Lifeboat Foundation

A team from NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a novel device using gallium nitride nanopillars on silicon that significantly improves the conversion of heat into electricity. This could potentially recover large amounts of wasted heat energy, benefiting industries and power grids.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have fabricated a novel device that could dramatically boost the conversion of heat into electricity. If perfected, the technology could help recoup some of the heat energy that is wasted in the U.S. at a rate of about $100 billion each year.

Continue reading “Revamping Energy Recovery: New Way To Efficiently Convert Waste Heat Into Electricity” »

Scientists making the “Air-gen” device have discovered that any material can be used to generate electricity from the air.

Year 2022 o.o!!!

From ocean depths to mountain peaks, humans have littered the planet with tiny shards of plastic. We have even absorbed these microplastics into our bodies—with uncertain implications.

Images of plastic pollution have become familiar: a turtle suffocated by a shopping bag, water bottles washed up on beaches, or the monstrous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” of floating detritus.

Continue reading “‘They’re everywhere’: microplastics in oceans, air and human body” »

Researchers have synthesized a chalcogenide compound that has the electronic structure of an ideal Dirac semimetal—which could facilitate the study of this exotic class of materials.

New York City is sinking under the weight of its massive buildings, leaving it more vulnerable to rising seas, a new study finds.

Most coastal cities are slowly sinking as the earth beneath them settles and groundwater is drained away. In some metropolises, the weight of large, concrete-and-steel skyscrapers may be hastening this slump, but experts rarely, if ever, account for the mass of large buildings in projections of future sinking.

For the new study, scientists tallied the weight of every building in New York, which they put at 842 million tons, and estimated the downward force of these structures across the city. They found that buildings are leaving a bigger imprint in areas rich in clay than in areas where sand or bedrock predominate.

As potential alternatives to lithium-ion batteries, rechargeable calcium (Ca) metal batteries offer advantageous features such as high energy density, cost-effectiveness, and natural elemental abundance. Its properties are also thought to help accelerate ion transport and diffusion in electrolytes and cathode materials, giving it an edge over other lithium-ion battery alternatives such as magnesium and zinc.

However, many challenges impede the development of practical Ca metal batteries. The challenges include the lack of an efficient electrolyte and the absence of cathode materials with sufficient Ca²⁺ storage capabilities.

Now, Tohoku University researchers have developed a prototype calcium metal rechargeable battery capable of 500 cycles of repeated charge-discharge – the benchmark for practical use.

A combination of two techniques provides warning signs that the stress on a material will lead to failure.

Soft elastomers, such as rubber, plastic, and silicone, are used in thousands of products, such as gaskets, hoses, and inflatable rafts, but under stress, these materials tend to crack abruptly, without warning. Now, using an improved method to image structural changes in a sample under stress, researchers have shown that a subtle pattern of molecular motions at the surface of the material occurs several minutes before a final failure [1]. With development, they believe the technique may help engineers monitor materials while in use and detect failures well before they happen. The researchers also showed that their approach works for some more brittle polymer materials.

When studying the mechanical failure of a material, researchers often experiment by cutting a small notch into a thin sheet of the material and applying a slowly increasing force that pulls the notch apart. Eventually, a crack will grow and spread rapidly from the notch. Materials scientist Costantino Creton of Paris Sciences and Letters University says that over the past few years, such experiments have led to two general findings for elastomers. First, by embedding light-emitting, force-sensitive molecules into test materials, researchers have shown that, prior to crack initiation, irreversible molecular-bond damage accumulates very close to the initial notch (within 0.1 mm). Second, using sensitive spectroscopy techniques, other studies have found signs of unusual microscopic rearrangements of the polymer molecules occurring over larger regions of the material just prior to failure.

Single electrons stay stationary in superconductors with “flat-band” electronic structures, which could lead to low-energy-consumption devices made from such materials.

In 2018, researchers discovered that two layers of graphene, stacked and twisted at a specific angle, could exhibit superconductivity. Theorists have determined that the electronic structure of such a twisted material approximately resembles a “flat band,” which means that the energy of the materials’ free electrons remains constant regardless of the electrons’ momenta. This phenomenon inspired a flurry of work on systems that exhibit flat-band superconductivity. However, most of the research has focused on how such systems behave under equilibrium conditions. Now Päivi Törmä of Aalto University in Finland and her colleagues have probed the behavior of superconducting flat-band systems under nonequilibrium conditions [1]. The findings could help in the design of superconducting devices with low energy consumption.

Törmä and her colleagues considered an idealized flat-band material subjected to an applied voltage, making it a nonequilibrium system. Their predictions indicate that in this nonequilibrium system the paired and unpaired electrons follow the same behavior patterns as those in an equilibrium system: unpaired electrons form stationary quasiparticles and paired electrons flow with zero resistance. Additionally, in both types of systems the flat band helps the electrons form the bound pairs required for superconductivity.

Meet the house that diapers built.

Researchers have designed and erected a house that has shredded, disposable diapers mixed into its concrete and mortar. A single-story home of about 36 square meters can pack nearly 2 cubic meters of used diapers into its floors, columns and walls, the team reports May 18 in Scientific Reports.

Using recycled diapers as composite building materials would not only shrink landfill waste but also could make such homes more affordable, the team says, a particular need in developing countries like Indonesia where the demand for low-cost housing far outstrips the supply.