Lifeboat Foundation

A major goal in renewable energy research is to harvest the energy of the sun to convert water into hydrogen gas, a storable fuel. Now, with a nanoparticle-based system, researchers have set a record for one of the half-reactions in this process, reporting 100% efficiency for the reduction of water to hydrogen (Nano Lett. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b04813).

To make such water-splitting systems, researchers must find the right materials to absorb light and catalyze the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen. The two half-reactions in this process—the reduction of water to hydrogen gas, and the oxidation of water to oxygen gas—must be isolated from each other so their products don’t react and explode. “Completing the cycle in an efficient, stable, safe fashion with earth-abundant elements is an ongoing challenge,” says chemist Nathan S. Lewis of Caltech, who was not involved in this study.

Until recently, the efficiency of the reduction step had maxed out at 60%. One challenge is that electrons and positive charges formed in the light absorption process can rapidly recombine, preventing the electrons from reducing water molecules to form hydrogen. To overcome this problem, several years ago, Lilac Amirav of Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and her colleagues designed a nanoparticle-based system (J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2010, DOI: 10.1021/jz100075c) that would physically separate the charges formed during photocatalysis.

Continue reading “Nanoscale system reaches perfect efficiency for solar fuel production step” »

Love on a Subatomic Scale.

When talking about love and romance, people often bring up unseen and mystical connections. Such connections exist in the subatomic world as well, thanks to a bizarre and counterintuitive phenomenon called quantum entanglement. The basic idea of quantum entanglement is that two particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space; a change induced in one will affect the other. In 1964, physicist John Bell posited that such changes can occur instantaneously, even if the particles are very far apart. Bell’s Theorem is regarded as an important idea in modern physics, but it seems to make little sense. After all, Albert Einstein had proven years before that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Indeed, Einstein famously described the entanglement phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” In the last half-century, many researchers have run experiments that aimed to test Bell’s Theorem. But they have tended to come up short because it’s tough to design and build equipment with the needed sensitivity and performance, NASA officials said. Last year, however, three different research groups were able to perform substantive tests of Bell’s Theorem, and all of them found support for the basic idea. One of those studies was led by Krister Shalm, a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. Shalm and his colleagues used special metal strips cooled to cryogenic temperatures, which makes them superconducting — they have no electrical resistance. A photon hits the metal and turns it back into a normal electrical conductor for a split second, and scientists can see that happen. This technique allowed the researchers to see how, if at all, their measurements of one photon affected the other photon in an entangled pair. The results, which were published in the journal Physical Review Letters, strongly backed Bell’s Theorem. “Our paper and the other two published last year show that Bell was right: any model of the world that contains hidden variables must also allow for entangled particles to influence one another at a distance,” co-author Francesco Marsili, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. There are practical applications to this work as well. The “superconducting nanowire single photon detectors” (SNSPDs) used in the Shalm group’s experiment, which were built at NIST and JPL, could be used in cryptography and in deep-space communications, NASA officials said. NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere Dust and Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission, which orbited the moon from October 2013 to April 2014, helped demonstrate some of this communications potential. LADEE’s Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration used components on the spacecraft and a ground-based receiver similar to SNSPDs. The experiment showed that it might be possible to build sensitive laser communications arrays that would enable much more data to be up- and downloaded to faraway space probes, NASA officials said.

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The nanoscale coating that’s at least 95% air repels the broadest range of liquids of any material in its class, causing them to bounce off the treated surface, according to the University of Michigan engineering researchers who developed it.

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A video about how fast technological progress is going, how much technology has improved the world and the potential for technology to solve our most pressing challenges. Inspired in part by the book Abundance by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, and by the video “Shift Happens 3.0” (also known as “Did You Know”) by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

Among the things mentioned are developments and possibilities within information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. The video also touches upon how several of these developments are exponential, but it does not get into the realm of technological singularity and the thoughts of people such as Ray Kurzweil, which is the topic of some of my other videos.

Continue reading “Did You Know? The Future Is Better Than You Think!” »

Plasmonics, the study of how electrons behave in a metal under an electromagnetic field, requires the use of specialty coherent light sources as a basic tool. Optical interferometry can potentially become more important in biomedicine if only the technology could be made more compact, practical, and proven useful.

Toward that end researchers at Brown University have developed a way of using plasmonics techniques without using a coherent light source at all. This allows optical interferometry at the nanoscale and should lead to new types of biomedical sensors that can do rapid wide spectrum analysis for a variety of markers.

Here’s more details about the technology from Brown University:

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At Vanderbilt University scientists are building an artificial kidney that they envision will one day will be a standard of care over dialysis. The device consists of a silicon nanotechnology filter chip and embedded living kidney cells that would work together to mimic the functionality of a healthy kidney. The end result is expected to be about the size of a natural kidney, small enough to be implantable and powered by the body’s own blood flow.

The filter component has tiny pores that can be individually shaped to perform a specific task. These filters would sit in a series, each one performing a different filtration step. Between the filter slices there would be living kidney cells that perform tasks that the man made components are not very good at, including reabsorption of nutrients and getting rid of accumulated waste.

Here’s video with Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Dr. William Fissell, the lead scientist on the research:

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(Phys.org)—Researchers have designed and implemented an algorithm that solves computing problems using a strategy inspired by the way that an amoeba branches out to obtain resources. The new algorithm, called AmoebaSAT, can solve the satisfiability (SAT) problem—a difficult optimization problem with many practical applications—using orders of magnitude fewer steps than the number of steps required by one of the fastest conventional algorithms.

The researchers predict that the amoeba-inspired computing system may offer several benefits, such as high efficiency, miniaturization, and low energy consumption, that could lead to a new computing paradigm for nanoscale high-speed problem solving.

Led by Masashi Aono, Associate Principal Investigator at the Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and at PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, the researchers have published a paper on the amoeba-inspired system in a recent issue of Nanotechnology.

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One of my favorites for 2016 — smart contact lenses.

Researchers at RMIT University and the University of Adelaide have joined forces to create a stretchable nano-scale device to manipulate light.

RMIT University.

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Creating Qubit from a CMOS transitor.

Scientists make a qubit at the sharp edges within a silicon nanowire transistor.

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