Lifeboat Foundation

Potential applications include pressure-monitoring bandages, shade-shifting fabrics.

The bright iridescent colors in butterfly wings or beetle shells don’t come from any pigment molecules but from how the wings are structured—a naturally occurring example of what physicists call photonic crystals. Scientists can make their own structural colored materials in the lab, but it can be challenging to scale up the process for commercial applications without sacrificing optical precision.

Holes in the sun can beam out solar material at 500 miles per second.

Electrons find each other repulsive. Nothing personal—it’s just that their negative charges repel each other. So getting them to pair up and travel together, like they do in superconducting materials, requires a little nudge.

In old-school superconductors, which were discovered in 1911 and conduct electric current with no resistance, but only at extremely cold temperatures, the nudge comes from vibrations in the material’s atomic lattice.

But in newer, “unconventional” superconductors—which are especially exciting because of their potential to operate at close to room temperature for things like zero-loss power transmission—no one knows for sure what the nudge is, although researchers think it might involve stripes of electric charge, waves of flip-flopping electron spins that create magnetic excitations, or some combination of things.

The CD was initially soaked in 40 mL of acetone for 1.5 minutes, releasing the metal layer by breaking down the polycarbonate substrate. The metal from the CD was easily harvested with polyimide tape, which also serves as the substrate layer in the new device integration to improve the mechanical durability and robustness of the thin metal film.

“When you pick up your hair on your clothes with sticky tape, that is essentially the same mechanism,” said Assistant Professor Ahyeon Koh, who led the research. “We loosen the layer of metals from the CD and then pick up that metal layer with tape, so we just peel it off. That thin layer is then processed and flex ible.”

Researchers created the sensors utilizing a commercially available Cricut cutter, an off-the-shelf machine for crafters that generally cut designs from materials like paper, vinyl, card stock, and iron-on transfers. The flexible circuits then would be removed and stuck onto a person. The whole fabrication process was completed in 20–30 minutes, without releasing toxic chemicals or needing expensive equipment, and it costs about $1.50 per device.

A new disposable battery is made of paper and other sustainable materials and is activated with a few drops of water.

A durable bioadhesive hydrogel-elastomer enables continuous imaging of internal organs and tissues.

New research outlines the materials and reactions that could have sparked life on Earth. It is the simplest hypothesis yet.

A large percentage of a building’s energy usage is consumed by heating and cooling, but a new dynamic shading system designed by researchers at the University of Toronto could help. Inspired by the skin of krill, the system uses cells of blooming pigment that can block light on demand.

Krill are tiny marine organisms that are usually transparent, but have the ability to move pigments around in the cells beneath their skin, allowing them to turn darker to protect themselves from UV damage in bright sunlight. This, the UToronto team reasoned, would be a useful ability for windows and building facades to have.

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Another 999 attempts and the trash will be gone forever.

The first 100,000 kg of plastic has now been recovered from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization engaged in removing plastic dumped in oceans, revealed in a LinkedIn post.

Founded in 2013, The Ocean Cleanup is developing technologies that can help remove plastics that are discarded into the oceans as well as intercept them in the rivers before they enter the larger water bodies. The organization’s target is the GPGP in the North Pacific Ocean, where trash from countries in Asia, South America, and North America gathers into a large gyre of debris in the water. ## How does The Ocean Cleanup plan to clear it?

Continue reading “A non-profit removes 100,000 kg of plastic from the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch” »