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Scientists have observed the molecular motion of rubber components typically used in automobile tires—polybutadiene and carbon black—with the world’s fastest time resolution.

The study, published in Applied Physics Letters, reveals a clear interaction between the two components on the , paving the way towards improved diagnostics of tire rubber degradation and the development of materials with enhanced durability.

Tire rubber is a that typically includes , such as polybutadiene, and added nanoparticles, such as carbon black, to improve its . During driving, strong forces act on the tire, causing its components to move against each another, which can lead to wear and degradation of the material.

Best known for co-discovering the gömböc—the first convex 3D shape with just two balancing points—Domokos aims to understand the physical world by describing its forms in the simplest possible geometry.

He often begins new projects by concocting original ways to classify shapes. To prove that the gömböc existed before they found it, he and Péter Várkonyi introduced mathematically precise definitions of flatness and thinness. To categorize pebbles, Domokos counts their number of stable and unstable balancing points. And to describe tessellating patterns in rock cracks or nanomaterials, he calculates just two numbers: the average number of “tiles” meeting at each vertex in the “mosaic” and the average number of vertices per tile.

The point is to find “a new language” to describe the shapes, says mathematician Krisztina Regős, one of Domokos’s graduate students. “The first thing that people do when they understand something: give it a name,” Domokos says. “And shapes don’t have names.”

In a surprising new study, researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have found that the electron beam radiation that they previously thought degraded crystals can actually repair cracks in these nanostructures.

The groundbreaking discovery provides a new pathway to create more perfect crystal nanostructures, a process that is critical to improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of materials that are used in virtually all electronic devices we use every day.

“For a long time, researchers studying nanostructures were thinking that when we put the crystals under radiation to study them that they would degrade,” said Andre Mkhoyan, a University of Minnesota chemical engineering and materials science professor and lead researcher in the study. “What we showed in this study is that when we took a crystal of titanium dioxide and irradiate it with an electron , the naturally occurring narrow actually filled in and healed themselves.”

Ceramic nanowires could essentially be used even for car tires reducing even hazardous rubber waste.


A team of MIT-led engineers found a simple, inexpensive way to strengthen Inconel 718 with ceramic nanowires to be used in metal PBF AM processes. The team believes that their general approach could be used to improve many other materials. “There is always a significant need for the development of more capable materials for extreme environments. We believe that this method has great potential for other materials in the future,” said Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in Nuclear Engineering and a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE).

Li, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), is one of three corresponding authors of a paper on the work that appeared in the April 5 issue of Additive Manufacturing. The other corresponding authors are Professor Wen Chen of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Professor A. John Hart of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Co-first authors of the paper are Emre Tekoğlu, an MIT postdoc in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE); Alexander D. O’Brien, an NSE graduate student; and Jian Liu of UMass Amherst. Additional authors are Baoming Wang, an MIT postdoc in DMSE; Sina Kavak of Istanbul Technical University; Yong Zhang, a research specialist at the MRL; So Yeon Kim, a DMSE graduate student; Shitong Wang, an NSE graduate student; and Duygu Agaogullari of Istanbul Technical University. The study was supported by Eni S.p. A. through the MIT Energy Initiative, the National Science Foundation, and ARPA-E.

When it comes to human longevity, you might envision nanobots helping our bodies operate more efficiently. But our bodies are biological machines in their own right, evolved to handle any situation in the real world from illness to cold to hunger. Our bodies heal themselves, and they can be programmed to do so if we understood that language better.

This video talks about DNA and genes, and the epigenetic mechanisms that read that information. The epigenetic clock is one way to measure the age of cells, and this can be reversed with current technologies. We discuss experiments by David Sinclair, which made blind mice see again, and experiments by Greg Fahy, which regenerated the immune system of humans and reset their cellular age by 2 years.

Asking our bodies to heal themselves could be one of the largest medical breakthroughs ever, instead of trying mainly chemical means of medication. And it has significant implications for whether or not we can achieve longevity escape velocity and continue to live more or less indefinitely. This promises to be a very interesting topic.

#aging #longevity #science.

Researchers from Changchun University of Science and Technology (CUST) and City University of Hong Kong (CityU) have conducted a survey on the fabrication of flexible sensors using nanomaterials of different dimensions and the triggering methods of interaction between these sensors and virtual reality applications.

The review, published in the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing (IJEM), highlights the recent advancements in -based flexible sensors (NMFSs) involving various nanomaterial frameworks such as nanoparticles, nanowires, and nanofilms.

Different triggering mechanisms for interaction between NMFSs and metaverse/virtual reality applications are discussed, e.g., skin-mechanics-triggered, temperature-triggered, magnetically triggered, and neural-triggered interfaces.

Two-photon polymerization is a potential method for nanofabrication to integrate nanomaterials based on femtosecond laser-based methods. Challenges in the field of 3D nanoprinting include slow layer-by-layer printing and limited material options as a result of laser-matter interactions.

In a new report now on Science Advances, Chenqi Yi and a team of scientists in Technology Sciences, Medicine, and Industrial Engineering at the Wuhan University China and the Purdue University U.S., showed a new 3D nanoprinting approach known as free-space nanoprinting by using an optical brush.

This concept allowed them to develop precise and spatial writing paths beyond optical limits to form 4D functional structures. The method facilitated the rapid aggregation and solidification of radicals to facilitate polymerization with increased sensitivity to , to provide high accuracy, free-space painting much like Chinese brush painting on paper.

A quickie about E5.


Hello, i am back! Blood, sweat and tears have been shed these past months of absence. But enough sweating was done during the summer, tears have already been shed, so that just leaves me with blood. And whether taking a part of blood (plasma) and injecting it into old animals is enough for rejuvenation. That’s right, many of you may remember, earlier this year i made a video on the oldest living rat.- and now we have some updates: in particular, (i) what actually were the rats given, and (ii) what changes were seen, showing both some DNAm and glycan age data.

Find me on Twitter — https://twitter.com/EleanorSheekey.

The method is still at its basic stage but multiple such microscopes could be pooled up to build a larger quantum computer.

Researchers at the IBS Center for Quantum Nanoscience (QNS) in Seoul, South Korea, have successfully demonstrated using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to perform quantum computation using electrons as qubits, a press release said.

Quantum computing is usually associated with terms such as atom traps or superconductors that aid in isolating quantum states or qubits that serve as a basic unit of information. In many ways, everything in nature is quantum and can be used to perform quantum computations as long as we can isolate its quantum states.

An unnamed Ukrainian scientist has allegedly developed a new material that can mask heat signatures of troops and gear from Russian drones.

“Necessity is the mother of all inventions,” as the saying goes, and this saying has never been more accurate than when applied to wargear. The latest exemplar of this is a new “invisibility cloak” developed by a Ukrainian material scientist to help protect Ukrainians from Russian drones. As reported by inews.


Aurumarcus/iStock.

Hidden in plain sight.