Lifeboat Foundation

Reactive molecules, such as free radicals, can be produced in the body after exposure to certain environments or substances and go on to cause cell damage. Antioxidants can minimize this damage by interacting with the radicals before they affect cells.

Led by Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering, Penn State researchers have applied this concept to prevent imaging damage to conducting polymers that comprise soft electronic devices, such as organic solar cells, organic transistors, bioelectronic devices and flexible electronics. The researchers published their findings in Nature Communications today (Jan. 8).

According to Gomez, visualizing the structures of conducting polymers is crucial to further develop these materials and enable commercialization of soft electronic devices—but the actual imaging can cause damage that limits what researchers can see and understand.

O,.o circa 2020.

Their quantum phase battery consists of an n-doped InAs nanowire forming the core of the battery (the pile) and Al superconducting leads as poles. It is charged by applying an external magnetic field, which then can be switched off.

Cristina Sanz-Fernández and Claudio Guarcello, also from CFM, adapted the theory to simulate the experimental findings.

Continue reading “The World’s First Quantum Phase Battery Is Here” »

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have discovered that carbon nanotube membrane pores could enable ultra-rapid dialysis processes that would greatly reduce treatment time for hemodialysis patients.

The ability to separate molecular constituents in complex solutions is crucial to many biological and man-made processes. One way is via the application of a concentration gradient across a porous membrane. This drives ions or molecules smaller than the pore diameters from one side of the membrane to the other while blocking anything that is too large to fit through the pores.

In nature, biological membranes such as those in the kidney or liver can perform complex filtrations while still maintaining high throughput. Synthetic membranes, however, often struggle with a well-known trade-off between selectivity and permeability. The same material properties that dictate what can and cannot pass through the membrane inevitably reduce the rate at which filtration can occur.

University of Wyoming researchers demonstrated their method using a traditional microwave oven. Read it here.

Every year, over a million people develop health care-acquired infections during their hospital stays. And around 100000 of them die from those complications.

But researchers at the University of Georgia are determined to change that, and their new study shows a promising tool for preventing infections before they happen.

Continue reading “Building safer medical devices with innovative protective nanoparticle coating” »

A multitasking nanomachine that can act as a heat engine and a refrigerator at the same time has been created by RIKEN engineers. The device is one of the first to test how quantum effects, which govern the behavior of particles on the smallest scale, might one day be exploited to enhance the performance of nanotechnologies.

Conventional heat engines and refrigerators work by connecting two pools of fluid. Compressing one pool causes its fluid to heat up, while rapidly expanding the other pool cools its fluid. If these operations are done in a periodic cycle, the pools will exchange energy and the system can be used as either a heat engine or a fridge.

It would be impossible to set up a macroscale machine that does both tasks simultaneously—nor would engineers want to, says Keiji Ono of the RIKEN Advanced Device Laboratory. “Combining a traditional heat engine with a refrigerator would make it a completely useless machine,” he says. “It wouldn’t know what to do.”

They are as thin as a hair, only a hundred thousand times thinner—so-called two-dimensional materials, consisting of a single layer of atoms, have been booming in research for years. They became known to a wider audience when two Russian-British scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, a building block of graphite. The special feature of such materials is that they possess novel properties that can only be explained with the help of the laws of quantum mechanics and that may be relevant for enhanced technologies. Researchers at the University of Bonn (Germany) have now used ultracold atoms to gain new insights into previously unknown quantum phenomena. They found out that the magnetic orders between two coupled thin films of atoms compete with each other. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

Quantum systems realize very unique states of matter originating from the world of nanostructures. They facilitate a wide variety of new technological applications, e.g. contributing to secure data encryption, introducing ever smaller and faster technical devices and even enabling the development of a quantum computer. In the future, such a computer could solve problems which conventional computers cannot solve at all or only over a long period of time.

How unusual quantum phenomena arise is still far from being fully understood. To shed light on this, a team of physicists led by Prof. Michael Köhl at the Matter and Light for Quantum Computing Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn are using so-called quantum simulators, which mimic the interaction of several quantum particles—something that cannot be done with conventional methods. Even state-of-the-art computer models cannot calculate complex processes such as magnetism and electricity down to the last detail.

“Reverse osmosis membranes are widely used for cleaning water, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about them,” said in a statement Manish Kumar, an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, who co-led the research. “We couldn’t really say how water moves through them, so all the improvements over the past 40 years have essentially been done in the dark.”

The researchers discovered that the problem with desalination membranes was that they were inconsistent in density and mass distribution. By giving the membranes a uniform density at the nanoscale, they were able to improve their performance.

The researchers’ new membranes are 30% to 40% more efficient, requiring less energy to clean more water. Although more efficient than non-membrane desalination processes, reverse osmosis membranes still use plenty of energy, a problematic aspect the researchers are working on.

Ultra-small integrated circuits have revolutionized mobile phones, home appliances, cars, and other everyday technologies. To further miniaturize electronics and enable advanced functions, circuits must be reliably fabricated in three dimensions. Achieving ultrafine 3D shape control by etching into silicon is difficult, because even atomic-scale damage reduces device performance. Researchers at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) have published a new study in Crystal Growth and Design in which they etched silicon to adopt the shape of atomically smooth pyramids. Coating these silicon pyramids with a thin layer of iron imparted magnetic properties that until now were only theoretical.

NAIST researcher and senior author of the study Ken Hattori is widely published in the field of atomically controlled nanotechnology. One focus of Hattori’s research is in improving the functionality of silicon-based technology.

“Silicon is the workhorse of modern electronics because it can act as a semiconductor or an insulator, and it’s an abundant element. However, future technological advances require atomically smooth device fabrication in three dimensions,” says Hattori.