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?
A study of 29 European lakes has found that some naturally-occurring lake bacteria grow faster and more efficiently on the remains of plastic bags than on natural matter like leaves and twigs.
The bacteria break down the carbon compounds in plastic to use as food for their growth.
The scientists say that enriching waters with particular species of bacteria could be a natural way to remove plastic pollution from the environment.
Studies of dense carbon materials formed by bolide impacts or produced by laboratory compression provide key information on the high-pressure behavior of carbon and for identifying and designing unique structures for technological applications. However, a major obstacle to studying and designing these materials is an incomplete understanding of their fundamental structures. Here, we report the remarkable structural diversity of cubic/hexagonally (c/h) stacked diamond and their association with diamond-graphite nanocomposites containing sp3-/sp2-bonding patterns, i.e., diaphites, from hard carbon materials formed by shock impact of graphite in the Canyon Diablo iron meteorite. We show evidence for a range of intergrowth types and nanostructures containing unusually short (0.31 nm) graphene spacings and demonstrate that previously neglected or misinterpreted Raman bands can be associated with diaphite structures. Our study provides a structural understanding of the material known as lonsdaleite, previously described as hexagonal diamond, and extends this understanding to other natural and synthetic ultrahard carbon phases. The unique three-dimensional carbon architectures encountered in shock-formed samples can place constraints on the pressure–temperature conditions experienced during an impact and provide exceptional opportunities to engineer the properties of carbon nanocomposite materials and phase assemblages.
Graphene electronic tattoos are unique devices used in healthcare systems for personalized applications. Monolayered graphene electronic tattoos are used to monitor different electrophysiological signals in humans. Despite their innovative functionality, these devices suffer from an impermeability to sweat and difficulties in reproducibility.
Study: Graphene electronic tattoos 2.0 with enhanced performance, breathability and robustness. Image Credit: Tex vector/Shutterstock.com.
In an article recently published in the journal npj 2D Materials and Applications, an enhanced version of graphene electronic tattoos was introduced. This update is wearable on the skin with sweat permeability, superior electrical properties, and robustness. While the older systems suffered scattered electrical properties due to growth or transfer-related discrepancies, the reported graphene electronic tattoos with graphene nanoscrolls (GNS) or multilayered graphene structures showed enhanced properties.
A team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the University of Michigan has found that the rate of cooling in reactions dramatically affects the type of uranium molecules that form.
The team’s experimental work, conducted over about a year and a half starting in October 2020, attempts to help understand what uranium compounds might form in the environment after a nuclear event. It has recently been detailed in Scientific Reports.
“One of our most important findings was learning that the rate of cooling affects the behavior of uranium,” said Mark Burton, the paper’s lead author and a chemist in the Lab’s Materials Science Division. “The big picture here is that we want to understand uranium chemistry in energetic environments.”
Circa 2018 unlimited energy using graphene.
University of Arkansas researchers have shown that the motion of graphene could supply an unlimited amount of clean energy. (Image credit: Pixabay)Graphene advancements are rolling out on a regular basis, with new developments in production 0, strength 0, and have even used it to create 3D printed objects. Researchers from the University of Arkansas have also utilized the material to create a source of potential unlimited clean energy, thanks to its flexibility.
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology and the National Institute for Material Science in Tsukuba (Japan) have recently probed a Chern mosaic topology and Berry-curvature magnetism in magic-angle graphene. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, offers new insight about topological disorder that can occur in condensed matter physical systems.
“Magic angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) has drawn a huge amount of interest over the past few years due to its experimentally accessible flat bands, creating a playground of highly correlated physics,” Matan Bocarsly, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org, “One such correlated phase observed in transport measurements is the quantum anomalous Hall effect, where topological edge currents are present even in the absence of an applied magnetic field.”
The quantum anomalous Hall effect is a charge transport-related phenomenon, in which a material’s Hall resistance is quantized to the so-called von Klitzing constant. It resembles the so-called integer quantum Hall effect, which Bocarsly and his colleagued had studied extensively in their previous works, particularly in graphene and MATBG.
