Graphene excels at removing contaminants from water, but it’s not yet a commercially viable use of the wonder material.
That could be changing.
In a recent study, University at Buffalo engineers report a new process of 3D printing graphene aerogels that they say overcomes two key hurdles—scalability and creating a version of the material that’s stable enough for repeated use—for water treatment.
UCLA materials scientists have developed a class of optical material that controls how heat radiation is directed from an object. Similar to the way overlapping blinds direct the angle of visible light coming through a window, the breakthrough involves utilizing a special class of materials that manipulates how thermal radiation travels through such materials.
Recently published in Science, the advance could be used to improve the efficiency of energy-conversion systems and enable more effective sensing and detection technologies.
“Our goal was to show that we could effectively beam thermal radiation —the heat all objects emanate as electromagnetic waves —over broad wavelengths to the same direction,” said study leader Aaswath Raman, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “This advance offers new capabilities for a range of technologies that depend on the ability to control the flows of heat in the form of thermal radiation. This includes imaging and sensing applications that rely on thermal sources or detecting them, as well as energy applications such as solar heating, waste heat recovery and radiative cooling, where restricting the directionality of heat flow can improve performance. ”.
“Multiple printers constructed the building in 200 hours using local soil, meaning it’s zero-waste and needed no materials to be transported to the site.”
Fred Oesch.
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Interfaith solutions for major global challenges — bawa jain — founder, the centre for responsible leadership.
Bawa Jain is a visionary leader in the interfaith movement throughout the world.
Mr. Jain is Founder and President of The Centre for Responsible Leadership (https://www.thecrl.org/), a non-profit organization dedicated to assembling global thought leaders to find concrete solutions to the major challenges plaguing our world today.
Mr. Jain is also the Chairman of the World Youth Peace Summit, which brings together dynamic young leaders who share the dream of peace, organizing Youth Peace Conferences and facilitating a worldwide network that links active young people, and the Secretary General of the World Council of Religious Leaders, an independent body, working to bring religious resources to support the work of the United Nations in a common quest for peace.
Mr. Jain Co-Founded the Religious Initiative of The World Economic Forum, Founded The Gandhi King Awards for Non-Violence, and launched World Council of Religious Leader’s Religion One on One Initiative and is a strong proponent of Religious Diplomacy.
3D printing has opened up a completely new range of possibilities. One example is the production of novel turbine buckets. However, the 3D printing process often induces internal stress in the components, which can, in the worst case, lead to cracks. Now a research team has succeeded in using neutrons from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) research neutron source for non-destructive detection of this internal stress—a key achievement for the improvement of the production processes.
Gas turbine buckets have to withstand extreme conditions: Under high pressure and at high temperatures they are exposed to tremendous centrifugal forces. In order to further maximize energy yields, the buckets have to hold up to temperatures which are actually higher than the melting point of the material. This is made possible using hollow turbine buckets which are air-cooled from the inside.
These turbine buckets can be made using laser powder bed fusion, an additive manufacturing technology: Here, the starter material in powder form is built up layer by layer by selective melting with a laser. Following the example of avian bones, intricate lattice structures inside the hollow turbine buckets provide the part with the necessary stability.
**A lobster’s underbelly is lined with a thin, translucent membrane that is both stretchy and surprisingly tough.** This marine under-armor, as MIT engineers reported in 2019, is made from the toughest known hydrogel in nature, which also happens to be highly flexible. This combination of strength and stretch helps shield a lobster as it scrabbles across the seafloor, while also allowing it to flex back and forth to swim.
A lobster’s underbelly is lined with a thin, translucent membrane that is both stretchy and surprisingly tough. This marine under-armor, as MIT engineers reported in 2019, is made from the toughest known hydrogel in nature, which also happens to be highly flexible. This combination of strength and stretch helps shield a lobster as it scrabbles across the seafloor, while also allowing it to flex back and forth to swim.
Now a separate MIT team has fabricated a hydrogel-based material that mimics the structure of the lobster’s underbelly. The researchers ran the material through a battery of stretch and impact tests, and showed that, similar to the lobster underbelly, the synthetic material is remarkably “fatigue-resistant,” able to withstand repeated stretches and strains without tearing.
If the fabrication process could be significantly scaled up, materials made from nanofibrous hydrogels could be used to make stretchy and strong replacement tissues such as artificial tendons and ligaments.
Imagine a foldable smartphone or a rollable tablet device that is powerful, reliable and, perhaps most importantly, affordable.
New research directed by Wake Forest University scientists and published today in the journal Nature Communications has led to a method for both pinpointing and eliminating the sources of instability in the materials and devices used to create such applications.
“In this work, we introduced a strategy that provides a reliable tool for identifying with high accuracy the environmental and operational device degradation pathways and subsequently eliminating the main sources of instabilities to achieve stable devices,” said lead author Hamna Iqbal, a graduate student who worked closely with Professor of Physics Oana Jurchescu on the research.
The second-generation of their implantable scaffold takes the shape of an ice cube tray, and can hold three times as many photoreceptor cells — 300000 of them in all — and features cylindrical holes on the underside so these cells can connect with the patient’s retinal tissue as they mature. It is made from a biocompatible material called poly(glycerol-sebacate) that offers the necessary mechanical strength, but is safely metabolized by the body after it serves its purpose.
One of the main causes of vision loss in adults is deteriorative disorders of the retina, like macular degeneration, that are characterized by the death of the eye’s photoreceptor cells. Scientists are therefore focusing a lot of attention on coming up with ways to regenerate these cells, and a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) has engineered a novel type of scaffold that could give these efforts a boost, by improving the precision with which replacement photoreceptor cells can be delivered into the eye.
Way back in 2012, we looked at research in which UW-Madison scientists demonstrated how pluripotent stem cells could be used to grow retinal tissue in the lab. This tissue featured many of the hallmarks of real retinal tissue, including photoreceptor cells, and raised the prospect of harnessing this technique to grow replacement tissue in place within a damaged or diseased eye to restore vision.
“While it was a breakthrough to be able to make the spare parts – these photoreceptors – it’s still necessary to get them to the right spot so they can effectively reconstruct the retina,” says professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences David Gamm. “So, we started thinking, ‘How can we deliver these cells in a more intelligent way?’ That’s when we reached out to our world-class engineers at UW–Madison.”
We are made of stardust, the saying goes, and a pair of studies including University of Michigan research finds that may be more true than we previously thought.
The first study, led by U-M researcher Jie (Jackie) Li and published in Science Advances, finds that most of the carbon on Earth was likely delivered from the interstellar medium, the material that exists in space between stars in a galaxy. This likely happened well after the protoplanetary disk, the cloud of dust and gas that circled our young sun and contained the building blocks of the planets, formed and warmed up.
Carbon was also likely sequestered into solids within one million years of the sun’s birth — which means that carbon, the backbone of life on earth, survived an interstellar journey to our planet.
A team of researchers working at Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology has developed a skeletal-muscle-based, biohybrid soft robot that can swim faster than other skeletal-muscle-based biobots. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes building and testing their soft robot.
As scientists continue to improve the abilities of soft robots, they have turned to natural materials such as animal tissue. To date, most efforts in this area have involved the use of skeletal or cardiac muscles—each have their strengths and weaknesses. Skeletal-muscle-based biobots have, for example, suffered from lack of mobility and strength. In this new effort, the researchers in Spain have developed a new design for a tinyskeletal-muscle-based soft robot that overcomes both issues and is therefore able to swim faster than others of its kind.
To make their biobot, the researchers used a simulation to create a spring-based spine for a swimming creature shaped like an eel. The simulation allowed the researchers to optimize its shape. They then 3D printed the skeleton (which was made of a polymer called PDMS) and used it as a scaffold for growing skeletal muscles. The finished robot was approximately 260 micrometers long—its shape allowed for propulsion in just one direction. The biobot moves when given electrical stimulation; the charge incites the muscle to contract, which compresses the skeletal spring inside. When the stimulation is removed, the energy in the spring is released, pushing the biobot forward.
