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Category: materials – Page 24

Sadly, we know that microplastics are getting everywhere, including our drinking water – but researchers have developed a new way to tackle the problem: a filter made of a rather unusual combination of material, which is able to remove up to 99.9 percent of tiny plastic fragments from water.

The researchers, led by a team from Wuhan University in China, combined both chitin (derived from squid bone) and cellulose (derived from cotton) for their ‘Ct-Cel’ foam filter. Both materials are found in abundance in nature, cheap to adapt, and sustainable.

They then tested their filter against numerous different types of plastic, finding it did an excellent job with a wide variety of fragment sizes and plastic types – including some of those most commonly seen in microplastic pollution.

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Researchers at the University of Tsukuba have developed an innovative method for rapidly creating laser light sources in large quantities using an inkjet printer that ejects laser-emitting droplets.

By applying an electric field to these droplets, the researchers demonstrated that switching the emission of light on and off is possible. Furthermore, they successfully created a compact laser by arranging these droplets on a circuit board.

The study is published in Advanced Materials.

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Monitoring electrical potentials with high recording site density and micrometer spatial resolution in liquid is critical in biosensing. Organic electronic materials have driven remarkable advances in the field because of their unique material properties, yet limitations in spatial resolution and recording density remain. Here, we introduce organic electro-scattering antennas (OCEANs) for wireless, light-based probing of electrical signals with micrometer spatial resolution, potentially from thousands of sites. The technology relies on the unique dependence of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):polystyrene sulfonate light scattering properties to its doping level. Electro-optic characteristics of individual antennas varying in diameters and operating voltages were systematically characterized in saline solution. Signal-to-noise ratios up to 48 were achieved in response to 100-mV stimuli, with 2.5-mV detection limits. OCEANs demonstrated millisecond time constants and exceptional long-term stability, enabling continuous recordings over 10 hours. By offering spatial resolution of 5 μm and a recording density of 4 × 106 cm−2, OCEANs unlock new readout capabilities, potentially accelerating fundamental and clinical research.

Sci. Adv. 10, eadr8380 (2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adr8380

Select the format you want to export the citation of this publication.

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Scientists at The University of Manchester have achieved a significant breakthrough in using cyanobacteria—commonly known as “blue-green algae”—to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into valuable bio-based materials.

Their work, published in Biotechnology for Biofuels and Bioproducts, could accelerate the development of sustainable alternatives to fossil fuel-derived products like plastics, helping pave the way for a carbon-neutral circular bioeconomy.

The research, led by Dr. Matthew Faulkner, working alongside Dr. Fraser Andrews, and Professor Nigel Scrutton, focused on improving the production of citramalate, a compound that serves as a precursor for renewable plastics such as Perspex or Plexiglas. Using an innovative approach called “design of experiment,” the team achieved a remarkable 23-fold increase in citramalate production by optimizing key process parameters.

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Scientists have long known that light can sometimes appear to exit a material before entering it—an effect dismissed as an illusion caused by how waves are distorted by matter.

Now, researchers at the University of Toronto, through innovative quantum experiments, say they have demonstrated that “negative time” isn’t just a theoretical idea—it exists in a tangible, physical sense, deserving closer scrutiny.

The findings, posted on the preprint server arXiv but not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, have attracted both global attention and skepticism.

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Brown dwarfs are curious celestial bodies that appear to straddle the mass divide between stars and planets. Often referred to as “failed stars,” brown dwarfs form in isolation from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust like a star.

However, while fully-fledged stars continue to gather material from the gas and dust cloud that births them, brown dwarfs are less successful at this mass harvesting. As a result, they don’t reach the masses of the smallest stars and can’t trigger the process that defines main sequence stars, like our sun.

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Colloidal gels are complex systems made up of microscopic particles dispersed in a liquid, ultimately producing a semi-solid network. These materials have unique and advantageous properties that can be tuned using external forces, which have been the focus of various physics studies.

Researchers at University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the UGC-DAE Consortium for Scientific Research in India recently ran simulations and performed analyses aimed at understanding how the injection of active particles, such as swimming bacteria, would influence colloidal gels.

Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, shows that active particles can influence the structure of 3D colloidal gels, kneading them into porous and denser structures.

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In 2011 physicists made a surprising observation: A cuprate material exposed to intense pulses of light appeared to superconduct fleetingly at a temperature above its critical temperature. Could this be a clue to finding higher-temperature superconductors? The answer remains unclear. “There are still continuing debates about whether the light-induced state is really superconducting,” says Morihiko Nishida from the University of Tokyo. Now he and his colleagues have provided new hints concerning the nature of the light-induced state and its connection to electronic wave patterns called charge-density waves (CDWs) [1].

The researchers studied two cuprates, called LNSCO and LSCO, that both contain the element lanthanum. These materials superconduct at temperatures below 10 K, but at slightly higher temperatures, they transition to one of several low-conductivity states in which a wave pattern is imprinted onto the electron distribution. Previous work by this group suggested that these CDWs play a role in light-induced superconductivity [2], but it was unclear whether the wavelength—short or long—of the CDWs had any effect.

In their new experiments, Nishida and colleagues fired near-infrared pulses at their cuprate samples and recorded the electron response with a terahertz probe beam. In the CDW region of parameter space, they observed a light-induced conducting state whose frequency matched that of a superconducting resonance effect. The implication that the light-induced state is superconducting needs to be confirmed with other experiments, but the team’s work has revealed that both short-and long-wavelength CDWs play a role. The results have a bearing on models that suggest that the pairing of electrons—a key feature of superconductivity—occurs in CDW states at temperatures above the normal onset of superconductivity (see Synopsis: Picking out Waves in a Material’s Charge Distribution).

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Crafting a unique and promising research hypothesis is a fundamental skill for any scientist. It can also be time consuming: New PhD candidates might spend the first year of their program trying to decide exactly what to explore in their experiments. What if artificial intelligence could help?

MIT researchers have created a way to autonomously generate and evaluate promising research hypotheses across fields, through human-AI collaboration. In a new paper, they describe how they used this framework to create evidence-driven hypotheses that align with unmet research needs in the field of biologically inspired materials.

Published Wednesday in Advanced Materials, the study was co-authored by Alireza Ghafarollahi, a postdoc in the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM), and Markus Buehler, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering in MIT’s departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering and director of LAMM.

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