#UCLA chemists devise technology that could transform solar energy storage The materials in most of today residential rooftop solar panels can store energy from the sun for only a few microseconds at a time.
A new technology developed by chemists at UCLA is capable of storing solar energy for up to several weeks an advance that could change the way scientists think about designing solar cells.
UCLA Chemistrythe new design is inspired by the way that plants generate energy through photosynthesis. iology does a very good job of creating energy from sunlight,
and keeping positive and negative charges separated, Tolbert said. hat separation is the key to making the process so efficient. o capture energy from sunlight, conventional rooftop solar cells use silicon, a fairly expensive material.
and carry payloads of pharmaceutical drugs to targeted tissues. However, when usual methods to produce carbon nanoparticles are rather complex
The experiment showed that the carbon nanoparticles did not release the drug payload at room temperature
and provide backup for renewable energy sources that produce intermittent output, such as wind and solar power. But Chiang says the technology is suited also well to applications where weight
which can be controlled wirelessly to release small amounts of a drug payload. A team of researchers has created a new implantable drug-delivery system using nanowires that can be controlled wirelessly.
when the correct electromagnetic field is applied, the nanowires release small amounts of the payload. This process can be started
#Breakthrough in graphene production could trigger revolution in artificial skin development A pioneering new technique to produce high-quality,
low cost graphene could pave the way for the development of the first truly flexible lectronic skin that could be used in robots.
Researchers from the University of Exeter have discovered an innovative new method to produce the wonder material Graphene significantly cheaper,
have used this new technique to create the first transparent and flexible touch-sensor that could enable the development of artificial skin for use in robot manufacturing.
from Exeter Engineering department, believes the new discovery could pave the way for graphene-driven industrial revolutionto take place.
he vision for a raphene-driven industrial revolutionis motivating intensive research on the synthesis of high quality and low cost graphene.
Currently, industrial graphene is produced using a technique called Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD. Although there have been significant advances in recent years in this technique,
which grows graphene in an industrial cold wall CVD system, a state-of-the-art piece of equipment recently developed by UK graphene company Moorfield.
This so-called nanocvd system is based on a concept already used for other manufacturing purposes in the semiconductor industry.
This shows to the semiconductor industry for the very first time a way to potentially mass produce graphene with present facilities rather than requiring them to build new manufacturing plants.
This new technique grows graphene 100 times faster than conventional methods reduces costs by 99
and look forward to seeing where it can take the graphene industry in the future. Professor Seigo Tarucha from the University of Tokyo, coordinator of the Global Center of Excellence for Physics at Tokyo university and director of the Quantum Functional System Research Group at Riken Center
he ability to manufacture high quality, large area graphene (at a low cost) is essential for advancing this exciting material from pure science and proof-of-concept into the realm of conventional and quantum electronic applications.
we are using Exeter CVD grown graphene instead of the exfoliated material in our graphene-based devices, whenever possible.
The research team used this new technique to create the first graphene-based transparent and flexible touch sensor.
merging flexible and wearable technologies such as healthcare electronics and energy harvesting devices could be transformed by the unique properties of graphene.
The extremely cost efficient procedure that we have developed for preparing graphene is of vital importance for the quick industrial exploitation of graphene.
At just one atom thick, graphene is the thinnest substance capable of conducting electricity. It is very flexible
and is one of the strongest known materials. The race has been on for scientists and engineers to adapt graphene for flexible electronics.
Professor Saverio Russo, co-author and also from the University of Exeter added: his breakthrough will nurture the birth of new generations of flexible electronics and offers exciting new opportunities for the realization of graphene-based disruptive technologies.
Source: University of Exete s
#Electrical engineers Break Power and Distance Barriers for Fiber optic communication Electrical engineers have broken key barriers that limit the distance information can travel in fiber optic cables
and detected using ferromagnetic metal contacts with a tunnel barrier consisting of single layer graphene between the metal and silicon NW.
The ferromagnetic metal/graphene tunnel barrier contacts used to inject and detect spin appear as blue,
The use of graphene as the tunnel barrier provides a low-resistance area product contact
and used a graphene tunnel barrier contact that produces excellent spin injection and also satisfies several key technical criteria:
Using intrinsic 2d layers such as graphene or hexagonal boron nitride as tunnel contacts on nanowires offers many advantages over conventional materials deposited by vapor deposition (such as Al2o3
The use of multilayer rather than single layer graphene in such structures may provide much higher values of the tunnel spin polarization because of band structure derived spin filtering effects predicted for selected ferromagnetic metal/multi
-layer graphene structures. This increase would further improve the performance of nanowire spintronic devices by providing higher signal to noise ratios
and tested the results with advanced 3d printing technology. The new findings could serve as a basis for designing moveable components with especially natural mobile properties, for example for applications in robots.
Scientists at Harvard university in Cambridge, USA, manufactured the material with the help of a multimaterial 3d printer.
#Graphene flexes its electronic muscles Flexing graphene may be the most basic way to control its electrical properties, according to calculations by theoretical physicists at Rice university and in Russia.
and predictable in nanocones and should apply equally to other forms of graphene. The researchers discovered it may be possible to access
which the electronic properties of a sheet of graphene can be manipulated simply by twisting it a certain way.
The work will be of interest to those considering graphene elements in flexible touchscreens or memories that store bits by controlling electric dipole moments of carbon atoms
Perfect graphene an atom-thick sheet of carbon is a conductor, as its atomselectrical charges balance each other out across the plane.
But curvature in graphene compresses the electron clouds of the bonds on the concave side and stretches them on the convex side,
The researchers who published their results this month in the American Chemical Society Journal of Physical chemistry Letters discovered they could calculate the flexoelectric effect of graphene rolled into a cone of any size and length.
The researchers used density functional theory to compute dipole moments for individual atoms in a graphene lattice
and then figure out their cumulative effect They suggested their technique could be used to calculate the effect for graphene in other more complex shapes, like wrinkled sheets or distorted fullerenes,
several of which they also analyzed. hile the dipole moment is zero for flat graphene or cylindrical nanotubes,
Carbon nanotubes, seamless cylinders of graphene, do not display a total dipole moment, he said. While not zero, the vector-induced moments cancel each other out.
or from vehicle to vehicle if using LED headlights and taillights. Like current wireless communications, encryption is necessary to keep data secure
They can shed new light on the fundamental processes occurring in the nanoscale biological pores that funnel essential ingredients into cells. e also developed some key data processing methods
which will become essential to analyze the massive data generated by the volunteered computers. y simulating water molecules flowing through nanotubes we have shown how vibrations result in oscillating friction,
physicists have used graphene to build lightweight ultrasonic loudspeakers and microphones, enabling people to mimic bats
The diaphragms in the new devices are graphene sheets a mere one atom thick that have the right combination of stiffness
Graphene consists of carbon atoms laid out in a hexagonal, chicken-wire arrangement, which creates a tough,
or more years. here a lot of talk about using graphene in electronics and small nanoscale devices, but theye all a ways away, said Zettl,
because wee worked out how to make the graphene and mount it, and it easy to scale up. ettl,
UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Qin Zhou and colleagues describe their graphene microphone and ultrasonic radio in a paper appearing online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Zhou built loudspeakers using a sheet of graphene for the diaphragm, and since then has been developing the electronic circuitry to build a microphone with a similar graphene diaphragm.
An atom-thick layer of carbon atoms, called graphene (black mesh), provides the vibrating diaphragm for both an ultrasonic microphone and loudspeaker.
Image credit: UC Berkeleyone big advantage of graphene is that the atom-thick sheet is so lightweight that it responds immediately to an electronic pulse, unlike today piezoelectric microphones and speakers.
This comes in handy when using ultrasonic transmitters and receivers to transmit large amounts of information through many different frequency channels simultaneously,
Graphene membranes are also more efficient converting over 99 percent of the energy driving the device into sound,
The use of graphene allows the authors to obtain very flat frequency responses in a wide range of frequencies,
and will permit a detailed study of the auditory pulses that are used by bats. ettl noted that audiophiles would also appreciate the graphene loudspeakers and headphones,
this device would have been darn near impossible to build because of the difficulty of making freestanding graphene sheets,
Zettl said. ut over the past decade the graphene community has come together to develop techniques to grow,
transport and mount graphene, so building a device like this is now very straightforward; the design is simple. ource:
Writing this week (July 6, 2015) in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular biology, a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Laura Kiessling describes the knack of a human protein known as intelectin to distinguish between our cells
In addition to Kiessling lab, groups in the labs of UW-Madison bacteriology Professor Katrina Forest, Scripps Research Institute cell and molecular biology Professor James Paulson,
said Capasso. ur understanding of optics on the macroscale has led to holograms, Google glass and LEDS,
An Atomic Force Microscope measured the force required to accomplish each action. ne of the major hurdles in the area of bioelectronics
or biosensors, in bacteria that are placed then in the gut, this paper stands out from the crowd by first engineering a member of the Bacteroides genus,
and release it at the exact timing desired would be a boon for the field of renewable energy.
the SSE optical scheme can be used for augmented reality applications, when real and virtual objects are shown on the same screen simultaneously.
and will lead to a better understanding of quark formations created by nuclear forces, with possible implications in astrophysics.
whereby HIV exploits the regulatory process between BST2 and ILT7 to limit the body antiviral response,
crowdsourcing approach to neuroscience is a great way to understand normal and healthy brain circuitry. ource
The research marks a major development in our understanding of efficient hydrogen storage. It was led by Dr Valeska Ting from University Department of Chemical engineering in conjunction with researchers from Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and collaborators in the USA and Germany.
reater understanding of how the nanoscale structure of the storage material can influence gas storage capacities is expected to lead to more accurate evaluation methods for existing porous hydrogen storage materials.
This, in turn, should have an impact on the design and evaluation of new hydrogen storage materials for future automotive applications.
#Graphene-Based Biosensor Could Detect Cancer within Minutes One of the main reasons why treating most cancers is such a difficult task is our inability to detect its presence before it becomes widespread.
The new, graphene-based immunosensor could soon lead to a quantum leap in cancer diagnosis. Image credit:
researchers at Trinity college Dublin are currently developing a highly-efficient biosensor that could pick up even the slightest presence of cancer within the body in mere minutes.
The prototype device, called Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) immunosensor, is a small strip of material based on advanced optical technology,
it took graphene to also make it sensitive to cancer. e showed experimentally that simply the addition of graphene led to a clear increase in the sensor signal, aid Dr. Georg Duesberg,
as well as capacitors whose energy storage capacity increases about tenfold when the fibers are stretched. Fibers and cables derived from the invention might one day be used as interconnects for super-elastic electronic circuits;
The new work was done under the auspices of the Innovative Genomics Initiative (IGI), a joint UC Berkeley-UCSF program co-directed by Berkeley Jennifer Doudna, Phd,
Doudna, professor of chemistry and of cell and molecular biology at Berkeley, and an HHMI investigator,
An international group of clinicians and scientists from different universities and research institutions, among them the Berlin-based Max Planck Institute for Molecular genetics (Department of Vertebrate Genomics, Hans Lehrach, group
3-D People in Your Living room Demonstrations of augmented reality displays typically involve tricking you into seeing animated content such as monsters
Hololens uses a novel holographic display technology that can trick the eye into perceiving 3-D objects more effectively than conventional stereoscopic displays (see icrosoft Making Fast Progress with Hololens.
is developing its own wearable augmented reality device based on display technology that similar to Microsoft (see 0 Breakthrough Technologies 2015:
and plans to ship out the first Ampy gadgets in the fall to crowdfunding backers and people who preorder it online.
they were determined to craft a technology that relied on solar power noble attempt that ultimately failed because solar power,
Eventually they settled on a thermal energy storage system that uses a phase-change material to store energy in the form of ice.
and the battery circulates that thermal energy into a heat exchanger to keep milk chilled over the course of the day.
#Google App Puts Neural networks on Your Phone to Translate Signs Offline In recent years Google has used networks of crudely simulated neurons running in its data centers to improve its speech recognition,
and there always a decent chance that the payload will be lost to an accident. Fiber-optic cables, in contrast, are easy and cheap to install
who works on autonomous car technology. t the first such computer that seems really designed for a carn autopilot computer.
A year ago, the company announced at CES that it had developed a compact computer for processing sensor information (see udi Shows Off a Compact Brain for Self-driving cars.
Consequently, materials scientists have been falling over themselves to discover the extraordinary properties of graphene, boron nitride, molybdenum disulphide, and so on.
The big advantage of black phosphorus over graphene is that it has a natural bandgap that physicists can exploit to make electronic devices
What more, black phosphorus is better at this even than graphene. Finally, they measured the current through the nanosheets
All this could mark an interesting step change in research associated with black phosphorus. Many people will have seen the excitement associated with the remarkable properties of graphene.
and can be used for new types of quantum computing.""He added:""The physics of the Weyl fermion are so strange,
said Madan Babu of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular biology in the UK, who was involved not in the work. f you can replace some of the subunits of the DNA repair machinery,
a single virtual image would appear below the sample. But because they work as separate microlenses,
Graphene nanoribbons which can be used to boost a materialselectronic properties and strength hold promise for a number of applications.
prove that it is possible to create an artificial skin that could blend in with backgrounds or flash display signals to attract search
and divert predators. ur ultimate goal is to create artificial skin that can mimic fast acting active camouflage
The term High-Z refers to all the metals in the alloy having a large number of protons in their atomic nuclei;
Rabiei believes that the foams could be particularly useful in making vessels to transport nuclear waste,
The scheme aims to push renewable energy in the UK towards 15%of total energy by 2020.
Tesla wall-mounted Powerwall batteries are designed to store up to 10kw hours of wind or solar energy;
Eco-entrepreneur Dale Vince, chair of the renewable energy firm Ecotricity, said the home battery market remained undeveloped until now
The missing link Energy storage has been described as the missing link of solar energy adoption. A report from Deutsche Bank this year said solar energy storage would be cheap enough to be deployed on a large scale within five years as a result of a yearly cost reduction of 20%to 30%in the price of lithium-ion
batteries s
#At the limit of Moore's law: scientists develop molecule-sized transistors Scientists have created a transistor made up of a single molecule.
The transistor represents a big step forward toward quantum computing, and was made possible using a scanning tunnelling electron microscope to place atoms in exact positions
this new research will help bring about quantum computing, widely considered to be the next stage in the evolution of computers.
Quantum computing explained: harnessing particle physics to work faste o
#HOLY SEA SNAILS! Their TEETH are strong enough to build a plane Forget the Killer Rabbit from Monty python,
but POWERFUL LASER suitable for very SMALL sharks Shrinking the scale of semiconductor materials to help build powerful quantum computing systems has proved to be a real head-scratcher for scientists.
which is entanglement between quantum bits in semiconductor-based devices, "enthused the Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland-National Institute of Standards and Technology's adjunct assistant prof Jacob Taylor,
Boffins undertook the study to create a better understanding of how to use double quantum dots (two quantum dots joined together) as the basic units of information, known as qubits, in quantum computers.
Princeton university provides further details about the study's promising outlook for quantum computing here. The paper, Semiconductor double quantum dot micromaser, was published in the Science journal yesterday d
#Graphene sheaths could boost processor signal speeds by 30 per cent Scientists at Stanford have found a new use for graphene that will significantly increase the speed of standard computer processors.
instead used an atom-thick layer of graphene to sheath the copper, and found that could boost the data transfer speeds of the wires:
the graphene-coated interconnects, depending on their length, can reliably transfer data between four and 17 per cent faster than the equivalent interconnects in today's processor designs, apparently."
"Graphene has been promised to benefit the electronics industry for a long time, and using it as a copper barrier is perhaps the first realization of this promise."
"The advantages of using graphene in this way are twofold. Firstly, from an engineering standpoint, graphene is a much more efficient material,
taking up a ninth of the space of tantalum nitride coatings. But the biggest advantage is that the graphene actually acts both as an insulator,
but also a conductor. The team found that electrons would travel through the graphene as well as through the copper wire,
and it was there that the speed benefits really kicked in. The team, which will present its findings at the Symposia of VLSI Technology And circuits in Kyoto,
if the graphene tech is shrunk down to next-generation process sizes. The research is interesting,
The team are now looking into how to grow the graphene directly onto copper wires,
Jeffrey Gao, president of the Huawei transmission network product line, said the network"is turning to data center centric,
"The Precision Medicine Initiative will leverage advances in genomics, emerging methods for managing and analyzing large data sets while protecting privacy,
and health information technology to accelerate biomedical discoveries.""The White house investment is split in four parts.
all of which will contain about 30 percent biofuel. The animal-based propellent is produced by California-based Altair Fuels.
Today, United will announce a $30 million investment in Fulcrum Bioenergy, one of the largest makers of aviation biofuels.
Globally, airlines have been looking at biofuel use for some time, but this marks the biggest ever investment in alternative fuels by a major commercial airline, reports The New york times. Eventually, United plans to integrate biofuels into its entire fleet.
Typical fossil fuels used in aviation are formed from the organic remains of dead plants and animals that have been buried deep within the Earth.
"From there, Facebook will walk users through password security options and show the computers logged into different Facebook services.
It's sort of hard to tell that they're even smart glasses point that seems to have been lost on Google glass.
#This was a big week for driverless, anti-alcohol, and parking space-sensing cars For fans of automated autos that don need drivers, don like alcohol,
Google has agreed to acknowledge accidents involving the testing of its driverless cars. The new transparency was announced at the end of the week
He has contended the driverless cars have never been at fault. The cause of the human driverserrors, the company has said,
and represents a major step in efforts to build quantum computing systems. I consider this to be a really important result for our long-term goal
which is entanglement between quantum bits in semiconductor-based devices. However, the researchers weren trying to build a mini-maser.
joining two dots together to form qubits. Qubits are the basic units of information in quantum computers.
Researchers stated that the goal was to get to double quantum dots to communicate with each other. They used extremely thin nanowires that were made of indium arsenide to fabricate the quantum dots.
The placed the qubits 6 mm apart in a cavity that was made from niobium at a temperature near absolute zero(-459 degrees Fahrenheit.
#Researchers Develop Rice-Sized Laser That Can Boost Quantum computing Researchers have developed a microwave laser or maser,
which will help the world to take a major step towards quantum computing. Princeton university researchers developed a laser the size of a grain of rice,
while investigating the use of semiconductor material fragments as components for quantum computing. The study was started to explore the quantum dots,
as components for quantum computers. The maser is a tiny, rice grain sized laser that is powered by a single electron from the artificial atoms called quantum dots.
The discovery will boost the ongoing efforts of scientists across the world to use semiconductor materials to build quantum computing systems. consider this to be a really important result for our long-term goal,
which is entanglement between quantum bits in semiconductor-based devices, said Jacob Taylor, an adjunct assistant professor at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland-National Institute of Standards and Technology.
That means two quantum dots joined together as quantum bits or qubits. Qubits are the basic unit of information in quantum computing. e designed dots to emit photons
when single electrons jump from a higher to a lower energy level across the double dot.
A single electron trapped in a semiconductor nanostructure can form the most basic of building blocks for a quantum computer.
before practical quantum computers can be realized, scientists need to develop a scalable architecture that allows full control over individual electrons in computational arrays.
#Nvidia's Tegra X1 Powers Smart cars At the Consumer electronics Show (CES) last week, Nvidia released demos of two computing platforms, Drive CX and Drive PX, for cars.
These computing platforms are part of the venture called Nvidia Drive and are powered by the Tegra X1 mobile chip.
Additionally, the famous graphics card manufacturer also released demos of two computing platforms, Drive CX and Drive PX, for cars.
and give a boost to the concept of driverless cars s
#Unprecedented Details on Precipitation Revealed by Satellites Techniques of monitoring all the precipitation throughout the globe within a short span of time were not effective previously.
the same approach could be used to power self-driving cars, personal assistants in smartphones or conduct scientific research in fields from climate change to cosmology.
#Scientists Invented Bionic Leaf to Convert Solar energy into Liquid fuel Aided by a new technique, a team of researchers has found a way of converting solar energy into liquid fuel.
Presently, photovoltaic cells are used to convert solar energy into hydrogen, which is stored then in fuel cells for future use.
Researcher Pamela Silver stated his is a proof of concept that you can have a way of harvesting solar energy and storing it in the form of a liquid fuel.
that delivers payloads to precise waypoints. The word that should have sparked your attention, of course, is ayloads.
each of them armed with a small micro-payload of death. Enemy radars won be able to pick them up
Remember when the future of warfare was bigger bigger missile payloads, bigger tanks and bigger warplanes?
Xinhua Wu, from the Monash Centre for Additive manufacturing, said creating the engines was a painstaking process."
After three decades of relative obscurity, 3d printing is becoming a much talked-about area of technology.
Computer giant Hewlett-packard has announced that it will put an ultra-fast 3d printer on the market by 2016.
generating 170,000-megawatt hours of solar power annually that will be pumped into the electrical grids that power AWS cloud datacenters in the eastern and central US.
The Virginia solar farm is part of AWS'larger goal to power its global infrastructure footprint with 100 percent renewable energy.
But even with its grand energy commitments, AWS is criticized still highly--mostly by the environmental organization Greenpeace--for its lack of transparency surrounding energy consumption and the way it sources renewable energy.
Amazon has committed not publically to a renewable energy deadline. AWS does say it expects to run its infrastructure on 40 percent renewable power for by the end of 2016.
So far approximately 25 percent of the power consumed within its global datacenters comes from renewable energy sources, according to a recent blog post by AWS cloud chief Jeff Barr.
"and accuses the cloud provider for having taken"few or no steps to switch to renewables".
for a total reduction in carbon emissions of 88 percent from using the AWS Cloud instead of operating their own data centers
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