This company is rebuilding communities using old plastic.
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Plastic brick houses
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All material things appear to be made of elementary particles that are held together by fundamental forces. But what are their exact properties? How do they affect how our universe looks and changes? And are there particles and forces that we don’t know of yet?
Questions with cosmic implications like these drive many of the scientific efforts at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Three distinguished particle physicists have joined the lab over the past months to pursue research on two particularly mysterious forms of matter: neutrinos and dark matter.
Neutrinos, which are abundantly produced in nuclear reactions, are among the most common types of particles in the universe. Although they were discovered 60 years ago, their basic properties puzzle scientists to this date.
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Nice and Kudos to ORNL.
A team led by Jonathan Poplawsky of the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences used advanced microscopy techniques to discover efficiency differences of crystalline structures of various mixtures of cadmium, tellurium and selenium. In fact, selenium is an integral part of the formulation that resulted in a world record for solar cell efficiency. The team’s paper is published in Nature Communications.
While some of today’s solar cells use a blend of cadmium and tellurium to convert light into electricity, adding the optimum amount of selenium in the right places could help increase efficiency from the current mark of about 22 percent to levels approaching the theoretical limit of 30–33 percent. The trick is to determine the best ratio of selenium.
“Using different microscopy methods, we were able to gain a better understanding of the phases, compositions and crystalline structures that allow these materials to convert light into electricity more efficiently,” said Poplawsky, adding that the availability of data is limited. “In some instances, adding too much selenium changes the crystalline structure of cadmium-tellurium and dramatically reduces the conversion efficiency.”
Amazing and can serve many areas.
(DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) In work that aims to protect soldiers from biological and chemical threats, a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists has created a material that is highly breathable yet protective from biological agents.
This material is the first key component of futuristic smart uniforms that also will respond to and protect from environmental chemical hazards. The research appears in the July 27 edition of the journal, Advanced Materials.
High breathability is a critical requirement for protective clothing to prevent heat-stress and exhaustion when military personnel are engaged in missions in contaminated environments. Current protective military uniforms are based on heavyweight full-barrier protection or permeable adsorptive protective garments that cannot meet the c, ritical demand of simultaneous high comfort and protection, and provide a passive rather than active response to an environmental threat.
A Russian web hosting service is providing an avenue for cybercriminals to set up sites for selling stolen passwords, credit cards, and other pilfered personal information, a cybersecurity firm said.
The web hosting company Deer.io has become popular among online thieves because it’s easy to use and asks few questions from users, said Rick Holland, vice president of strategy at the cybersecurity firm Digital Shadows, on Tuesday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.
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