The researchers have dubbed the system easurable virtual reality (MVR) a spin on conventional virtual reality that designed to visualize a robot erceptions and understanding of the world
Agha-mohammadi says the system may help speed up the development of self-driving cars, package-delivering drones,
The new method produces the combination of desired properties in as small a package as possible Bawendi says which could help pave the way for particles with other useful properties such as the ability to bind with a specific type of bioreceptor or another
#New approach to boosting biofuel production Yeast are used commonly to transform corn and other plant materials into biofuels such as ethanol.
Toxicity is probably the single most important problem in cost-effective biofuels production says Gregory Stephanopoulos the Willard Henry Dow Professor of Chemical engineering at MIT.
They report the findings which they believe could have a significant impact on industrial biofuel production in today s issue of the journal Science.
What s also exciting to us is that this could apply beyond ethanol to more advanced biofuel alcohols that upset cell membranes in the same way Lam says.
what would be found in an industrial biofuel fermenter. If you really want to be relevant you ve got to go to these levels.
#How to make a perfect solar absorber The key to creating a material that would be ideal for converting solar energy to heat is tuning the material s spectrum of absorption just right:
When harnessing solar energy you want to trap it and keep it there Chou says; getting just the right spectrum of both absorption and emission is essential to efficient STPV performance.
Most of the sun s energy reaches us within a specific band of wavelengths Chou explains ranging from the ultraviolet through visible light and into the near-infrared.
which would add greatly to the complexity and expense of a solar power system. This is the first device that is able to do all these things at the same time Chou says.
and materials science to advance solar energy harvesting says Paul Braun a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was involved not in this research.
The work was supported by the Solid-state Solar Thermal energy Conversion Center and the U s. Department of energy y
Originally designed to look for cracks in nuclear reactors water tanks the robot could also inspect ships for the false hulls
and customize unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) for multiple applications. Today, hundreds of companies worldwide are making drones for infrastructure inspection, crop-and livestock-monitoring,
Unfortunately the traveling-salesman problem is also an example indeed perhaps the most famous example of an NP-complete problem meaning that even for moderate-sized data sets it can t (as far as anyone knows) be solved in a reasonable amount of time.
and is exploring powering the device on solar energy an important consideration for poor rural areas. The research was funded by the Singapore National Research Foundation through SMART T
or a complex mechanical part. nd this creates a big data footprint for each one of these components,
and provide a solution for future renewable energy. The work, which also included research scientist Jifa Qi, graduate student Matthew Klug and postdoc Xiangnan Dang, was supported by Italian energy company Eni through the MIT Energy Initiative y
In this study researchers tested the nanoparticle-delivery system with different payloads of therapeutic RNA. They found that delivery of mir-34a a p53-regulated mirna slowed tumor growth as did delivery of sikras a KRAS-targeting sirna.
CRISPR a gene-editing system devised within the past several years exploits a set of bacterial proteins that protect microbes from viral infection.
#Light pulses control graphene s electrical behavior Graphene, an ultrathin form of carbon with exceptional electrical optical and mechanical properties, has become a focus of research on a variety of potential uses.
The researchers found that by controlling the concentration of electrons in a graphene sheet they could change the way the material responds to a short but intense light pulse.
If the graphene sheet starts out with low electron concentration the pulse increases the material s electrical conductivity.
But if the graphene starts out with high electron concentration the pulse decreases its conductivity the same way that a metal usually behaves.
Therefore by modulating graphene's electron concentration the researchers found that they could effectively alter graphene's photoconductive properties from semiconductorlike to metallike.
The finding also explains the photoresponse of graphene reported previously by different research groups which studied graphene samples with differing concentration of electrons.
We were able to tune the number of electrons in graphene and get either response,
To perform this study the team deposited graphene on top of an insulating layer with a thin metallic film beneath it;
by applying a voltage between graphene and the bottom electrode the electron concentration of graphene could be tuned.
The researchers then illuminated graphene with a strong light pulse and measured the change of electrical conduction by assessing the transmission of a second low-frequency light pulse.
In this case the laser performs dual functions. We use two different light pulses: one to modify the material and one to measure the electrical conduction.
This all-optical method avoids the need for adding extra electrical contacts to the graphene. Gedik the Lawrence C. and Sarah W. Biedenharn Associate professor of Physics says the measurement method that Frenzel implemented is a cool technique.
and reveal graphene's electrical response in only a trillionth of a second. In a surprising finding the team discovered that part of the conductivity reduction at high electron concentration stems from a unique characteristic of graphene:
its electrons travel at a constant speed similar to photons which causes the conductivity to decrease when the electron temperature increases under the illumination of the laser pulse.
Our experiment reveals that the cause of photoconductivity in graphene is very different from that in a normal metal or semiconductors,
therefore require increasing absorption efficiency such as by using multiple layers of graphene, Gedik says. Isabella Gierz a professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg Germany who was involved not in this research says:"
The research team also included Jing Kong the ITT Career development Associate professor of Electrical engineering at MIT who provided the graphene samples used for the experiments;
The difficulty with this approach is that simulating a single pixel in the virtual image requires multiple pixels of the physical display.
Among their first prototypes was a Google glass-type invention with a camera that could read facial expressions
in the last five years however understanding has accelerated dramatically driven by advances in human genomics.
Human genomics has begun to reveal the causes of these disorders. We still have a long way to go
But in the last few years we ve turned this featureless landscape into something we can exploit.
The new material is able to convert 85 percent of incoming solar energy into steam a significant improvement over recent approaches to solar-powered steam generation.
if you can generate steam with solar energy, it would be very useful. Ghasemi and mechanical engineering department head Gang Chen,
But initiating this reaction requires very intense solar energy about 1, 000 times that of an average sunny day.
and retain solar energy. The structure bottom layer is a carbon foam that contains pockets of air to keep the foam afloat
They found they were able to convert 85 percent of solar energy into steam at a solar intensity 10 times that of a typical sunny day.
The research which also included MIT graduate student Daniel Preston and former postdoc Ryan Enright now at Lucent Ireland Ltd. was supported by MIT s Solid-state Solar-Thermal energy Conversion Center
This is where we re Going with an expected rise of wireless charging one promising future application Soljacic sees is in medical devices especially implanted ventricular assist devices (or heart pumps) that support blood flow.
At the same time a host of recent studies have demonstrated that it s shockingly easy to identify unnamed individuals in supposedly anonymized data sets even ones containing millions of records.
Any cellphone app online service or big data research team that wants to use your data has to query your data store
I don t see another way of making big data compatible with constitutional rights and human rights s
DIG s role is to develop new technologies that exploit those protocols. With HTTPA each item of private data would be assigned its own uniform resource identifier (URI) a key component of the Semantic web a new set of technologies championed by W3c that would convert the Web from essentially a collection of searchable
Data on HVAC systems have been connected through building automation for some time. KGS however, can connect that data to cloud-based analytics and extract eally rich informationabout equipment,
Now theye designed a projector that exploits the same technology, which theyl unveil at this year Siggraph, the major conference in computer graphics.
It s really about expanding wind energy to all those places on the fringes where it doesn t really work today
Because the BAT is advanced an aerostat platform Glass says customers can use it to lift additional payloads such as weather monitoring and surveillance equipment.
But perhaps the most logical added payload Glass says is Wi-fi technology: If you have a remote village for instance he says you can put a Wi-fi unit up outside the village
That s the phenomenon that the new system exploits. Think about a range around you like five feet says Gregory Wornell the Sumitomo Electric Industries Professor in Engineering in MIT s Department of Electrical engineering
Finding your place The researcherssystem exploits two existing computational tools. One is the computer algebra system Macsyma,
the DOE Energy efficiency and Renewable energy Clean energy Prize, worth $100, 000, and the NSTAR MIT Clean energy Prize, worth $125, 000.
One finalist team was selected in each of three categories renewable energy (Thermovolt), energy efficiency (MF Fire), and infrastructure and resources (ulink) with each receiving $25, 000.
But these bulky oxesrely on costly energy storage components such as capacitors and inductors. Failing to account for the strength or weakness of each individual PV cell,
specifically iffusion capacitancesunwanted electrical charges between two components Chang was able to eliminate the need for external energy storage
but we found a way to leverage them. o one has thought ever of using the solar cell as an energy storage itself,
Winning in renewable energy (and also an Audience Choice Award) was Thermovolt which turns solar cells into cogeneration systems.
along with carbon dioxide to produce biogas at a rate of up to 100 cubic feet per minute.
improves biogas quality, and enables a higher degree of automation. The biogas enters a connected cogeneration system for power conversion.
Depending on several site factors, this produces anywhere from 30 to 400 kilowatts of electricity. Treated wastewater exits the reactor with 80 to 90 percent of pollutants removed,
Osteoarthritis humanoid design and personal bionics Biom s broader goal is to prevent costly conditions such as osteoarthritis. As we age the loss of fast muscle fibers
But ultimately the work of both Biom and Herr s group at MIT he says aims to help revolutionize the idea of personal bionics blurring the lines between electromechanics and the human body.
#A molecular approach to solar power It an obvious truism, but one that may soon be outdated:
The problem with solar power is that sometimes the sun doesn shine. Now a team at MIT and Harvard university has come up with an ingenious workaround a material that can absorb the sun heat
or powering heat-based industrial processes this could provide an opportunity for the expansion of solar power into new realms. t could change the game,
While previous modeling showed that the packing of azobenzenes on the same CNT would provide only a 30 percent increase in energy storage,
not electricity, might be desired the outcome of solar power. For example, in large parts of the world the primary cooking fuel is wood or dung
He adds that the resulting increase in energy storage density s surprising and remarkable. his result provides additional motivation for researchers to design more
and better photochromic compounds and composite materials that optimize the storage of solar energy in chemical bonds, Kanai says.
and especially in solar thermophotovoltaicsharnessing solar energy by using it to heat a material, which in turn radiates light of a particular color.
which could be useful for converting agricultural waste to biofuels. Other potential applications include diagnostic devices and scaffolds for tissue engineering.
In a new Nature Materials paper, the researchers report boosting plantsability to capture light energy by 30 percent by embedding carbon nanotubes in the chloroplast,
as well as serve as plant-based biosensors and stress reducers. By adapting the sensors to different targets,
They are also working on incorporating electronic nanomaterials, such as graphene, into plants. ight now, almost no one is working in this emerging field,
The researchersdesign exploits the mechanism of a different type of medical device known as a middle-ear implant.
Among other things, she is now studying the financing of small-scale distributed solar power in areas of Kenya without either a formal grid or established banking systems;
hoists for workers at dams, buildings, bridges, and massive wind turbines; as well as for first responders. here a broad spectrum of users people who use rope access as part of their work for
Doug Arent, a research scientist at the National Renewable energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. who was involved not in this work,
and in autonomous vehicle control among other applications gauge depth by emitting short bursts of laser light
which are at a premium in autonomous vehicles trying to avoid collisions. The system can also use the same reflected photons to produce images of a quality that a conventional imaging system would require 900 times as much light to match
What our study really says is that these drugs could have an entirely new second life in combination with chemotherapy says Yaffe who is a member of MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
Inside each M-Block is a flywheel that can reach speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute; when the flywheel is braked,
it imparts its angular momentum to the cube. On each edge of an M-Block, and on every face, are arranged cleverly permanent magnets that allow any two cubes to attach to each other. t one of these things that the modular-robotics community has been trying to do for a long time,
The new findings using a layer of one-atom-thick graphene deposited on top of a similar 2-D layer of a material called hexagonal boron nitride (hbn) are published in the journal Nano Letters.
The hybrid material blocks light when a particular voltage is applied to the graphene, while allowing a special kind of emission and propagation,
Light interaction with graphene produces particles called plasmons while light interacting with hbn produces phonons.
The properties of the graphene allow precise control over light, while hbn provides very strong confinement and guidance of the light.
says, his work represents significant progress on understanding tunable interactions of light in graphene-hbn.
The work is retty criticalfor providing the understanding needed to develop optoelectronic or photonic devices based on graphene and hbn,
There are several advantages of 3d printed devices over 40-year-old real devices that have been rendered inert.
at very limited input power levels 10 nanowatts to 1 microwatt for the Internet of things. The prototype chip was manufactured through the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's University Shuttle Program.
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
The work was supported by the U s. Department of energy Center for Energy storage Research, based at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois n
and wires in a 3d printed shell that was nowhere near throwable, Aguilar says through about 20 further iterations.
sees this hormone-releasing microchip as one of the first implantable rtificial organsecause it acts as a gland. lot of the therapies are trying to chemically trick the endocrine systems Cima says. e are doing that with this artificial organ we created. ild ideasinspiration for the microchips came in the late 1990s,
Among nanomaterials, carbon-based nanoparticles such as carbon nanotubes and graphene have shown promising results, but they suffer from relatively low electrical conductivity,
and flywheels tend to be less efficient, or simply too complex to be reduced practical when to very small sizes. e are in a sweet spot,
and future wearable technologies, says Geoff Spinks, a professor of engineering at the University of Wollongong, in Australia,
Now MIT spinout Cambridge Electronics Inc. CEI) has announced a line of Gan transistors and power electronic circuits that promise to cut energy usage in data centers, electric cars,
CEI is using its transistors to enable power electronics that will make data centers less energy-intensive
is better power electronics for data centers run by Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other companies, to power the cloud.
Currently, these data centers eat up about 2 percent of electricity in the United states. But Gan-based power electronics
Doggie Wearables Monitoring Shoppers and Catching TV While You Doze off In the past two years there been a boom in talk around the Internet of things and Wearables.
Mark Waugh) Two teenagers from Manchester have developed a 3d printed wristband with embedded sensors that can detect
#Researchers use oxides to flip graphene conductivity Graphene a one-atom thick lattice of carbon atoms is touted often as a revolutionary material that will take the place of silicon at the heart of electronics.
By demonstrating a new way to change the amount of electrons that reside in a given region within a piece of graphene they have a proof-of-principle in making the fundamental building blocks of semiconductor devices using the 2-D material.
Moreover their method enables this value to be tuned through the application of an electric field meaning graphene circuit elements made in this way could one day be rewired dynamically without physically altering the device.
Chemically doping graphene to achieve p -and n-type version of the material is possible but it means sacrificing some of its unique electrical properties.
but manufacturing and placing the necessary electrodes negates the advantages graphene's form factor provides.
We've come up with a non-destructive reversible way of doping Rappe said that doesn't involve any physical changes to the graphene.
The team's technique involves depositing a layer of graphene so it rests on but doesn't bond to a second material:
Here we have graphene standing by on the surface of the oxide but not binding to it.
or gaining electrons the graphene says'I can hold the electrons for you and they'll be right nearby.'
Because the lithium niobate domains can dictate the properties Shim said different regions of graphene can take on different character depending on the nature of the domain underneath.
That allows as we have demonstrated a simple means of creating a p-n junction or even an array of p-n junctions on a single flake of graphene.
Such an ability should facilitate advances in graphene that might be analogous to what p-n junctions and complementary circuitry has done for the current state-of-the-art semiconductor electronics.
What's even more exciting are the enabling of optoelectronics using graphene and the possibility of waveguiding lensing and periodically manipulating electrons confined in an atomically thin material.
and the charge carrier density of the graphene suspended over it. And because the oxide polarization can be altered easily the type
and extent of supported graphene doping can be altered along with it. You could come along with a tip that produces a certain electric field
and the graphene's charge density would reflect that change. You could make the graphene over that region p-type
or n-type and if you change your mind you can erase it and start again.
Researchers make magnetic graphene More information: Nature Communications dx. doi. org/10.1038/ncomms713 3
#Researchers make magnetic graphene Graphene a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice has many desirable properties.
Magnetism alas is not one of them. Magnetism can be induced in graphene by doping it with magnetic impurities
but this doping tends to disrupt graphene's electronic properties. Now a team of physicists at the University of California Riverside has found an ingenious way to induce magnetism in graphene while also preserving graphene's electronic properties.
They have accomplished this by bringing a graphene sheet very close to a magnetic insulator-an electrical insulator with magnetic properties.
This is the first time that graphene has been made magnetic this way said Jing Shi a professor of physics
and astronomy whose lab led the research. The magnetic graphene acquires new electronic properties so that new quantum phenomena can arise.
These properties can lead to new electronic devices that are more robust and multifunctional. The finding has the potential to increase graphene's use in computers as in computer chips that use electronic spin to store data.
Study results appeared online earlier this month in Physical Review Letters. The magnetic insulator Shi and his team used was yttrium iron garnet grown by laser molecular beam epitaxy in his lab. The researchers placed a single-layer graphene sheet on an atomically smooth layer of yttrium iron garnet.
They found that yttrium iron garnet magnetized the graphene sheet. In other words graphene simply borrows the magnetic properties from yttrium iron garnet.
Magnetic substances like iron tend to interfere with graphene's electrical conduction. The researchers avoided those substances
and chose yttrium iron garnet because they knew it worked as an electric insulator which meant that it would not disrupt graphene's electrical transport properties.
By not doping the graphene sheet but simply placing it on the layer of yttrium iron garnet they ensured that graphene's excellent electrical transport properties remained unchanged.
In their experiments Shi and his team exposed the graphene to an external magnetic field. They found that graphene's Hall voltage-a voltage in the perpendicular direction to the current flow-depended linearly on the magnetization of yttrium iron garnet (a phenomenon known as the anomalous Hall effect seen in magnetic materials like iron and cobalt.
This confirmed that their graphene sheet had turned magnetic. Explore further: Researchers find magnetic state of atoms on graphene sheet impacted by substrate it's grown on More information:
Physical Review Letters journals. aps. org/prl/abstract/#ysrevlett. 114.01660 6
#The latest fashion: Graphene edges can be tailor-made Theoretical physicists at Rice university are living on the edge as they study the astounding properties of graphene.
In a new study, they figure out how researchers can fracture graphene nanoribbons to get the edges they need for applications.
New research by Rice physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues shows it should be possible to control the edge properties of graphene nanoribbons by controlling the conditions under
which the nanoribbons are pulled apart. The way atoms line up along the edge of a ribbon of graphenehe atom-thick form of carbonontrols
whether it's metallic or semiconducting. Current passes through metallic graphene unhindered but semiconductors allow a measure of control over those electrons.
Since modern electronics are all about control, semiconducting graphene (and semiconducting two-dimensional materials in general) are of great interest to scientists
and industry working to shrink electronics for applications. In the work, which appeared this month in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Nanoscale,
the Rice team used sophisticated computer modeling to show it's possible to rip nanoribbons
and get graphene with either pristine zigzag edges or what are called reconstructed zigzags. Perfect graphene looks like chicken wire,
with each six-atom unit forming a hexagon. The edges of pristine zigzags look like this://Turning the hexagons 30 degrees makes the edges"armchairs"
with flat tops and bottoms held together by the diagonals. The electronic properties of the edges are known to vary from metallic to semiconducting,
depending on the ribbon's width.""Reconstructed"refers to the process by which atoms in graphene are enticed to shift around to form connected rings of five and seven atoms.
The Rice calculations determined reconstructed zigzags are the most stable, a desirable quality for manufacturers.
All that is great, but one still has to know how to make them.""Making graphene-based nano devices by mechanical fracture sounds attractive,
but it wouldn't make sense until we know how to get the right types of edgesnd now we do said
Their study revealed that heating graphene to 1, 000 kelvins and applying a low but steady force along one axis will crack it in such a way that fully reconstructed 5-7 rings will form
fracturing graphene with low heat and high force is more likely to lead to pristine zigzags z
which are candidates for low-cost next generation solar power. The researchers have used the technique to determine that materials with a highly organized structure at the nanoscale are not more efficient at creating free electrons than poorly organized structures#a finding
Princeton team explores 3d printed quantum dot LEDS More information: High-resolution Patterns of Quantum dots Formed by Electrohydrodynamic Jet Printing for Light-emitting diodes Nano Lett.
#A new step towards using graphene in electronic applications A team of the University of Berkeley
and the Centre for Materials Physics (CSIC-UPV/EHU) has managed with atomic precision to create nanostructures combining graphene ribbons of varying widths.
or have raised so many hopes with a view to their potential deployment in new applications as graphene has.
That is why ribbons or rows of graphene with nanometric widths are emerging as tremendously interesting electronic components.
and give rise to perfectly specified graphene nanoribbons by means of a highly reproducible process and without any other external mediation than heating to the required temperature.
) centre extended this very concept to new molecules that were forming wider graphene nanoribbons and therefore with new electronic properties This same group has managed now to go a step further by creating through this self-assembly heterostructures that blend segments of graphene nanoribbons of two different widths.
The forming of heterostructures with different materials has been a concept widely used in electronic engineering and has enabled huge advances to be made in conventional electronics.
We have managed now for the first time to form heterostructures of graphene nanoribbons modulating their width on a molecular level with atomic precision.
therefore constitutes a significant success towards the desired deployment of graphene in commercial electronic applications.
Bandgap Engineering of Bottom-up Synthesized Graphene nanoribbons by Controlled Heterojunctions. Y.-C. Chen T. Cao C. Chen Z. Pedramrazi D. Haberer D. G. de Oteyza F. Fischer S. Loiue M
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