Lifeboat Foundation

Purple is the new black.

Purple bacteria are poised to turn your toilet into a source of energy and useable organic material.

Household sewage and industrial wastewater are very rich in organic compounds, and organic compounds can be very useful. But there’s a catch: we don’t know of any efficient way to extract them from the eww goo yet. So these resource-laden liquids get treated, and the material they contain is handled as a contaminant.

Continue reading “Purple bacteria turn sewage into hydrogen fuel” »

A Hong Kong start-up company has launched an eco-friendly plastic bag dubbed “Invisible Bag” which can easily dissolve in hot water (above 80 degrees Celsius). More importantly, its ingredients are non-toxic and will not cause harm to the environment.

It started by Devana Ng and her French husband Flavien Chaussegros, who are passionate about trail running. Last year, they saw the mountains full of plastic waste and decided to do their part for the planet by reducing the amount of waste. They founded Distinctive Action to promote sustainable and environmentally friendly products. The Invisible Bag is made of Polyvinyl Alcohol (known as PVA) together with plant-based starch, glycerin and water.

After soaking in water for a few minutes, the Invisible Bag will dissolve in hot water, which will turn milky white. However, it is environmentally safe, non-toxic, biodegradable, and leaves no microplastics behind, according to the Distinctive Action’s official website.

In a significant achievement, physicists have produced a two-dimensional supersolid in the lab for the first time.

That may sound incredibly mind-bendy, but it’s a feat researchers have been working towards for more than 50 years. Supersolids are strange materials with atoms arranged in the ordered structure of a solid, yet they can flow without friction, just like a superfluid.

Two years ago, physicists successfully created supersolids using ultra-cold magnetic atoms… but only in one-dimension. Now, a team of Austrian researchers has managed to create the crystal-like structure in 2D for the first time; the result will allow physicists to test and experiment with some of the weirdest materials-science phenomena out there.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have explored high-pressure behavior of shock-compressed tantalum at the Omega Laser Facility at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). The work showed tantalum did not follow the predicted phase changes at high pressure and instead maintained the body-centered cubic (BCC) phase until melt.

The results of the work are featured in a Physical Review Letters paper and focuses on how researchers studied the melting behavior of tantalum at multi-megabar pressures on the nanosecond timescale.

“This work provides an improved physical intuition for how materials melt and respond at such extreme conditions,” said Rick Kraus, lead author of the paper. “These techniques and improved knowledge base are now being applied to understanding how the iron cores of rocky planets solidify and also to more programmatically relevant materials as well.”

An exotic form of magnetism has been discovered and linked to an equally exotic type of electrons, according to scientists who analyzed a new crystal in which they appear at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The magnetism is created and protected by the crystal’s unique electronic structure, offering a mechanism that might be exploited for fast, robust information storage devices.

The newly invented material has an unusual structure that conducts electricity but makes the flowing electrons behave as massless particles, whose magnetism is linked to the direction of their motion. In other materials, such Weyl electrons have elicited new behaviors related to electrical conductivity. In this case, however, the electrons promote the spontaneous formation of a magnetic spiral.

“Our research shows a rare example of these particles driving collective magnetism,” said Collin Broholm, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who led the experimental work at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR). “Our experiment illustrates a unique form of magnetism that can arise from Weyl electrons.”

The Solar System is positively lousy with magnetic fields. They drape around (most of) the planets and their moons, which interact with the system-wide magnetic field swirling out from the Sun.

Although invisible to the naked eye, these magnetic fields leave their marks behind. Earth’s crust is riddled with magnetic materials, for example, that retain a paleomagnetic record of the planet’s changing magnetic field. And meteorites, when we are lucky enough to find them, can tell us about the magnetic field in the environment they formed in, billions of years ago.

Most of the meteorites we study in this manner are from the asteroid belt, which sits between Mars and Jupiter. But astronomers from Japan have just developed a new means of probing the magnetic materials within meteorites from much, much farther away — and thus provided a new tool for understanding the outer reaches of the early Solar System.

Scientists at Australia’s RMIT investigating the massive untapped potential of wave energy have come up with a novel design for a convertor they say operates with far greater efficiency than comparable solutions, and which they hope could open the door to widespread commercial use of the technology. The team’s prototype employs a novel dual-turbine design that sidesteps some common technical issues, and proved capable of harvesting twice the energy from waves as current designs in early experiments.

The idea of capturing energy from ocean waves has been around for centuries, and recently we’re starting to see modern machines designed for these purposes take to the seas in some interesting forms. This includes rotating systems that extract power from vertical and horizontal movement, blowhole-like generators that capture energy as waves push water and air through concrete chambers, and squid-like generators with buoyant arms that rise and fall with the motion of the waves.

One of the more common approaches to harnessing wave energy is known as a point absorber buoy, which consists of a flotation device on the surface that is tethered to the seabed. As the buoy moves up and down with the passing waves, it drives an energy converter mechanism built onto the tether partway below the surface. This might be a geared drivetrain that uses the linear motion to spin a flywheel and generate power, as seen in some experimental designs.

A nearby star-forming region may explain the mystery of tiny grains from beyond the solar system.

Researchers in Singapore and at CalTech have developed a 3D printed fabric with an interesting property: it is generally flexible but can stiffen on demand. You can see a video about the new fabric, below.

The material consists of nylon octahedrons interlocked. The cloth is enclosed in a plastic envelope and vacuum-packed. Once in a vacuum, the sheet becomes much stiffer and can hold many times its own weight.

Continue reading “3D Printed Fabric Stiffens On Demand” »