger ones.
Since the solutions form a single sheet of film there is no need for bonding layers together
which can result in a weaker filter. There is no separate layer it s completely integrated
As a final stage a different polymer is added to give the material including the lining of the pores surfaces that attract
The material forms tiny crystals a chemically ordered state but with intrinsic randomness such that the orientations of the stacked molecules can be arbitrary
and the sizes of the crystals different, forming aggregate structures that are disordered highly. That combination of order and disorder contributes to eumelanin broadband absorption, the team found. t a naturally existing nanocomposite,
These insights may be useful in developing materials for applications such as pigments, he says, or in improving the efficiency of solar cells.
and cut off some metal in the back that was dead weight and built a composite nacelle to hold our custom electronics
or more concentric spheres made of short chains of a chemically modified polymer. RNA is packaged within each sphere
The particles are coated with a polymer called PEG, which protects them from being broken down in the body
The injectable device is made of two types of silicone one that provides the MRI signal and one that offers structural support.
Injecting magnetic materials known as contrast agents can help boost the visibility of certain tissues but these agents are designed typically to break down soon after the MRI is performed.
The new MRI sensor combines two forms of silicone a solid called PDMS and a substance known as DDMPS which has an oily consistency.
what s called a swollen polymer. The researchers shaped this polymer into a 1. 5-millimeter sensor that could be implanted in tissue during a biopsy;
they also created smaller particles (tens of microns long) that can be injected through a needle.
which alters the proton spins inside the silicone a phenomenon that can be detected with MRI.
This is the first direct observation of exciton diffusion processes Bulovic says showing that crystal structure can dramatically affect the diffusion process.
While these experiments were carried out using a material called tetracene a well-studied archetype of a molecular crystal the researchers say that the method should be applicable to almost any crystalline or thin-film material.
and better photochromic compounds and composite materials that optimize the storage of solar energy in chemical bonds, Kanai says.
These crystals are doped with elements such as ytterbium, gadolinium, erbium, and thulium, which emit visible colors
the researchers can tune the crystals to emit any color in the visible spectrum. To manufacture the particles, the researchers used stop-flow lithography,
This approach allows shapes to be imprinted onto parallel flowing streams of liquid monomers chemical building blocks that can form longer chains called polymers.
In this case, each polymer stream contains nanocrystals that emit different colors, allowing the researchers to form striped particles.
The researchers demonstrated the versatility of their approach by using two polymers with radically different material properties one hydrophobic and one hydrophilic o make their particles.
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