the study is the first time low temperature plasmas (LTPS) have been applied on cells grown directly from patient tissue samples.
It is the result of a unique collaboration between the York Plasma Institute in the Department of physics and the Cancer Research Unit (CRU) in York Department of biology.
Low temperature plasmas are formed by applying a high electric field across a gas using an electrode, which breaks down the gas to form plasma.
This creates a complex, unique reactive environment containing high concentrations of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS).
when transferred through plasma to a target source, is a key mediator of oxidative damage and cell death in biological systems.
a Phd student at the York Plasma Institute who has been working with Dr Fiona Frame on the project,
monitoring the precision of plasma application. If all subsequent trials are successful, LTP could be used to treat cancer patients within 10-15 years 1
whether in a communications tower or a mobile phone, is to launch energy into free space in the form of electromagnetic or radio waves,
and to collect energy from free space to feed into the device. One of the biggest problems in modern electronics,
"Another challenge with aerials is that certain physical variables associated with radiation of energy are understood not well.
"Working with researchers from the National Physical Laboratory and Cambridge-based dielectric antenna company Antenova Ltd, the Cambridge team used thin films of piezoelectric materials, a type of insulator
"If you want to use these materials to transmit energy, you have to break the symmetry as well as have accelerating electrons--this is the missing piece of the puzzle of electromagnetic theory,
Piezoelectric materials can be made in thin film forms using materials such as lithium niobate, gallium nitride and gallium arsenide.
energy and resources to follow their dreams.""Rasmussen credits PPPL with providing help and support during critical points in her project."
Initially working with Lew Meixler on a federal Cooperative Research and development Agreement in the Plasma Surface Laboratory, she solved the problem by treating the metal (steel or titanium) with a plasma.
#Hyper-stretchable elastic-composite energy harvester Scientists have developed a hyper-stretchable elastic-composite energy harvesting device called a nanogenerator.
and Technology (KAIST) has developed a hyper-stretchable elastic-composite energy harvesting device called a nanogenerator. Flexible electronics have come into the market
researchers have not developed ultra-stretchable and fully-reversible energy conversion devices properly. Recently researchers from KAIST and Seoul National University (SNU) have collaborated
These noteworthy results were achieved by the non-destructive stress-relaxation ability of the unique electrodes as well as the good piezoelectricity of the device components.
The new SEG can be applied to a wide-variety of wearable energy harvesters to transduce biomechanical-stretching energy from the body (or machines) to electrical energy.
#Scientists create invisible objects in the microwave range without metamaterial cloaking Physicists from ITMO University,
Contrary to the now prevailing notion of invisibility that relies on metamaterial coatings, the scientists achieved the result using a homogenous object without any additional coating layers.
or can be developed at will,"said Mikhail Rybin, first author of the paper and senior researcher at the Metamaterials Laboratory in ITMO University.
The subject of invisibility came into prominence with the development of metamaterials--artificially designed structures with optical properties that are encountered not elsewhere in nature.
Metamaterials are capable of changing the direction of light in exotic ways, including making light curve around the cloaked object.
Nevertheless, coating layers based on metamaterials are extremely hard to fabricate and are not compatible with many other invisibility ideas.
"The device the team has developed--called the D3 (digital diffraction diagnosis) system--features an imaging module with a battery-powered LED light clipped onto a standard smartphone that records high-resolution imaging data with its camera.
When connected to an electrical power source, and wrapped over a multilayer polymer composite, the heated film stimulates the polymer to solidify.
--while using only 1 percent of the energy. The new"out-of-oven"approach may offer a more direct
energy saving method for manufacturing virtually any industrial composite, says Brian L. Wardle, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT."
The team measured the energy required to solidify or cross-link, the polymer and carbon fiber layers, finding that the CNT film used one-hundredth the electricity required for traditional oven-based methods to cure the composite.
Both methods generated composites with similar properties, such as cross-linking density. Wardle says the results pushed the group to test the CNT film further:
#Graphene pushes the speed limit of light-to-electricity conversion ICFO researchers Klaas-Jan Tielrooij, Lukasz Piatkowski,
The new device that the researchers developed is capable of converting light into electricity in less than 50 femtoseconds (a twentieth of a millionth of a millionth of a second.
Thus, the energy absorbed from light is efficiently and rapidly converted into electron heat. Next, the electron heat is converted into a voltage at the interface of two graphene regions with different doping.
which plants use the energy in sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. However
and the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute (Kavli-ENSI) at Berkeley, is one of three corresponding authors of a paper describing this research in the journal Nano Letters.
Yet fossil fuels, especially coal, will remain a significant source of energy to meet human needs for the foreseeable future.
and combined with water for the synthesis of molecular products that form biomass, "says Chris Chang, an expert in catalysts for carbon-neutral energy conversions."
"In our system, nanowires harvest solar energy and deliver electrons to bacteria, where carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of a variety of targeted, value-added chemical products."
"Our findings indicate that a subset of genes involved with elevated plasma lipid levels and inflammation may also increase the risk for developing AD.
Elevated levels of plasma lipids and inflammation can be modified with treatment, which means it could be possible to identify
This is based on the ability of the protein LEM to regulate specific energy circuits, and particularly mitochondrial respiration, in a subset of white blood cells known as cytotoxic T cells.
which uses gravity to save energy. We observed that the residual water in the container was pumped to reactor tank,
where it received a dosing of the dissociating elements in predetermined amounts. In this phase solid, organic and inorganic matter as well as heavy metals are removed by precipitation and gravity;
and a sludge settles at the bottom of the reactor. The latter is removed and examined to determine
--and forms again precisely when energy is pumped into the structure. Dr. Jannic Wolf, chemist at the University of Konstanz, discovered through complex experiments that a particular diarylethene compound is an eligible candidate.
as they both will require very little energy. With the Helmholtz Research School NANONET, the conditions for investigating
#Efficient method of producing metallic nanoparticles VTT's aerosol technology reactor for nanoparticle production can generate a variety of pure metal particles, particles of various alloys and carbon-coated particles.
The reactor can efficiently produce hundreds of grammes or even kilogrammes of nanoparticles per day."
When developing the reactor, the aim was to achieve a production figure of 200-3, 000 grammes per day.
Plasma synthesis, which consumes large amounts of energy and involves significant material wastage, is used another generally method.
In the design of the reactor developed by VTT, the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the synthesis process were key criteria.
For this reason, synthesis is performed under air pressure at a comparatively low temperature. This means that the equipment can be built from materials commonly used in industry
and energy consumption is low. The process generates an extremely high particle concentration, enabling a high production speed but with low gas consumption.
VTT has demonstrated the practical functionality of its reactor by testing the production of various nanometals, metallic compounds and carbon-coated materials.
in the production of biofuels--have been produced in the reactor. Following synthesis, magnets used as catalysts can be gathered efficiently in
Nanoparticles have also been tested in the manufacture of magnetic inks and inks that conduct electricity in printed electronics.
VTT's researchers believe that the reactor has many applications in addition to those already mentioned. The silicon nanoparticles it produces may even enable lithium battery capacity to be boosted by a factor of 10.
Other possible applications all of which require further investigation, include high permeability polymers, nanomagnets for medical diagnostics applications, materials for the 3d printing of metal articles,
#Better battery imaging paves way for renewable energy future"Iron fluoride has the potential to triple the amount of energy a conventional lithium-ion battery can store,
"says Song Jin, a UW-Madison professor of chemistry and Wisconsin Energy Institute affiliate.""However, we have yet to tap its true potential."
There, they collected chemical maps from actual coin cell batteries filled with iron fluoride during battery cycling to determine how well they perform.
"In the past, we weren't able to truly understand what is happening to iron fluoride during battery reactions
because other battery components were getting in the way of getting a precise image, "says Li.
and discharge energy. Thus far, using iron fluoride in rechargeable lithium ion batteries has presented scientists with two challenges.
The first is that it doesn't recharge very well in its current form.""This would be like your smart phone only charging half as much the first time,
"Consumers would rather have a battery that charges consistently through hundreds of charges.""By examining iron fluoride transformation in batteries at the nanoscale,
Jin and Li's new X-ray imaging method pinpoints each individual reaction to understand why capacity decay may be occurring."
The second challenge is that iron fluoride battery materials don't discharge as much energy as they take in, reducing energy efficiency.
"If we can maximize the cycling performance and efficiency of these low-cost and abundant iron fluoride lithium ion battery materials,
we could advance large-scale renewable energy storage technologies for electric cars and microgrids, "he says. Jin also believes that the novel X-ray imaging technique will facilitate the studies of other technologically important solid-state transformations
and help to improve processes such as preparation of inorganic ceramics and thin-film solar cells. The experiments were performed with the help of Yu-chen Karen Chen-Wiegart, Feng Wang, Jun Wang and their co-workers at Beamline X8c
and supported by the U s. Department of energy Basic energy Sciences and a seed grant from the Wisconsin Energy Institute.
The synthesis of the battery materials in Jin's lab was supported by National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research h
#Innovation boosts Wi-fi bandwidth tenfold Researchers have invented a new technology that can increase the bandwidth of Wi-fi systems by 10 times,
The work will have implications for the search for new energy materials.""Hemley said d
#Metamaterials shine bright as new terahertz source Metamaterials allow design and use of light-matter interactions at a fundamental level.
An efficient terahertz emission from two-dimensional arrays of gold split-ring resonator metamaterials was discovered as a result of excitation by a near-infrared pulsed laser.
Terahertz waves are used in noninvasive imaging and sensing technology, in addition to information, communication, processing, and data storage technologies.
This discovery opens new ways to use metamaterials for these important applications. Broadband terahertz sources offer exciting possibilities to study fundamental physics principles
To solve these challenges consider metamaterials; materials that allow control of the properties of light-matter interactions at the fundamental level.
The building blocks of metamaterials, known as split-ring resonators, can be designed to exhibit strong electric and magnetic response to electromagnetic fields over a wide frequency range, from terahertz to infrared.
when a two-dimensional array of nanometer-sized gold metamaterial resonators is illuminated by a tunable near-infrared femtosecond laser,
with wavelengths matching the magnetic resonance of the metamaterial, a strong broadband of terahertz electromagnetic waves is emitted.
Further, these new metamaterials could allow integration of terahertz optoelectronics with high-speed telecommunications. DOE Office of Science, Basic energy Sciences (experiments.
Theory research was supported by the US Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.
They have exploited the underlying physics to reduce the necessary laser power for plasma generation. Researchers at the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics have shown that a laser-generated microplasma in air can be used as a source of broadband terahertz radiation.
Ph d. student and lead author Buccheri explains that they exploited the underlying physics to reduce the necessary laser power for plasma generation.
For this, a plasma is needed. Buccheri explains that spectroscopy works by looking at which frequencies are absorbed by certain materials.
"Until now, approaches to use a plasma as a broadband source of terahertz have used commonly an elongated plasma generated by combining together two laser beams of different frequencies, i e.,
The"one-color"approach uses single laser frequency to generate the plasma. Pioneered by Harald Hamster and colleagues in 1993,
it required even higher laser energies and therefore it was explored not further until this recent paper by Buccheri and Zhang.
if by creating a plasma with a laser in one of these"weirder"polarization states
"He adds that he was then able to exploit the physics to use lower laser energies than previously thought possible to generate broadband terahertz waves in air.
The trick was to replace elongated plasmas, with lengths ranging from few millimeters to several centimeters, with a microplasma, about the width of a human hair.
Although plasmon lasers have been demonstrated at different spectral ranges, from the ultraviolet to near-infrared, a systematic approach to manipulate the lasing emission wavelength in real time has not been possible.
The main limitation is that only solid gain materials have been used in previous work on plasmon nanolasers;
Odom's research team has found a way to integrate liquid gain materials with gold nanoparticle arrays to achieve nanoscale plasmon lasing that can be tuned dynamical, reversibly and in real time.
The research was supported by the U s. Department of energy's ARPA-E REACT program (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy-Rare earth Alternatives in Critical Technologies) which develops cost-effective alternatives to rare earths,
the naturally occurring minerals with unique magnetic properties that are used in electric vehicle (EV) motors, and wind generators.
so that an electromagnetic field can interact with them. This interaction is measured then, which gives vital information on the molecule's mass-to-charge ratio.
#Electrical power converter allows grid to easily accept power from renewable energy Doctoral student Joseph Carr developed the system with his adviser, Juan Balda, University Professor and head of the department of electrical engineering.
Innovations in this field are critical as the United states moves toward integration of renewable energy sources to the national power grid.
and their students are doing in the field of future energy systems.""The availability and use of renewable energy sources,
and their associated harvesting systems increase the need for new power converters that can efficiently convert diverse energy sources to work across modern electrical grid systems.
it produces stable electricity ready to be supplied to the electrical grid system. Carr received his doctorate from the university in 2011.
He now works for ABB, a power company in Raleigh, North carolina. Balda has been a professor at the university since 1989.
His main research interests are power electronics, electric power distribution systems, motor drives and electric power quality.
As associate director of the National Center for Reliable Electric power Transmission, a 7, 000-square-foot, $5-million power electronic test facility at the University of Arkansas
Balda is at the center of a critical corps of U of A researchers investigating solid-state solutions for the nation's electric power grid d
They placed a superconducting island in between the electromagnetic field and the oscillator to mediate the interaction."
Because of the increased radiation pressure coupling, the oscillator observes the electromagnetic field with the precision of a single photon.
The arrangements exhibit much lower potential energy and greater stability than a standard-setting configuration reported last year by a Nobel prize-winning team from Stanford university.
Differences in atomic arrangements can alter molecular energy and stability, with less potential energy making for a more stable molecule.
The team calculates that one of the arrangements may represent the most stable possible structure in a molecule with its composition."
and then we computed their energies to find the most stable ones.""Without those rules, it's like finding a needle in the Platte river.
plasma levels and higher levels of Id1 in myeloid peripheral blood cells. Targeting Id1 might provide a three-pronged therapeutic approach,
Humphreys and his team have spent six years building a specialized receiver, called GRID, to extract so-called carrier phase measurements from low-cost antennas.
GRID currently operates outside the phone, but it will eventually run on the phone's internal processor.
and absorb high-energy radiation. Also, in order to work properly at room temperature, the material should have a reasonably large band gap (the energy difference between the top of the valence band
and the bottom of the conduction band in semiconductors) and high resistivity to suppress thermally generated charge carriers for precisely detecting radiation-generated carriers.
or biocarbon that can be defined as a carbonaceous material obtained through thermal treatment of biomass at low temperatures and under inert atmosphere.
In order to detect HIV-1 in recently infected individuals the researchers developed an assay that can detect the presence of the virus in whole blood or plasma.
or plasma where they bind to the virus creating aggregates of antibody and viral lysate.
Previous simulations of restored vision have used a"scoreboard model,"a grid of dots similar to the scoreboard at a football game, in
This opens the door to a memory system that can be packed onto a microprocessor, a major step toward the goal of reducing energy dissipation in modern electronics."
A large portion of the energy used in computing is spent on transferring data from one type of memory to another.
Doing that quickly takes more energy and generates more heat. In past research Salahuddin and his colleagues found that directing electrical current through the rare metal tantalum creates polarity in magnets without an external magnetic field.
#'Yolks'and'shells'improve rechargeable batteries One big problem faced by electrodes in rechargeable batteries, as they go through repeated cycles of charging
degrading the battery's performance over time. Now a team of researchers at MIT and Tsinghua University in China has found a novel way around that problem:
and provide a dramatic boost in the battery's capacity and power. The new findings,
which use aluminum as the key material for the lithium-ion battery's negative electrode,
Most present lithium-ion batteries--the most widely used form of rechargeable batteries--use anodes made of graphite, a form of carbon.
Lithium metal, for example, can store about 10 times as much energy per gram, but is extremely dangerous,
Also, the liquid electrolyte in contact with aluminum will always decompose at the required charge/discharge voltages,
forming a skin called solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) layer, which would be ok if not for the repeated large volume expansion and shrinkage that cause SEI particles to shed.
As a result, previous attempts to develop an aluminum electrode for lithium-ion batteries had failed.
"Li says,"that separates the aluminum from the liquid electrolyte"between the battery's two electrodes.
and the aluminum inside is protected from direct contact with the electrolyte. The team didn't originally plan it that way,
says Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering, who has a joint appointment in MIT's Department of Materials science and engineering."
For applications that require a high power-and energy density battery, he says, "It's probably the best anode material available."
"Since screens consume large amounts of energy in devices like laptops, phones, and tablets, our approach could have a huge impact on energy consumption and battery life,
"she noted.""If you start with polarized light, then you double your optical efficiency, "See explained."
then the battery will last much longer because the display would only draw half as much power as conventional displays."
we're sending a lot more energy to that spot than the energy sent by the sun,
the mathematical framework developed by the team can compute energy-efficient codes that optimize the amount of energy that reaches the camera.
noting that a robot's sensors expend a relatively large amount of energy because they are always on."
But by creating the vapor with a strong jolt of electricity instead of heat, the researchers found they could ionize the gas into a plasma that glowed a soft blue light."
"This method is probably an easy and original way to make a plasma, "said Cedric Poulain, a physicist at The french Alternative energies and Atomic energy commission.
Poulain speculates that the deformability of a liquid drop would let the researchers rig up a device to move the plasma along a surface,
but he admits that such applications were far from his and his colleagues'minds when they first conceived the experiment.
At first, the researchers wanted to explore the limits of the analogy between the boiling phenomenon and water electrolysis,
because they study an event called"boiling crisis"in nuclear power plant steam generators. If the core of a nuclear reactor gets too hot,
Arrayin their lab, Poulain and his colleagues devised a setup to run electricity through conductive droplets and film the droplets'behavior at high speed..
which conducts electricity, above a metal plate and applied a voltage across the drop. When the drop touched the plate,
electricity began to flow, and the water in the hydrochloric acid solution started to break down into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
but further analysis revealed that the gaseous cushion was in fact mostly water vaporized by energy from the electric current.
what gives rise to the very high electric field necessary to generate a long-term and dense plasma with little energy.
Arraythe researchers next plan to analyze the composition of the plasma layer. They say it appears to be a superposition of two types of plasma that is not well understood.
They will also study the fast dynamics at the bottom of the drop just as the sparks begin to fly,
which should yield additional insights into the plasma. Although plasma dynamics may seem far removed from the problem of film boiling in nuclear reactors,
Poulain is happy about the path the curiosity-driven research has taken the team.""It's very exciting,
"he said of the team's foray into plasma levitation n
#Paving the way for a faster quantum computer Since its conception, quantum mechanics has defied our natural way of thinking,
which is both time-consuming and energy-intensive. Instead, his team came up with a process for ultra-fast boriding
a process that saves time, money and energy, and even alleviates environmental concerns. In three years, Erdemir and his team took an abstract concept
often for 10 hours or more--the ultra-fast method uses a battery-like design to channel reactive boron into metal surfaces.
Like a battery, the furnace relies on the attraction between positive and negative charges to get boron flowing swiftly toward its destination.
According to Erdemir, the heating process alone makes pack-boriding extremely energy-intensive. Ultra-fast boriding can do a better job
while using 80 to 90 percent less energy. And while the powder mix-based traditional boriding releases carbon dioxide and other hazardous emissions
is significant because it represents a new way of combining elemental materials to form the building blocks of energy storage technology--such as batteries, capacitors and supercapacitors,
"Due to their structure and electric charge, certain elements just don t'like'to be combined, "Anasori said.""It's like trying to stack magnets with the poles facing the same direction--you're not going to be very successful
was the first two-dimensional material to be touted for its potential energy storage capabilities. But, as it was made up of only one element, carbon,
The new MXENES have surfaces that can store more energy. An Elemental Impasse Four years later, the researchers have worked their way through the section of the Periodic table with elements called"transition metals"
We see possible applications in thermoelectrics, batteries, catalysis, solar cells, electronic devices, structural composites and many other fields, enabling a new level of engineering on the atomic scale
oil and gas pipelines and nuclear plants has been developed by researchers at the University of Strathclyde with inspiration from the natural world.
If there are defects in a nuclear plant or an oil pipeline, we would be able to detect cracks that have a range of sizes
#Close to the point of more efficient chips More efficient chips based on plasmonics are a step closer to reality through better control of the directional excitation of plasmons in a gold grating.
A*STAR researchers and their collaborators have generated electromagnetic waves known as surface plasmon polaritons in a gold grating
so called because they use plasmons--collective excitations of electrons in a conductor--rather than electrons to transfer
direction of plasmons in a gold grating both theoretically and experimentally. In the experiments, they moved the STM tip relative to the edge of the gold grating
"The STM tip acts as a point source of surface plasmons,"Yang explains.""When placed on a metal film,
electrons that tunnel across the gap can excite plasmons, although inefficiently.""Yang likens the excitation of plasmons in gratings to dropping pebbles in a swimming pool with swimming lanes demarcated by floats."
"What is interesting is that depending on how far we drop the pebble from the barrier for each lane,
"This control of direction stems from the surface plasmon polariton reflected from the grating edge interfering with the one at the STM probe.
The result provides point sources of surface plasmon polaritons. This could prove useful for developing ways to replace wires between chips with optical connectors,
The researchers intend to investigate the optical characteristics of the plasmon source when the electrically excited plasmons are coupled to plasmonic waveguides,
opening the way to plasmonic counterparts of electronic components.""Potentially, we hope to achieve logic gates, which underpin all processing circuits,
based on electrically driven plasmons,"says Dong g
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