Lifeboat Foundation

Chemists have created nanorobots propelled by magnets that remove pollutants from water. The invention could be scaled up to provide a sustainable and affordable way of cleaning up contaminated water in treatment plants.

Martin Pumera at the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague, in the Czech Republic and his colleagues developed the nanorobots by using a temperature-sensitive polymer material and iron oxide. The polymer acts like tiny hands that can pick up and dispose of pollutants in the water, while the iron oxide makes the nanorobots magnetic. The researchers also added oxygen and hydrogen atoms to the iron oxide that can attach onto target pollutants.

The robots are about 200 nanometres wide and are powered by magnetic fields, which allow the team to control their movements.

Circa 2020 face_with_colon_three

Liquid metals are a promising functional material due to their unique combination of metallic properties and fluidity at room temperature. They are of interest in wide-ranging fields including stretchable and flexible electronics, reconfigurable devices, microfluidics, biomedicine, material synthesis, and catalysis. Transformation of bulk liquid metal into particles has enabled further advances by allowing access to a broader palette of fabrication techniques for device manufacture or by increasing area available for surface-based applications. For gallium-based liquid metal alloys, particle stabilization is typically achieved by the oxide that forms spontaneously on the surface, even when only trace amounts of oxygen are present. The utility of the particles formed is governed by the chemical, electrical, and mechanical properties of this oxide. To overcome some of the intrinsic limitations of the native oxide, it is demonstrated here for the first time that 2D graphene-based materials can encapsulate liquid metal particles during fabrication and imbue them with previously unattainable properties. This outer encapsulation layer is used to physically stabilize particles in a broad range of pH environments, modify the particles’ mechanical behavior, and control the electrical behavior of resulting films. This demonstration of graphene-based encapsulation of liquid metal particles represents a first foray into the creation of a suite of hybridized 2D material coated liquid metal particles.

Messenger RNA

#biology #biochemistry #rna

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Microbial life may have resided within the first four kilometers of Mars’s porous crust.

Four billion years ago, the solar system was still young. Almost fully formed, its planets were starting to experience asteroid strikes a little less frequently. Our own planet could have become habitable as long as 3.9 billion years ago, but its primitive biosphere was much different than it is today. Life had not yet invented photosynthesis, which some 500 million years later would become its main source of energy. The primordial microbes — the common ancestors to all current life forms on Earth — in our planet’s oceans, therefore, had to survive on another source of energy. They consumed chemicals released from inside the planet through its hydrothermal systems and volcanoes, which built up as gas in the atmosphere.

Some of the oldest life forms in our biosphere were microorganisms known as “hydrogenotrophic methanogens” that particularly benefited from the atmospheric composition of the time. Feeding on the CO₂ (carbon dioxide) and H2 (dihydrogen) that abounded in the atmosphere (with H2 representing between 0.01 and 0.1% of the atmospheric composition, compared to the current approximate of 0.00005%), they harnessed enough energy to colonize the surface of our planet’s oceans. we explore Mars, it is becoming clearer that similar environmental conditions were developing on its surface at the same time as those that enabled methanogens to flourish in the oceans back on Earth.

A team of researchers from Purdue University claim to have discovered the “chemistry behind the origin of life” on Earth in simple droplets of water, and they’re using strikingly strong language to celebrate the findings.

Graham Cooks, chemistry professor at Purdue and lead author of a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, called it a “dramatic discovery” and the “secret ingredient for building life” in a statement.

“This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” he added. “This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water.”

Breadcrumbs…

When University of Cambridge astronomer Amy Bonsor and her colleagues studied the spectrum of light from white dwarfs — the burned-out remains of small stars — they noticed flecks of heavier elements on the stars’ surfaces where there should have been only a glowing expanse of helium and hydrogen. The astronomers realized the stars’ surfaces were littered with debris from asteroids and comets that had fallen into the stars, visible on the surface just briefly before sinking into the depths.

The chemical makeup of those planet crumbs — visible in their spectra, the specific wavelengths of light each chemical emits — suggests that the building blocks of planets are as ancient as a star system itself, rather than things that form later from the disk of material orbiting the star.

Continue reading “Dead stars covered in space debris could reveal the origins of planets” »

Since the isolation of graphene, we’ve identified a number of materials that form atomically thin sheets. Like graphene, some of these sheets are made of a single element; others form from chemicals where the atomic bonds naturally create a sheet-like structure. Many of these materials have distinct properties. While graphene is an excellent conductor of electricity, a number of others are semiconductors. And it’s possible to tune their properties further based on how you arrange the layers of a multi-sheet stack.

Given all those options, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that researchers have figured out how to make electronics out of these materials, including flash memory and the smallest transistors ever made, by some measures. Most of these, however, are demonstrations of the ability to make the hardware—they’re not integrated into a useful device. But a team of researchers has now demonstrated that it’s possible to go beyond simple demonstrations by building a 900-pixel imaging sensor using an atomically thin material.

The meteorites that bombarded Mars during the early days of the inner solar system may have carried enough water to create a 300-metre-deep ocean on the planet.

Martin Bizzarro at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and his colleagues have analysed the concentration of a rare chromium isotope, known as chromium-54, in samples of meteorites that have come to Earth from Mars to estimate how much water was deposited on the Red Planet by asteroids.

The uppermost layer of Mars contains the chemical signatures of carbonaceous, or C-type, meteorites that bombarded it as its crust solidified some 4.5 billion years ago.

Scientists from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Osaka University introduced a method for manufacturing complex microrobots driven by chemical energy using in situ integration. By 3D-printing and assembling the mechanical structures and actuators of microrobots inside a microfluidic chip, the resulting microrobots were able to perform desired functions, like moving or grasping. This work may help realize the vision of microsurgery performed by autonomous robots.

As medical technology advances, increasingly complicated surgeries that were once considered impossible have become reality. However, we are still far away from a promised future in which microrobots coursing through a patient’s body can perform procedures, such as microsurgery or cancer cell elimination.

Continue reading “3D-printing microrobots with multiple component modules inside a microfluidic chip” »