Lifeboat Foundation

The extra juice comes from a secret ingredient…corn starch.

Could a simple materials change make electric car batteries able to four times more energy? Scientists in South Korea think so. In a new paper in the American Chemical Society’s Nano Letters, a research team details using silicon and repurposed corn starch to make better anodes for lithium ion batteries.

This team is based primarily in the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), where they’ve experimented with microemulsifying silicon, carbon, and corn starch into a new microstructured composite material for use as a battery anode. This is done by mixing silicon nanoparticles and corn starch with propylene gas and heating it all to combine.

Continue reading “Corny Lithium-Ion Batteries Could Hold Quadruple the Charge” »

“It is like using your thumb to control the water spray from a hose,” said Ming Liu, associate professor in UC Riverside’s Marlan. “You know how to get the desired spraying pattern by changing the thumb position, and likewise, in the experiment, we read the light pattern to retrieve the details of the object blocking the five nm-sized light nozzles.”

The light is then focused into a spectrometer, where it forms a tiny ring shape. The researchers can formulate the absorption and scattering images with colors by scanning the probe over an area and recording two spectra for each pixel.

The team expects the new nano-imaging technology can be an important tool to help the semiconductor industry make uniform nanomaterials with consistent properties for use in electronic devices. The new full-color nano-imaging technique could also be used to improve understanding of catalysis, quantum optics, and nanoelectronics.

It’s one thing to produce nano-scale materials, but it’s an entirely different thing imaging them.

Nanomaterials have many applications, especially in electronics, but they have one issue: They are so small that they don’t reflect enough light to show fine details, such as colors, even with the aid of the most powerful microscopes.

Now, researchers from UC Riverside may have come up with a solution. They have conceived of an imaging technology that compresses lamp light into a nanometer-sized spot, holding that light at the end of a silver nanowire. This allows it to reveal previously invisible details such as colors.

Continue reading “‘Squeezed’ Light Can Give Nano-Imaging a Much Needed Boost” »

A team of researchers at the University of Groningen has developed a multicomponent nanopore machine that approaches single molecule protein sequencing—it uses a design that allows for unfolding, threading and degrading a desired protein. In their paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry, the group describes their nanopore machine, how it works and how close it comes to allowing single molecule protein sequencing. Yi-Lun Ying with Nanjing University has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining the purpose of macromolecular machines and the work done by the team with this new effort.

It has been a goal of chemists for many years to create a machine of some type that would allow easy analysis of individual protein molecules, similar to devices that have been created to sequence nucleic acids. Such efforts have been stymied by the high degree of complexity of protein molecules. In this new effort, the researchers have come close to achieving that goal. They have built a tiny (900 kDa) multicomponent nanopore machine that is capable of unfolding a given protein and then presenting it to a protein nanopore (a tiny cavity or pore).

The researchers built the machine by placing a chopper of sorts on top of material borrowed from a bacterium. The material works as a tunnel, directing bits from the chopper through a membrane that was designed to mimic the surface of a cell. The chopper breaks a protein into fragmented bits that are easily exported through the nanopore. As they do so, the fragments impact the flow of charged molecules, which leads to the generation of an electrical signal.

A team of researchers from TU Delft managed to design one of the world’s most precise microchip sensors. The device can function at room temperature—a ‘holy grail’ for quantum technologies and sensing. Combining nanotechnology and machine learning inspired by nature’s spiderwebs, they were able to make a nanomechanical sensor vibrate in extreme isolation from everyday noise. This breakthrough, published in the Advanced Materials Rising Stars Issue, has implications for the study of gravity and dark matter as well as the fields of quantum internet, navigation and sensing.

One of the biggest challenges for studying vibrating objects at the smallest scale, like those used in sensors or quantum hardware, is how to keep ambient thermal noise from interacting with their fragile states. Quantum hardware for example is usually kept at near absolute zero (−273.15°C) temperatures, and refrigerators cost half a million euros apiece. Researchers from TU Delft created a web-shaped microchip sensor that resonates extremely well in isolation from room temperature noise. Among other applications, their discovery will make building quantum devices much more affordable.

Speaker: Swarup Bhunia.

http://www.eecs.case.edu/doku.php?id=eecs: home: seminar_series:upcoming_seminars.

Using a focused laser beam, scientists can manipulate properties of nanomaterials, thus ‘writing’ information onto monolayer materials. By this means, the thinnest light disk at atomic level was demonstrated.

The bottleneck in atomic-scale data storage area may be broken by a simple technique, thanks to recent innovative studies conducted by scientists from Nanjing Normal University (NJNU) and Southeast University (SEU).

Through a simple, efficient and low-cost technique involving the focused laser beam and ozone treatment, the NJNU and SEU research teams, leading by Prof. Hongwei Liu, Prof. Junpeng Lu and Prof. Zhenhua Ni demonstrated that the photoluminescence (PL) emission of WS₂ monolayers can be controlled and modified, and consequently, it works as the thinnest light disk with rewritable data storage and encryption capability.

Upcoming International Conference at “3rd World Congress on NanoScience, Nanotechnology & Advanced Materials (WCNSN-2022)”scheduled on February 21–22, 2022 at Dubai, UAE. Which bounded with the theme “Fueling the Core of Trends in Nanotechnology & Advanced Materials”
WCNSN-2022 primary goal is to bring all the experts in Nano-field and proclaim the knowledge, share the innovative ideas among academicians, scholars, industrialists, researchers, developers and students, more over it is great platform to create new contacts with the experts in NanoScience and Nanotechnology field throughout the world.
WCNSN-2022 includes plenary presentations, keynote session, oral talks, posters, exhibitions, workshops, symposium and interactive discussions.
To get a discount, Please use code: VF-PHR2021
If you are interested and want more information do not hesitate to contact me. I’ll be happy to help you.
Have a nice day!

The creation of nanoscale computers for use in precision health care has long been a dream of many scientists and health care providers. Now, for the first time, researchers at Penn State have produced a nanocomputing agent that can control the function of a particular protein that is involved in cell movement and cancer metastasis. The research paves the way for the construction of complex nanoscale computers for the prevention and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

Nikolay Dokholyan, G. Thomas Passananti Professor, Penn State College of Medicine, and his colleagues — including Yashavantha Vishweshwaraiah, postdoctoral scholar in pharmacology, Penn State — created a transistor-like ‘logic gate,’ which is a type of computational operation in which multiple inputs control an output.

“Our logic gate is just the beginning of what you could call cellular computing,” he said, “but it is a major milestone because it demonstrates the ability to embed conditional operations in a protein and control its function, said Dokholyan. ” It will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of human biology and disease and introduces possibilities for the development of precision therapeutics.”