Materials – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jan 18
2016

Space elevators will become feasible

The material to create space elevators will be developed by 2030, enabling a new golden age of space travel, according to a study published in the journal New Space.

“The material needed to have a 100,000 km rope will become real before 2030 and enable the creation of this low-cost access to space,” wrote Cathy W Swan, of SouthWest Analytic Network, Peter A Swan and John M Knapman, of the International Space Elevator Consortium, and David I Raitt, retired from the European Space Agency.

A space elevator would make launching people, satellites and craft into geostationary orbit dramatically cheaper than at present, with the researchers estimating it would drop from the current prices of $25,000 per kg for commercial launches and $40,000 per kg for governmental launches to $100 per kg for materials.

Jan 16
2016

European Space Agency unveils ‘lunar village’ plans as stepping stone to Mars

Moon “village”, a successor to International Space Station, would be series of structures made by robots and 3D printers that use moon dust as building material.

Jan 13
2016

Half of plastic trash in oceans comes from 5 countries

If true, this might mean there’s a “low hanging fruit” solution to ocean gyre garbage — a targeted effort to improve garbage collection in a small number of cities in developing nations, might dramatically reduce it. Hint, hint, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation! Side benefit would be greatly improving the lives of people in those cities, with some obvious health benefits along the way.

Economic growth in these countries is outpacing infrastructure, and their trash is collecting in the sea.

Jan 13
2016

45 scientists coming to Davos

The scientists below will all be bringing their perspectives to our meeting of leaders from every sector in Davos next week.

Neil Alford, materials scientist working on the creation of a room-temperature maser – the laser’s older sister, capable of amplifying microwaves rather than light for use in chemical detection or diagnostics.

Abir Al-Tabbaa, engineer investigating the potential of self-healing concrete for low-carbon infrastructure.

Jan 13
2016

Nanotechnology World Association | Researchers Determine the Three-Dimensional Positions of Individual Atoms for the First Time

Atoms are the building blocks of all matter on Earth, and the patterns in which they are arranged dictate how strong, conductive or flexible a material will be. Now, scientists at UCLA have used a powerful microscope to image the three-dimensional positions of individual atoms to a precision of 19 trillionths of a meter, which is several times smaller than a hydrogen atom.

Their observations make it possible, for the first time, to infer the macroscopic properties of materials based on their structural arrangements of atoms, which will guide how scientists and engineers build aircraft components, for example. The research, led by Jianwei (John) Miao, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a member of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, is published Sept. 21 in the online edition of the journal Nature Materials.

For more than 100 years, researchers have inferred how atoms are arranged in three-dimensional space using a technique called X-ray crystallography, which involves measuring how light waves scatter off of a crystal. However, X-ray crystallography only yields information about the average positions of many billions of atoms in the crystal, and not about individual atoms’ precise coordinates.

Jan 13
2016

New battery made of molten metals may offer low-cost, long-lasting storage for the grid

A novel rechargeable battery developed at MIT could one day play a critical role in the massive expansion of solar generation needed to mitigate climate change by midcentury. Designed to store energy on the electric grid, the high-capacity battery consists of molten metals that naturally separate to form two electrodes in layers on either side of the molten salt electrolyte between them. Tests with cells made of low-cost, Earth-abundant materials confirm that the liquid battery operates efficiently without losing significant capacity or mechanically degrading—common problems in today’s batteries with solid electrodes. The MIT researchers have already demonstrated a simple, low-cost process for manufacturing prototypes of their battery, and future plans call for field tests on small-scale power grids that include intermittent generating sources such as solar and wind.

Jan 12
2016

Medgadget @ CES 2016: Profusa Unveils Long-Term Implanatable Biosensor

Profusa Last week at CES, South San Francisco based Profusa showed off an upcoming injectable sensor that can be used to continuously monitor oxygen levels in tissue. Measuring only five millimeters long and a tiny 250 microns in diameter, the biosensor can be injected into tissue with just a hypodermic needle. It consists of a soft hydrogel scaffold that allows it to be biologically compatible with the surrounding tissue without any foreign body response. The sensor also contains a special chemical marker that changes fluorescence depending on the amount of oxygen that reacts with it. An optical reader placed on the skin measures the fluorescence and relays the data to a smartphone. The biosensor can last as long as two years (at which point the chemical marker begins to lose its potency), and because it contains no electronics and is completely biocompatible there’s no need to remove it.

On stage at the CES Digital Health Summit, Profusa CEO Dr. Ben Hwang gave a live demonstration of how the sensor works in action. As two of his colleagues with the sensors implanted and using a blood pressure cuffs performed stretches to simulate changes in blood flow, a graph displayed the live view of the changing tissue oxygen levels at the site of the sensors.

We had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Hwang after his talk, and he shared that the first application of the sensor is the Lumee Oxygen Sensing System, which is designed to monitor oxygen levels during the wound healing process. Sufficient oxygen flow through a wound is vital to the healing process, and Lumee can detect low oxygen levels early in the healing process and even before treatment or surgery begins.

Jan 11
2016

Bowie as Nikola Tesla in ‘The Prestige’

Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) commissions a machine from Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) during Tesla’s time in Colorado Springs. This video clip is taken from the motion picture ‘The Prestige’ (Touchstone Pictures **Copyright 2006 — All rights reserved*•. I own NO rights for this clip, which is intended to be used purely for your entertainment purposes. Do not copy, or in any way otherwise distribute this copyrighted material. Thank you! — JT.

Jan 10
2016

The health risks of spending a year in outer space

As we explore opportunities in space to colonized or even expand business opportunities in space such as mining, and discovering materials that could be brought back to earth to use; it will be important for scientists and researchers to look at ways in how technologies like CRISPR, nanobots, synthetic implants, etc. can assist in mitigating the impacts on humans in space.

A new report commissioned by NASA highlights many of the risks connected with one of the agency’s major goals: putting more humans in space for longer periods of time.

Jan 9
2016

Researchers gauge quantum properties of nanotubes, essential for next-gen electronics

Loving the progress around Quantum.

Today, a group of scientists — John A. Rogers, Eric Seabron, Scott MacLaren and Xu Xie from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Slava V. Rotkin from Lehigh University; and, William L. Wilson from Harvard University — are reporting on the discovery of an important method for measuring the properties of nanotube materials using a microwave probe. Their findings have been published in ACS Nano in an article called: “Scanning Probe Microwave Reflectivity of Aligned Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes: Imaging of Electronic Structure and Quantum Behavior at the Nanoscale.”

The researchers studied single-walled carbon nanotubes. These are 1-dimensional, wire-like nanomaterials that have electronic properties that make them excellent candidates for next generation electronics technologies. In fact, the first prototype of a nanotube computer has already been built by researchers at Stanford University. The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center is currently developing nanotube transistors for commercial use.

For this study, scientists grew a series of parallel nanotube lines, similar to the way nanotubes will be used in computer chips. Each nanotube was about 1 nanometer wide — ten times smaller than expected for use in the next generation of electronics. To explore the material’s properties, they then used microwave impedance microscopy (MIM) to image individual nanotubes.