The team led by Rice chemist James Tour has built a 1-kilobit rewritable silicon oxide device with diodes that eliminate data-corrupting crosstalk.
The crossbar memories built by the Rice lab are flexible resist heat and radiation and show promise for stacking in three-dimensional arrays.
The device built by Rice postdoctoral researcher Gunuk Wang lead author of the new paper sandwiches the active silicon oxide between layers of palladium.
and encoded ASCII letters spelling out RICE OWLS into the bits. Setting adjacent bits to the on state--usually a condition that leads to voltage leaks and data corruption in a 1r crossbar structure--had no effect on the information he said.
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate student Adam Lauchner; postdoctoral researcher Jian Lin; Douglas Natelson a professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering and Krishna Palem the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computer science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of statistics.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
The Rice labs of lead investigator Jun Lou Pulickel Ajayan and Boris Yakobson all professors in the university's Mechanical engineering and Materials Science Department collaborated with Wigner Fellow Wu
Last year Lou and Ajayan revealed their success at making intricate patterns of intertwining graphene and hbn among them the image of Rice's owl mascot.
The question now is how to bring all the 2-D materials together said co-author Sina Najmaei a Rice graduate student.
Now we can grow grain sizes as large as 100 microns Lou said. That's still only about the width of a human hair but in the nanoscale realm it's big enough to work with he said.
The ORNL electron microscopy images make it possible to view these grain boundaries directly. The Rice researchers see many possible ways to combine the materials not only in two-dimensional layers but also as three-dimensional stacks.
Natural crystals are made of structures bound by the Van der waals force but they're all of the same composition Lou said.
Co-authors of the Nature Materials paper are Rice research associate Xiaolong Zou graduate students Gang Shi and Sidong Lei and Wu Zhou at Oak ridge National Laboratory.
Computations were performed on Rice's DAVINCI system and at the Cyberinfrastructure for Computational Research both funded by NSF.
which predicted that grain boundaries can be strong and earlier experiments which indicated that they were much weaker than the perfect lattice.
Large-area sheets required for applications must contain many small grains connected at grain boundaries
and it was unclear how strong those grain boundaries were. This our second Science paper reports on the strength of large-area graphene films grown using chemical vapor deposition (CVD)
and were able to create test samples without harming the graphene notes the paper's lead author Gwan-Hyoung Lee a postdoctoral fellow in the Hone lab. Our findings clearly correct the mistaken consensus that grain boundaries of graphene
But CVD graphene is stitched'together from many small crystalline grains--like a quilt--at grain boundaries that contain defects in the atomic structure Kysar explains.
These grain boundaries can severely limit the strength of large-area graphene if they break much more easily than the perfect crystal lattice
when tested right at a grain boundary is about 90%as strong as the ideal crystal This is an exciting result for the future of graphene
Very little is known about the effects of grain boundaries in 2d materials Kysar adds. Our work shows that grain boundaries in 2d materials can be much more sensitive to processing than in 3d materials.
This is due to all the atoms in graphene being surface atoms so surface damage that would normally not degrade the strength of 3d materials can completely destroy the strength of 2d materials.
The connections between the crystals called grain boundaries can be as important as the crystals themselves in determining the material's performance on a large scale.
The grain boundaries become important in any technology says Hone. Say for example we want to make a solar cell.
and that means that there will be thousands of grain boundaries. We need to understand what they do so we can control them.
The team used atomic-resolution electron microscopy to examine the grain boundaries of this material and saw lines of misaligned atoms.
Once they knew where to find the grain boundaries and what they looked like the team could study the effect of a single grain boundary on the properties of the Mos2.
To do this they built tiny transistors the most basic component in all of electronics out of the crystals
and saw that the single defective line of atoms at the grain boundaries could drastically change the key electronic and optical properties of the Mos2.
The new approach takes cellulose from non-food plant material such as corn stover converts about 30%to amylose
Corn stover consists of the stem leaves and husk of the corn plant remaining after ears of corn are harvested.
However the process works with cellulose from any plant. This bioprocess called simultaneous enzymatic biotransformation
but foster Gulf of mexico Dead Zonenew ORLEANS April 9 2013#The most serious ongoing water pollution problem in the Gulf of mexico originates not from oil rigs as many people believe but rainstorms and fields of corn and soybeans a thousand
Just as fertilizer makes corn and soybeans grow it stimulates the growth of plants in the water#algae in the Gulf.
alvarez@rice. eduthe extraordinary properties of some nanomaterials offer leapfrogging opportunities to develop next-generation applications for drinking water disinfection
Unlike the simple starch-based glucose sugars in corn and other grains the sugars in cellulosic biomass are complex polysaccharides that must be extricated from a tough polymer called lignin
This is just the first step in our effort to better engineer a process for capturing CO2 from flue gas at power plants said George Hirasaki the lead researcher of Rice's CO2-capture research team The researchers hope to reduce the costs of CO2 capture by creating an integrated
Rice's new study found that in cases where waste is available it may be used to capture CO2.
Hirasaki Rice's A j. Hartsook Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular engineering said employing waste heat is just one example of a number of ways that Rice's team is looking to improve upon a tried-and-true technology for CO2 capture.
It has been estimated that the use of current technology for CO2 capture would drive up the cost of electricity by 70 to 100 percent said Rice graduate student Sumedh Warudkar a co-investigator on the Rice university team.
The research suggests that two elements of Rice's design--optimized amine formulation and the use of waste heat--can reduce parasitic power loss from about 35 percent to around 25 percent.
While corn-grain ethanol and biodiesel are the only biofuels to have been produced in commercial quantities in the U s. to date the study committee found much greater potential in biofuels made from lignocellulosic biomass
--which includes crop residues like wheat straw switchgrass whole trees and wood waste. This drop in fuel is designed to be a direct replacement for gasoline
They are finding success using the byproducts of biofuels made from corn stover wheat straw and rice straw.
which is produced biofuel from inedible material such as wood chips wheat straw or other agricultural residue.
which uses corn and grain to make biofuel. Corn ethanol's byproduct--called distiller's dried grains--can be used as cattle feed
but cellulosic ethanol's byproduct--called high-lignin residue--is perceived often as less valuable. With the cellulosic ethanol process you have leftover material that has lignin
and some cellulose in it but it's not really a feed material anymore Riding said.
The research could greatly affect Kansas and other agricultural states that produce crops such as wheat and corn.
After harvesting these crops the leftover wheat straw and corn stover can be used for making cellulosic ethanol.
Cellulosic ethanol byproducts then can be added to cement to strengthen concrete. The utilization of this byproduct is important in both concrete materials
When this field is applied it creates subtle changes in the material's grain boundaries--where atoms from different crystals meet in the material.
Namely the field draws defects to the grain boundary. These defects consist of vacancies (missing atoms)
--which raises the temperature along the grain boundary. Raising the temperature along the grain boundary means that the material can be sintered at a much lower temperature
because sintering is done by selectively melting the grain boundaries to fuse the crystals together. Normally you would have to apply enough heat to raise the mass of all the material to the melting point
even though you only need to melt the grain boundary. Preheating the grain boundary with an electric field is allowed
what Narayan to lower the sintering temperature from 1450 C to 800 C and sinter the material much more quickly.
An invited viewpoint paper describing the work New mechanism for field-assisted processing and flash sintering of materials is published online in Scripta Materialia.
The first project was launched in 2009 by the Department of energy at a corn ethanol production facility in Decatur Ill. operated by the Archer daniel midlands Company.
Biochar is a plant byproduct similar to charcoal that can be made from lumber waste dried corn stalks and other plant residues.
#Lack of energy an enemy to antibiotic-resistant microbesrice University researchers cured a strain of bacteria of its ability to resist an antibiotic in an experiment that has implications for a longstanding public health crisis. Rice environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez
The Rice researchers tested their theory on two strains of bacteria P. aeruginosa which is found in soil
Alvarez has been chipping away at the problem since moving to Rice from the University of Iowa in 2004 even without American funding for research.
Co-authors of the paper are Rice alumni Michal Rysz now an environmental engineer at GSI Environmental Inc. Houston;
and John Fortner an assistant professor at Washington University St louis. Alvarez is the George R. Brown Professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice.
and more effective toxicity tests for airborne chemicals scientists from Rice university and the Rice spinoff company Nano3d Biosciences have used magnetic levitation to grow some of the most realistic lung tissue ever produced in a laboratory.
and department chair of physics and astronomy at Rice. This is the first time anyone has arranged these four cell types in the same way that they are found in lung tissue.
Killian and fellow scientists from Rice and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center co-founded Nano3d Biosciences in 2009 after creating a technology that uses magnetism to levitate
Growing realistic lung tissues in vitro is a particular challenge said study co-author Jane Grande-Allen professor of bioengineering at Rice.
when Rice bioengineering graduate student Hubert Tseng joined the research team as an intern. Tseng was already a student in Grande-Allen's lab one of Rice's leading laboratories for tissue-engineering research.
Hubert's and Jane's expertise in tissue engineering was invaluable for tackling this problem Souza said.
Another collaboration that paid off big was a partnership with a group of undergraduate students at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.
Study co-authors include Robert Raphael professor of bioengineering at Rice and cofounder of Nano3d Biosciences;
#Automated imaging system looks underground to help improve cropsplant scientists are working to improve important food crops such as rice maize
In a presentation today at the Association for Computing Machinery's Mobicom 2014 conference in Maui Hawaii researchers from Rice's Wireless Network Group will unveil a multiuser multiantenna transmission scheme for UHF a portion
The holy grail of wireless communications is to go both fast and far said lead researcher Edward Knightly professor and chair of Rice's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Rice's technology combines several proven technologies that are used already widely in wireless data transmission. One of these is multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) a scheme that employs multiple antennae to boost data rates without the need for additional channels or transmitter power.
or vice versa said Rice graduate student Narendra Anand the lead author of the new study. Imagine that the Wifi access point in your home
Knightly Anand and Rice graduate student Ryan Guerra designed the first open-source UHF multiuser MIMO test system.
Based on Rice's wireless open-access research platform or WARP the system allowed the team to perform a side-by-side comparison of multiuser MIMO for UHF and for both 2. 4 gigahertz and 5. 8 gigahertz Wifi.
The environment surrounding the atom-thick carbon material can influence its electronic performance according to researchers at Rice
Because it's so easy to accidently introduce impurities into graphene labs led by physicists Junichiro Kono of Rice
It was made possible by the Rice-based Nanojapan program through which American undergraduates conduct summer research internships in Japanese labs. Even a single molecule of a foreign substance can contaminate graphene enough to affect its electrical and optical properties
The Rice and Osaka labs are continuing to collaborate on a project to measure the terahertz conductivity of graphene on various substrates he said.
The paper's authors include Rice alumna Mika Tabata who conducted research as a 2012 Nanojapan participant in the Tonouchi lab and graduate student Minjie Wang;
of the Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering both at Rice. The National Science Foundation (NSF;
#Tricking plants to see the light may control most important twitch on Earthcopious corn growing in tiny backyard plots?
First discovered five years ago Rice's silicon oxide memories are a type of two-terminal resistive random-access memory (RRAM) technology.
In a new paper available online in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters a Rice team led by chemist James Tour compared its RRAM technology to more than a dozen competing versions.
Tour is Rice's T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry and professor of mechanical engineering and nanoengineering and of computer science.
The key ingredient of Rice's RRAM is its dielectric component silicon oxide. Silicon is the most abundant element On earth and the basic ingredient in conventional microchips.
and Rice postdoctoral researcher Gunuk Wang showed that using a porous version of silicon oxide could dramatically improve Rice's RRAM in several ways.
Study co-authors--all from Rice--include postdoctoral researcher Yang Yang; research scientist Jae-Hwang Lee;
and Edwin Thomas the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Rice's George R. Brown School of engineering professor in mechanical engineering and materials science and in chemical and biomolecular engineering.
In particular corn production and trade at the domestic level might be an area to target as changes could significantly reduce national water use for irrigation.
Crops like corn rice and wheat thrive best in these drier regions but rainfall is limited
The researchers looked at domestic and international trade of corn rice soy and wheat along with such livestock products as ruminant (animals like cattle goats and sheep that subsist on plant matter) pork and poultry.
These products accounted for 93 percent of China's domestic food supply in 2005 the last year with available data.
They found that domestic corn trade leads to significant losses of irrigation water resources (such as rivers reservoirs and groundwater.
However the provinces of Hubei Henan Jiangsu and Anhui produce wheat quite efficiently and their exports lead to large national water savings for both rainfall and irrigation water.
#New technologies will bring health benefits of oats and barley to a greater number of foodsnew technologies may help food manufacturers more broadly utilize the many healthful benefits of oats
and barley in a greater range of food products according to a June 24 panel discussion at the 2014 Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting & Food Expoâ in New orleans. Oats and barley are ancient food
crops known for their durability versatility and healthful attributes. Both grains have high levels of protein fiber and beta-glucan.
There is now evidence that oats and barley significantly reduce cholesterol levels and that they moderate blood glucose concentrations following a meal according to a presentation by Susan M. Toth Phd research scientist Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
In addition there is also research to support that oat and barley foods increase satiety after meals a sensation of feeling full after meals
which may aid in weight maintenance. In China barley and oats are used in a variety of products from cereals
and noodles to beverages and flat bread said Bo Jiang Phd professor of food science and executive director of the State Laboratory of Food Science and Technology at Jiangnan University in China.
Oats are now the third largest food staple in China growing in popularity as that country deals with rising rates of cancer diabetes heart disease and intestinal issues.
In the U s. barley and oats are used primarily for animal feed since they are difficult to break down
Food uses of barley and oats are limited rather due to lack of palatability of whole grain foods
In addition the U s. has ample and affordable supplies of other grains such as rice and wheat
And yet recent discoveries of the varied health benefits of oats and barley have spurred food scientists to develop new
and more efficient methods of breaking down the components and nutrients in these grains to make oats
and barley easier and more appealing to eat and for use as food additives. If we can improve the processing of barley
and oats we can improve public health said Liu. Many researchers have worked on processing barley or oats into value-added fractions enriched with nutrients some with commercial success said Liu.
The USDA has developed improved dry and wet methods to more quickly easily and affordably transform barley and oats into functional ingredients.
However added Liu food scientists and engineers have more work to do to commercialize these methods
and to educate consumers about the health benefits of beta-glucan and these two grains.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Institute of Food Technologists (IFT. Note:
A porous material invented by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour sequesters carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas at ambient temperature with pressure provided by the wellhead
The Rice material a nanoporous solid of carbon with nitrogen or sulfur is inexpensive and simple to produce compared with the liquid amine-based scrubbers used now Tour said.
Rice graduate student Chih-Chau Hwang lead author of the paper first tried to combine amines with porous carbon.
Apache Corp. a Houston-based oil and gas exploration and production company funded the research at Rice
The paper's co-authors are undergraduate Josiah Tour research scientist Carter Kittrell and senior research scientist Lawrence Alemany all of Rice and Laura Espinal an associate at NIST.
environment on plant traitslet's say plant scientists want to develop new lines of corn that will better tolerate long stretches of hot dry weather.
The study from Rice university and Duke university found that making a few changes to homework assignments in an upper-level undergraduate engineering course at Rice led to improved scores on exams.
The findings by a team from Rice's Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship and Duke's Department of psychology and Neuroscience demonstrate how technology
The results exceeded everyone's expectations said Rice co-author Richard Baraniuk the instructor of the upper-level signals
whether an intervention had a significant effect said Baraniuk the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of Rice's RDLS.
Rice research engineer J. P. Slavinsky was a co-author. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Rice university.
For example the systems biology approach could be applied in research to develop sweeter citrus fruit disease-resistant rice or drought-resistant trees.
Vertimass anticipates that the ORNL technology will be in demand by existing corn-based ethanol production plants as well as new refineries coming online that aim to convert non-food crops such as switchgrass
poplar wood and corn stover into biofuels. The technology could also supply a source of renewable jet fuel required by recent European union aviation emission regulations.
when it comes to producing bioethanol from plant parts like corn or sugar canes. Corn cubs and sugar canes are in fact plant parts that can also be used directly as food so there is a great public resistance to accept producing this kind of bioethanol.
A big challenge is therefore to become able to produce bioethanol from plant parts which cannot be used for food.
Cellulose is found everywhere in nature in rich quantities for example in the stems of the corn plant.
If we can produce bioethanol from the corn stems and keep the corn cubs for food we have come a long way says Per Morgen professor at the Institute of Physics Chemistry and Pharmacy University of Southern Denmark.
Cellulose is organized in long chains in the plant's cell walls and they are hard to break down.
and it is made on the basis of rice husks. My Iraqi colleagues have made the acid from treated rice husk.
The worldwide production of rice generates enormous amounts of rice husk and ashes from burning the husk so this material is cheap and easy to get hold of he says.
It's all about the acidthe ashes from burnt rice husks have a high content of silicate
and this is the important compound in the production of the new acid. The scientists paired silicate particles with chlorosulfonic acid and this made the acid molecules attach themselves to the silicate compounds.
Making the new acid3 grams of ash from burned rice husk were mixed with 100 ml of caustic soda (Naoh) in a plastic container.
and approaches that lead to improved outcomes are said unavailable Dr. Elizabeth Molyneux a pediatrician at QECH who co-authored the report with colleagues from Rice QECH Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Malawi.
and thanks to the partnership of QECH Rice and the Malawi Ministry of Health we are already implementing bubble CPAP nationwide.
In 2010 a team of Rice bioengineering students invented a low-cost bubble CPAP device. The technology which costs about 15 times less than conventional CPAP machines was created as part the Rice 360â°:
°Institute for Global Health Technologies'award-winning hands-on engineering education program Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB.
when CPAP was introduced first here said Rice's Rebecca Richards-Kortum the Stanley C. Moore Professor and chair of the Department of Bioengineering and director of both BTB and Rice 360â°.
Based on the dramatic results from the study QECH Rice 360â°and the Malawi Ministry of Health have partnered to provide bubble CPAP at all 27 of the country's government hospitals.
Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden director of Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) founded the hands-on BTB engineering education program in 2006.
BTB sends about a dozen Rice students overseas each summer to work with partners and test design prototypes--like bubble CPAP in 2010--that Rice students have created throughout the school year at the OEDK QECH has hosted BTB students each summer
since 2006 and Richards-Kortum and Oden raised $375000 in donations this year for the Day One Project an ambitious effort to expand QECH's neonatal facilities
Through the Day One Project Rice 360â°and QECH hope to create a collection of low-cost neonatal technologies that an African district hospital serving 250000 people can implement for about $5000.
A subsequent major development was the development of disease-resistant strains of wheat that could handle artificial fertilizer and produce higher yields.
We can make butanol from corn, but we've decided to avoid that route. Corn is expensive
so it's hard to make money. A second reason: corn is used for food. So we're using cellulosic biomass waste streams--corn cobs, treetops and limbs, dead pine trees from pine beetles.
We cannot convert municipal solid waste. That's a bit of too much of a challenge right now.
A tree is actually sugar. You need to do a bit of chemistry to get the sugar out.
The emerging trends are corn cobs--that's what Dupont, Denisco and Verenium are using.
Corn cobs are easy to break down into sugar. But that's not a solution to the cellulosic fuel problem.
cellulosic, sugarcane, grain (mostly corn from the U s.)600 more plants are needed in next decade.
All the corn, rice and wheat we grow to feed ourselves. That is a huge change compared to only a third of the Earth surface was covered by ice at the end of the Pleistocene and the shift into the Holocene,
Unlike corn or even sugar ethanol, halophyte algae (algae that grow in saltwater) do not compete with food stocks for freshwater. oewhen the cost of pumping ocean water into so-called wasteland regions such as the Sahara
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