Lifeboat Foundation

Research on opportunities to use nanomaterials for each industry could expand and increase efficiency in industrial water treatment.

(Natural News) Turkish inventors have created a new building material that is five times stronger than titanium and has the density of wood planks. Most remarkably, this new “Metallic wood” is lighter than titanium and still has the chemical stability of metal for use in manufacturing applications.

The new material is made out of nickel-based cellular materials as small as 17 nano-meters in diameter. These electroplated nickel nano-particles are strategically arranged in struts to maximize their load-bearing strength as a whole. This strategic arrangement of nickel makes the material four times stronger than bulk nickel plating. By tinkering with nano-meter-scale geometry, the inventors can increase the strength and density of the new material. This geometric arrangement of cellular materials is spatially organized and repeated to generate the new “Metallic wood” material. This geometric nano-meter engineering feat produces a very dense material, like that of wood. The inventors have even made the material as dense as water (1,000?kg/m3).

The idea is to give craftspeople the tools they need to incorporate digital services to the items they’re already making. Poupyrev made it clear that he doesn’t want fundamentally change tried and tested items, like a jacket, into a computer first, and an article of clothing second. He wants to imbue everyday items with digital functionality.

In its final form, Poupyrev envisions clothing, furniture, and accessories that are all connected to the cloud, each providing their own, specialized functionality. Users will interact with screens using their sleeves and pause their music by tapping their glasses. Step trackers will live in our shoes, translators will live in our ears, and medicinal nano-robots could be injected into our blood streams. The very notion of a computer will radically change as little computers get placed into everything.

“This could allow makers to image and create a new world where things are connected and we don’t need keyboards, screens, or mice to interact with computers,” he said. “I’ve been working on this for 20 years and as it’s taken shape I’m realizing that we’re not building an interface. We’re building a a new kind of computer, an invisible computer.”

Continue reading “This Tic-Tac-Sized Computer Can Turn Almost Anything Into a Smart Device” »

Apr 11, 2019 (Heraldkeeper via COMTEX) — Summary:

A new market study, titled “Discover Global Aerogel Market Upcoming Trends, Growth Drivers and Challenges” has been featured on WiseGuyReports.

Introduction

Continue reading “Global Aerogel Market 2019 Trends, Market Share, Industry Size, Growth, Sales, Opportunities, Analysis and Forecast To 2025” »

Maxwell’s demon is a machine proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1897. The hypothetical machine would use thermal fluctuations to obtain energy, apparently violating the second principle of thermodynamics. Now, researchers at the University of Barcelona have presented the first theoretical and experimental solution of a continuous version of Maxwell’s demon in a single molecule system. The results, published in the journal Nature Physics, have applications in other fields, such as biological and quantum systems.

“Despite its simplicity and the large amount of work in the field, this new variant of the classical Maxwell demon has remained unexplored until now,” notes F\xE8lix Ritort, professor from the Department of Fundamental Physics of the UB. “In this study, we introduced a system able to extract large amounts of work arbitrarily per cycle through repeated measurements of the state of a system.”

Researchers from Drexel University and Trinity College in Ireland, have created ink for an inkjet printer from a highly conductive type of two-dimensional material called MXene. Recent findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that the ink can be used to print flexible energy storage components, such as supercapacitors, in any size or shape.

Conductive inks have been around for nearly a decade and they represent a multi-hundred million-dollar market that is expected to grow rapidly into the next decade. It’s already being used to make the radiofrequency identification tags used in highway toll transponders, circuit boards in portable electronics and it lines car windows as embedded radio antennas and to aid defrosting. But for the technology to see broader use, conductive inks need to become more conductive and more easily applied to a range of surfaces.

Yury Gogotsi, Ph.D., Distinguished University and Bach professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who studies the applications of new materials in technology, suggests that the ink created in Drexel’s Nanomaterials Institute is a significant advancement on both of these fronts.

Continue reading “Need more energy storage? Just hit ‘print’” »

NIST researchers have explored in unprecedented detail a new breed of catalysts that allow some chemical reactions, which normally require high heat, to proceed at room temperature. The energy-saving catalysts use sunlight or another light source to excite localized surface plasmons (LSPs)—oscillations of groups of electrons on the surface of certain metal nanoparticles, such as gold, silver and aluminum. The energy derived from the LSP oscillations drives chemical reactions among molecules that adhere to the nanoparticles.

Scientists had previously shown that molecular hydrogen can be split into its individual atoms by the energy generated by the LSP oscillations. The NIST team has now discovered a second LSP-mediated reaction that proceeds at room temperature. In this reaction, LSPs excited in gold nanoparticles transform two molecules of carbon monoxide into carbon and carbon dioxide. The reaction, which ordinarily requires a minimum temperature of 400 degrees C., plays an important role in converting carbon monoxide into widely used carbon-based materials such as carbon nanotubes and graphite.

Probing the nanoparticles with an electron beam and combining the data with simulations, the NIST researchers pinpointed the sites on the gold nanoparticles where the reactions occurred. They also measured the intensity of the LSPs and mapped how the energy associated with the oscillations varied from place to place inside the nanoparticles. The measurements are key steps in understanding the role of LSPs for initiating reactions at room temperature, mitigating the need to heat the samples.

Continue reading “Researchers explore energy-saving catalysts that operate at room temperature” »

The optical laser has grown to a $10 billion global technology market since it was invented in 1960, and has led to Nobel prizes for Art Ashkin for developing optical tweezing and Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland for work with pulsed lasers. Now a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher has teamed up with experts at the University of Rochester to create a different kind of laser—a laser for sound, using the optical tweezer technique invented by Ashkin.

In the newest issue of Nature Photonics, the researchers propose and demonstrate a phonon laser using an optically levitated nanoparticle. A phonon is a quantum of energy associated with a sound wave and optical tweezers test the limits of quantum effects in isolation and eliminates physical disturbances from the surrounding environment. The researchers studied the mechanical vibrations of the nanoparticle, which is levitated against gravity by the force of radiation at the focus of an optical laser beam.

“Measuring the position of the nanoparticle by detecting the light it scatters, and feeding that information back into the tweezer beam allows us to create a laser-like situation,” said Mishkat Bhattacharya, associate professor of physics at RIT and a theoretical quantum optics researcher. “The mechanical vibrations become intense and fall into perfect sync, just like the electromagnetic waves emerging from an optical laser.”

Continue reading “New phonon laser could lead to breakthroughs in sensing and information processing” »

Humanity could be on the verge of an unprecedented merging of human biology with advanced technology, fusing our thoughts and knowledge directly with the cloud in real-time – and this incredible turning point may be just decades away, scientists say.

In a new research paper exploring what they call the ‘human brain/cloud interface’, scientists explain the technological underpinnings of what such a future system might be, and also address the barriers we’ll need to address before this sci-fi dream becomes reality.

At its core, the brain/cloud interface (B/CI) is likely to be made possible by imminent advances in the field of nanorobotics, proposes the team led by senior author and nanotechnology researcher Robert Freitas Jr from the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in California.

Continue reading “We Are Closer Than Ever to Merging Human Brains With The Cloud” »