From VC Elements—bridging the gap between global trends shaping our future, and the raw materials powering them ⚡️.
Coal is Still King
Coal still leads the charge when it comes to electricity, representing 35.4% of global power generation in 2022, followed by natural gas at 22.7%, and hydroelectric at 14.9%.
Apple’s iPhone 15 launched at the company’s fall event today, and I got to spend some time with the new smartphone. It didn’t get the flashy new titanium of the iPhone 15 Pro that Brian checked out, but it does have a new design that includes softer, more rounded edges and the introduction the Dynamic Island to a non-Pro phone for the first time.
The iPhone 15 is actually very impressive in the looks department. Apple went into details about all the material science magic it put into the new colored glass and anodized aluminum used in the cases during its presentation. The ultimate effect, and all most people need to care about, is that they look really good, like candy-colored confections in muted but fun tones.
If you could quickly predict the reactivity of a material in different scenarios using only its atomic-level geometry, you’d hold the golden ticket to finding application-specific catalytic materials. Some methods exist for making these predictions, but they require detailed knowledge about the arrangement of the atoms and are computationally expensive to perform and thus slow to run. Now Evan Miu and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a method that requires only information about the connectivity of the atoms, is computationally cheap, and is quick to run [1]. Their method accurately predicts how metal oxides interact with hydrogen in a reaction important to energy storage and catalysis.
Miu and the team hypothesized that they could predict a material’s reactivity using a single number that describes the so-called global connectivity of the system’s atoms. A material with a high global connectivity contains atoms that are, on average, bonded to more of their neighbors than does a system with a low value of this parameter. The researchers have used a similar concept to study reactivity for metal catalysts, but not for more complex structures, such as metal oxides.
To test their idea, the researchers examined—in different metal oxides—so-called hydrogen intercalation, a type of redox reaction that alters the host material’s properties. They found that they could use each oxide’s global connectivity to determine the strength of its hydrogen reactivity. The model-determined values for the various hydrogen-binding energies agree with experimental data and took mere seconds to obtain. The tool could thus allow scientists to rapidly develop and optimize novel materials to use in energy-storage applications.
BARDA is part of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The NTxscribe platform is a cell-free, continuous flow manufacturing system that reportedly delivers scalable RNA (including mRNA and self-amplifying RNA) materials in a tabletop footprint. This enzymatic process is designed to provide a low cost and rapidly deployable, vertically integrated manufacturing system, according to Jamie Coffin, PhD, CEO of NTx. Through this program, the system is being evaluated for its express development of RNA vaccines and therapeutics for infectious diseases, as well as its capability for distributed biomanufacturing.
“The traditional batch processes for developing vaccines and other biologics are burdensome and cannot be scaled quickly in the event of an emergency,” said Coffin. “Over the course of this project, we will aim to prove that NTxscribe can help BARDA meet its goals toward decentralized and rapidly deployable vaccine manufacturing.”
There are several perfectly good reasons why water isn’t a popular medium for calligraphers to write in. Constantly shifting and swirling, it doesn’t take long for ink to diffuse and flow out of formation.
An ingenious ‘pen’ developed by the researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, could give artists a whole new medium to work with.
The new device is a tiny, 50 micron-wide bead made of a special material that exchanges ions in the liquid, creating zones of relatively low pH. Traces of particles suspended in the water are then drawn to the acidic solution. Drawing out that zone can create persistent, ‘written’ lines.
Prepare to be awestruck by the incredible technological advancements on the horizon! Explore the mind-blowing innovations coming in the next 10 years.
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Year 2022 femtosecond logic gates for computers once thought to be almost a myth only for 2099 dreams is now real.
Light-field control of real and virtual charge carriers in a gold–graphene–gold heterostructure is demonstrated, and used to create a logic gate for application in lightwave electronics.
An active supermassive black hole is one of the greatest wonders in the cosmos.
A dense, invisible object that can be billions of times the mass of our Sun is surrounded by a vast, churning disk and torus of material, blazing with light as it swirls down onto the black hole center. But how big do these structures grow?
For the first time, an unambiguous detection of near-infrared light reveals the outskirts of the massive accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole hundreds of millions times our Sun’s mass, in a galaxy called III Zw 002 some 1.17 billion light-years away.
In a study published in Matter, researchers led by Prof. Yang Zhaorong and Prof. Hao Ning from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that the quasi-one-dimensional charge density wave (CDW) material cupric telluride (CuTe) provides a rare and promising platform for the study of multiple CDW orders and superconductivity under high pressure.
The interplay between superconductivity and CDW has always been one of the central issues in the research of condensed matter physics. While theory generally predicts that they compete with each other, superconductivity and CDW can manifest complex relationships under external stimuli in practical materials. Additionally, recent research in the superconducting cuprates and the Kagome CsV3Sb5 has found that superconductivity interacts with multiple CDW orders. However, in the above two systems, there are some other quantum orders in the phase diagrams, which hinders a good understanding of the interplay between superconductivity and multiple CDWs.
In this study, the researchers provided solid evidence for a second CDW order in the quasi-one-dimensional CDW material CuTe under high pressure. In addition, they found that superconductivity can be induced and that it has complex relationships with the native and emergent CDW orders.
To assist humans during their day-to-day activities and successfully complete domestic chores, robots should be able to effectively manipulate the objects we use every day, including utensils and cleaning equipment. Some objects, however, are difficult to grasp and handle for robotic hands, due to their shape, flexibility, or other characteristics.
These objects include textile-based cloths, which are commonly used by humans to clean surfaces, polish windows, glass or mirrors, and even mop the floors. These are all tasks that could be potentially completed by robots, yet before this can happen robots will need to be able to grab and manipulate cloths.
Researchers at ETH Zurich recently introduced a new computational technique to create visual representations of crumpled cloths, which could in turn help to plan effective strategies for robots to grasp cloths and use them when completing tasks. This technique, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, was found to generalize well across cloths with different physical properties, and of different shapes, sizes and materials.
