A Swedish Company Claims It Has Built The World's Most Efficient Solar Panel That Tracks The Sun.

A Swedish technology company has installed a new solar electricity generation system in South Africa’s sun-soaked Kalahari desert, saying it’s not only the most efficient system of its kind in the world, but it doubles the efficiency of standard solar panels.

The system, which features a pair of huge, 12-metre mirror dishes, runs on a Stirling engine - a type of closed-cycle regenerative heat engine that was invented way back in 1816, and uses trapped gas instead of water to propel the internal pistons and flywheel. The dishes are slowly rotated throughout the day to capture the maximum amount of solar rays and focus them into a specific point, which kicks the Stirling engine into gear.

Room With The Lowest Magnetic Field In The Solar System.

Some experiments, especially in fundamental physics, require the complete absence of magnetic fields. The only places you would find such a spot would be either in intergalactic space or inside a superconductor. Now an international team of researchers claim to have created such a space with a magnetic field that is the weakest in the solar system.

In the Journal of Applied Physics of 14 May the researchers report that by building a box consisting of metal shields arranged in a "Russian nesting doll" structure, they have been able to attenuate changes in the ambient magnetic field caused by man, such as passing cars, or of natural origin, such as solar flares, by a million fold, a factor they have increased to seven million since the acceptance of their paper. In practical terms, the shielded box can reduce magnetic disturbances from passing cars to below one pico Tesla. In comparison, the magnetic field of the Earth averages 48 microtesla at the surface.

This million-fold attentuation is an increase of two orders of magnitude over the previous best magnetically shielded space, the BMSR-2 in Berlin, explains Peter Fierlinger, a physicist at the Technical University Munich, Germany. "There is a very fundamental experiment that we are intending to do.  It will allow us to look at the origin of the universe much closer to the Big Bang than the Large Hadron Collider," says Fierlinger.

The team of 19 researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the United Sates used an industrial alloy of nickel and iron, Magnifer, that responds to external magnetic fields by becoming easily magnetized and redirecting the magnetic field lines towards the inside of the metal. The complete magnetic shield has a large external chamber consisting of three alloy shields and an aluminum shield for stopping RF radiation. A second box, also consisting of three Magnifer shells, called the "insert," is mounted on rails and can be rolled in and out of the external shield.  The total space available for experiments is slightly more than 4 m3.

"You can lock yourself in this room, but you will be the most magnetic item inside," says Fierlinger.

Although such magnetic shields have been built in the past, an efficient design, with optimized spacing and thickness of the metal sheets, became possible with advances in numeric modeling over the last few years, explains Fierlinger.  "It took us several years of elaborate work to achieve this improvement," he says.

The magnetic field the researchers achieved is now low enough to tackle an experiment that will  allow them to probe the Standard Model of Particle Physics beyond the capabilities of the LHC.

"We are trying to measure the electric dipole moment of the neutron, and this is a very fundamental quantity, it is a quantum effect inside the neutron which is forbidden by the laws of nature that are part of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, but it is an effect required to explain physics beyond our Standard Model,”  says Fierlinger. “And this physics must exist because it would explain why the universe, as we see it, has more matter than antimatter."

However, he is quick to add that their magnetically shielded room will profit other areas of science and technology, such as measuring magnetic signals from the brain with SQUIDs, the design and testing of SQUIDs, superconducting detectors, and low-noise electronics.  "Our chamber will not be a user facility, but experiments will be collaborative."

Diamond+Graphene Engineered to Reduce Friction To Almost Zero.

Friction is an important fact of life, robbing efficiency from anything where two surfaces interact with each other, such as engines and wheels. Lubrication can reduce the amount of friction, but it's never possible to get rid of it entirely.

In some rare cases, however, it's been possible to get the coefficient of friction to drop dramatically. A phenomenon called superlubricity occurs when two perfectly flat surfaces with incompatible crystal structures slide past each other. It's only been observed in extremely small samples, however, as larger surfaces have imperfections that tend to get stuck as they slide around.

Now, researchers have managed to create superlubricity in a large sample. They do so by getting graphene to wrap around nanoscopic diamonds, creating something akin to tiny ball bearings.

The authors of the new paper, a team from Argonne National Lab, were initially intending to study the traditional type of superlubricity. They reasoned that graphene and diamonds would have incompatible surfaces, and hoped that coating two surfaces with them would allow them to slide with minimal friction. Although friction was low, it didn't fall into the superlubricity category.

By looking at the surfaces afterwards, however, they found that small sheets of graphene had peeled off one of the surfaces and rolled up, creating scrolls in the debris. However, as graphene is only a single atom thick, these scrolls weren't very robust, and they ended up crunched between the two surfaces. In order to give the graphene more staying power, the team then turned to a rather robust substance: diamonds. The authors expected that the diamonds would act like tiny ball bearings, allowing the graphene scrolls to roll while the two surfaces slid past each other.

Diamonds have two other properties that make them an excellent choice. For one, they provide the same sort of surface that the authors had already reasoned would slide past graphene with minimal resistance. It's also possible to create incredibly small diamonds, which the authors refer to as nanodiamonds.

So, the authors coated a surface with graphene, coated another with diamond-like carbon, and sprinkled nanodiamonds in between. This dropped the coefficient of friction down to near zero, indicating the superlubricity had been achieved. Electron micrographs of the surface revealed that, as expected, graphene sheets had wrapped themselves around the nanodiamonds, which acted a bit like a ball bearing.

The authors tried a variety of conditions, changing the temperature, varying the load on the surfaces, and increasing their relative velocity. In all cases, the nanodiamonds retained superlubricity. The only exception came when the increased the relative humidity to 30 percent, which caused friction to increase dramatically. Apparently, water vapor can make its way into the space between the two surfaces and act as a bridge between them, creating transient bonds that need to be broken to shift the surfaces.

This is the first time that superlubricity's been demonstrated for something other than two microscopic, defect-free surfaces. So, in that sense, it represents significant progress, and may point a way forward to getting rid of some of the friction that robs us of energy.

Using Human Cells to Develope 3D Printed Ears.

3D printing has taken another huge step forward with engineers and physicians successfully creating a prosthetic human ear by using injectable moulds.

The injectable moulds contain living cells that were used to mould the shape of the ear. Over three months, the collagen used to mould them is replaced by cartilage once implanted. The discovery was made by scientists and biomedical engineers in Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical College and detailed in online peer review journal PLOS ONE.

The process starts with a digitised image of an ear for the printer. The file instructs the printer to mould the ear accordingly and then injects the gel containing living cells.

The whole procedure is quite fast. The mould takes roughly half a day to print and 30 minutes to inject the gel. It is then trimmed and left to culture in ‘nourishing cell culture media’ for a number of days before it is implanted on to a person.

The manufactured ear could help babies who have been born with ear deformities and in the long run be used to help people who lost their hearing later in life, whether through injury or illness, explains Dr Jason Spector.

Spector is the directorof the Laboratory for Bioregenerative Medicine and Surgery in New York and associate professor of plastic surgery with Weill Cornell. His colleague and co-lead author of the study, Lawrence Bonassar who is the associate professor of biomedical engineering also stated: “This is such a win-win for both medicine and basic science, demonstrating what we can achieve when we work together.”

Virtual Flowmeters: A Low-Cost Alternative

The use of virtual flowmeter (VFM) systems can help lower the costs and improve the reliability of subsea multiphase metering efforts. However, despite the maturation of VFM technology and the widespread use of VFM models as backups to physical meters, the industry has still not accepted it as an alternative to the physical meter or even as a tool to supplement physical meter measurements, an expert said. Speaking at a technical section on Tuesday at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Amin Amin, senior technical adviser at the Letton-Hall Group, discussed the study his group conducted into the viability of VFM systems. Amin compared five commercially available VFM software packages by using production data from a subsea well with a subsea multiphase flowmeter. He ran three rounds of evaluation. The first was an “out of the box” test, where the models were tested without any modifications. In the second round, the meters were tuned using elemental computing parameters for subsea multiphase meters such as total mass flow rate, gas volume fraction, and water/liquid ratio. In the third round, Amin factored fluid property errors into his measurements. “We really wanted to have a complete vote of confidence of VFMs,” Amin said. “Here was a real test case for us.” After the first round of testing, Amin noted that the real production data were valuable in comparing the methodologies used by each flow model to arrive at the given flow rates measured by the subsea multiphase flowmeter. In the second round, he found that the gas volume fraction could be estimated to a sufficient degree of accuracy by tuning the total mass flow rate in each model. Though the gas flow rate predictions grew increasingly uncertain over time, each package was consistent with regards to the anchoring role that the total mass flow rate parameter played in the VFM tuning process. The flow rate predictions from all participating models showed less than a 5% deviation from the measured oil flow rate and less than a 10% deviation from the measured gas flow rate. Adjusting the models to account for fluid properties did not change the results much. The deviation of individual phase densities had little effect on the flow rate projection, provided that the total mass flow rate used in the tuning process was accurate. Amin said the dependency of VFM models on the mixture density measurement at a given point for the purpose of defining the total mass flow rate is greater than it would be on the individual phase densities. Amin found that the presence of anomalous input data can impair the flow rate predictions of VFM systems, but with only one case study of note, it is hard to determine if this is a serious concern. He said more work is needed to establish a systematic approach to understand and interpret VFM systems in order to identify anomalous devices. “The systematic errors can be compromising, so the detection of these errors may not be as easy as one might expect from this system,” he said.

Technological Innovation Needed To Extract Value From Mature Oil Fields

With the oil industry facing an uncertain future in the wake of low oil prices, the maintenance of mature fields has become an extremely tough challenge. Despite the volatile economic environment, it is still possible for operators to wring additional value from these fields while keeping costs at a reasonable level, a trio of experts said. In a forum that took place at IHS CERAWeek in Houston, Tim Dodson, Michel Hourcard, and Leta Smith discussed the need for the industry to preserve mature fields by emphasizing technological innovation and creative management strategies. Dodson is the executive vice president at Statoil; Hourcard is a senior vice president of development, exploration, and production at Total; and Smith is a director at IHS. Dodson’s presentation focused primarily on Statoil’s efforts in the North Sea, particularly the Norwegian continental shelf. He said the mature areas in the Norwegian shelf remain attractive to the company because it is familiar with the geology, and it has the infrastructure in place to take advantage of the resources in the area. “As an operator of large production hubs in Norway, Statoil puts a lot of effort into proving up additional, timely resources in the surrounding areas in order to prolong the lifetime of the existing structure,” Dodson said. An example of this strategy is the Aasta Hansteen field, which was discovered by BP in 1997. Statoil is building a spar platform from which it will run the Polarled pipeline approximately 300 miles to a gas plant on the Nyhamna peninsula off the central Norwegian coast. Polarled is expected to deliver up to 70 million scf/D of gas to the Nyhamna plant. Furthermore, the company plans to build a separate pipeline between Polarled and the Kristin platform.

Worst-Case Discharges

In March, the SPE Board of Directors approved the publication of a technical report on the calculation of worst-case discharges (WCDs). The report, “Calculation of Worst-Case Discharge,” documents the consensus from an SPE-sponsored summit held in March last year. At the summit, 68 subject matter experts met in New Orleans with the goal of improving the methods of calculating and reporting WCD scenarios. The attendees—representing operators, regulators, academia, and service providers—developed the report, which was made available for comment for 30 days and edited to include comments before being approved by the Board. The focus of the technical report is on the calculation of WCD rather than well design or intervention. Its primary application is in the US Gulf of Mexico, although the report may be used for wells elsewhere. Deterministic methods are proposed because of the wording of regulations and requirements for detailed well design and response planning. Probabilistic modeling and statistical analysis are unacceptable. All reservoir properties, the report says, should be best-estimate, success-case values based on sound geology, geophysics, and engineering judgment. All calculation parameter values should be explained and justified to ensure consistency and transparency. Parametric sensitivity is recommended for identifying the major variables and their impact on the WCD calculation. Topics covered in the technical report include reservoir properties, inflow modeling, outflow modeling, total volume, special cases, and reporting. Future improvements could include flow correlations for high rates in large-diameter pipes, sonic velocity effects, and probabilistic methods. According to the report, the flow scenario should be modeled over the duration of the spill to determine when the highest, single-day flow rate from the well occurs, which may or may not be the first day. In multiwell situations, the report says, it is important to remember that the WCD well may or may not be the first well drilled on the block or in the field. Each potential well location must be assessed and the WCD determined by the planned well that has the highest WCD flow rate. The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management defines WCD as “the single highest daily flow rate of liquid hydrocarbon during an uncontrolled wellbore flow event,” that is, the average daily flow rate on the day that the highest rate occurs under worst-case conditions (e.g., a blowout). It is neither the total volume spilled over the duration of the event nor the maximum possible flow rate that would result from high-side reservoir parameters, nor a distribution of outcomes. It is a single value for the expected flow rate calculated under worst-case wellbore conditions using known (expected) reservoir properties.

Accounting for HSSE in an Enterprise Resource Planning System

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems help organizations manage data from product planning to shipping. By automating primary business-related processes, the systems allow companies to define their business models and plan workloads. However, most companies do not include processes related to health, safety, security, and environmental (HSSE) concerns within the scope of their ERP systems, and failing to account for HSSE may be a costly mistake, an expert said. Jeff Morgheim, a former climate change director at BP, said the early inclusion of HSSE practices in ERP systems is a good business practice because it sets a societal expectation that leads to improved decision making. He spoke at a webinar, “What About HSSE? Why Early Inclusion of HSSE Into Enterprise Resource Planning Efforts Makes Sense,” held by the SPE Gulf Coast Section’s Health, Safety, and Environment study group. Morgheim, who was part of BP’s executive team in the aftermath of the Macondo incident in 2010, is the founder of Edge Consulting. HSSE plays an important part in the operational excellence of an organization, Morgheim said. However, financial issues may make it difficult for a company to execute primary HSSE functions. “When an enterprise decides that it needs to implement something that allows all this information to flow together, the usual motivator has to do with getting a better handle on their accounting systems,” Morgheim said. “So, what you’ll find is that the executive sponsor within an enterprise will tend to be someone from within the finance function. That has an impact on the scope (of ERP implementation).” The following factors drive the inclusion of strong HSSE policies in an ERP system: Seizing the opportunity for near-term process improvements Avoiding rework Fostering a collaboration between functions Leveraging the risk reduction potential of an ERP system Enhancing workforce sustainability Signaling the role of HSSE to the organization Morgheim said near-term process improvements provide organizations with a framework for identifying the processes for simplification or elimination, and removing duplicity in data collection and reporting. An organization’s ability to use its HSSE policy in the investigative process in a consistent way with the rest of the ERP system is a powerful opportunity. “It’s a fantastic opportunity for your function to be able to sit down and look at how exactly our processes work,” he said. “Where do we get information from? Who do we get information to? How do we validate that information? What do we do with that information?” Avoiding rework on ERP systems is critical to keeping their cost down. Morgheim said incorporating good HSSE practices into a plan early will always cost less in the long run than retrofitting a plan to incorporate those practices after an incident. “As anyone who has done house remodeling knows, there is a lot less pain and suffering and mental anguish involved in designing all the rooms ahead of time rather than building two separate parts of the house and figuring out how you’re going to integrate them together,” he said. In addition, fostering collaboration between functions (operations, drilling, accounting, human resources, and the supply chain) helps reduce workload and errors within an organization. Leveraging an ERP’s risk reduction potential helps improve compliance, risk management, and operational assurance, which leads to long-term benefits in accounting and finance. Enhancing the HSSE workforce’s sustainability helps lower turnover costs and risks. It expands the pool of potential HSSE employees and lowers the costs to bring in new people. By emphasizing the importance of the role of HSSE, an organization is making it part of the creation of a culture of operational excellence. Morgheim said companies should reinforce the belief that good HSSE practices lead to good business practices.

STEM Learning Lab Promotes Love of Science and Maths in Children.

STEM Learning Lab provides young students with engaging and interactive learning experiences in science, technology, engineering and math by integrating those subjects in ways that are fun and hands-on.

For example, STEM’s curriculum also includes the powerful robotics platform EZ-Robot enabling kids engage in science and technology through building and playing with robots.

Here’s more from founders Gina Cherkowski and Ryan Clements:

How did you come up with the idea for your startup? Was there an “ah-ha” moment?

Gina: After many years of teaching in the classroom we still have so many kids who don’t have the competitive advantages in a world that requires an understanding of math, science, data, technology, and real world problem solving. This new world is based on having strong numeracy skills as well as visual and spatial reasoning skills. Adding arts to the equation is one way to do this.

We can also build these skills by teaching math visually using spatial temporal reasoning and by teaching things such as robotics. Most school curriculums do not target visual spatial skill development; in fact it is the smallest part of most math curriculums. Given that visual spatial reasoning is critical for learning, we know that supplementing children’s experiences with activities that promote visual spatial skills is important.

We wanted to provide a platform for children to learn these important skills while they are engaging in fun hands-on experiences and making new friends. Our camps not only target visual spatial skills and math and science skills, we also foster the development of computational literacy, analytical reasoning, problem solving, computer programing and logic-systems thinking.

What has been the biggest challenge so far? What have you done to solve it?

Distinguishing our niche from the many other great camps that are currently available. Parents need to find camps that best support their child and also understand the difference between each camp and what best suits them. Our niche is very different from any of the other camps in that our focus is on the visual spatial dynamic in learning through robotics and maker activities. To solve this challenge we have created many strategic partnerships, which has given us exposure and access to new networks, established relationships with many schools, and provided many demos of the robots and how they will work in our camps.

What’s new with your startup that we can share?

We have a full slate of camps and workshops for this summer open for registration at www.stemlearninglab.com. In the fall we will be adding math and robotics programs as well as science and computer camps for home-schoolers. Later this year we will launch a series of enrichment camps for kids on weekends, a pre-school program targeted to develop young children’s visual spatial skills that are critical to develop from ages 3 to 5, and bots for tots camps.

What advice would you like to share with others just starting out?

Take a process driven approach – utilize lean startup thinking, get your product to market quickly, test it with real customers and improve it based on feedback. Develop many strategic partnerships, networking opportunities, and mentoring relationships.

What made you choose to go down the path of entrepreneurship?

We both wanted the freedom to create things that added value and solved problems for others. We love the creative process, developing relationships, and the ability to act independently. We also are driven by the idea of disruptive innovation and we saw an opportunity to offer kids things that they couldn’t get in schools.

What do you and your startup need help with?

Getting the word out, growing our exposure and connecting to the people who could most benefit from our product. Please visit www.stemlearninglab.com for more information.

Lloyed Lobo covers technology startups in Alberta. He is a partner at Boast Capital and co-founder of Traction Conf. If you’d like to be featured, please email llobo@boastcapital.com.

Renewable Propane-Our Gabbage Could Produce Renewable Fuel.

Propane is a relatively clean-burning alternative to fossil fuels such as gasoline and diesel. But drilling for propane can damage the environment and in the end adds to the atmosphere’s carbon content.

Converting Waste Biomass & Garbage Into Propane

The US propane market has been in the news over the past several years as its supply and price have been very unstable, with shortages having a negative effect on some sectors of the economy. Coming up with a renewable form of propane for use in furnaces, outdoor grills and to make liquefied natural gas would be a major breakthrough as it would increase overall supply and significantly reduce carbon emissions.

Creating Next Generation Biofuels

Researchers at Imperial College and the University of Turku are developing a renewable form of propane that is created through microbial biosynthesis using the “fermentative butanol pathway.” Until now scientists have not been able to find natural metabolic pathways for renewable biosynthesis.

The process involves using E. coli bacteria, Escherichia coli, derived from human intestines and fatty acid synthesis. Now researchers are working to make the process scalable for commercial production.

Papers on the process have been published in the Journal of Biotechnology for Biofuels and the Journal of Nature Communications. According to the papers, genetically engineered bacterium could also be used and possibly ready for commercial-scale production within the next decade.

One obvious application of renewable propane would be to supply it to automobiles equipped with CNG or propane retrofits.

New Aluminium Battery Can Recharge in Just 60 seconds.

We were all happy to see rechargeable Lithium-ion batteries replacing the heavier and single use alkaline type batteries. But these Li-ion batteries are already struggling to meet ever-increasing power requirements. Smartphone users know that it can take hours to charge a lithium-ion battery.

Stanford University has developed a new type of aluminum-ion battery that is much cheaper, longer lasting, and also offers super-fast recharging as compared to a Li-ion battery. The battery can be recharged in just one minute.

It is a much safer alternative to conventional Li-ion batteries as well. Since it is made of aluminum, it won’t catch fire and has high-charge storage capacity.

Like any other battery, an aluminum-ion battery has two electrodes: a negatively charged electrode made of aluminum and a positively charged cathode. So far, different kinds of materials for the cathode have been tested unsuccessfully in search of the right material.

But Stanford scientists have discovered a simple solution using graphite. Graphite has given a great performance after repeated cycles of charging and discharging. The scientists placed the aluminum anode and graphite cathode, along with an ionic liquid electrolyte, in a flexible polymer coated pouch for testing.

The ultra durable aluminum battery developed by Stanford was able to withstand more than 7500 cycles without any loss of capacity as compared to 1000 cycles for a standard Li-ion battery.

This Engineering Design Could Make Living in Mars a Reality.

For years, people have speculated about the likelihood of life on Mars due to the planet’s proximity and similarity to Earth.

To kill the curiosity, NASA’s $2.5 billion Mars rover Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012 to find if Mars ever supported primitive life.

But if we are able to send people to Mars one day, what kind of homes will they inhabit?

NASA and MakerBot recently hosted a competition which asked entrants to make a 3D-printed model home suitable for the Red Planet. Participants were asked to take into account the extreme weather conditions, lack of oxygen and dust storms when designing their Martian abode.

Noah Hornberger’s modular beehive won the MakerBot Mars Base Challenge

The winner ‘Queen B’ concept home offers future architecture if humans successfully colonize Mars some day.

The ‘Queen B’ concept home is a space-saving and modular honeycomb design that’s flexible and compact. The hexagonal modules of this home.

The ‘Queen B’ features all the modern home comforts like a fully functional apartment.
It has a kitchen, two bathrooms, a garden, laundry room and even a 3D print lab…all fitted inside 16 ft diameter hexagons. Each of the 10 hexagonal modules is arranged around a central lounge area that contains a couple of couches, a TV and a charging station.

The average temperature is around -80ºF (-60ºC) which makes it really really cold on Mars.
An underground electric heater or an exothermic chemical reactor will be used to heat an underground water container. This would provide heat to the base camp. Excess steam could be used for steam power generators to supplement solar power.

New Way to Print Silicon for electronics could help make elctronics recyclable.

Printed electronics have opened up applications—flexible circuits and rollable displays, to name two—that were impossible with conventional electronics. Usually, printed electronics are created using organic or metal-oxide inks whose electronic properties often pale in comparison to silicon. Now scientists have discovered a new way to print silicon, potentially ousting its erstwhile usurpers.

The ability to print silicon onto substrates has existed for some time, but producing solid silicon from liquid polysilane ink required exposing the silicon to temperatures upwards of 350 degrees Celsius—far too hot for many of the flexible surfaces onto which one might want to print. The new technique, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Ishikawa, completely bypasses this step. The collaborators detailed their findings in the 21 April online edition of the journal Applied Physics Letters.

First, the researchers coated paper with liquid polysilane by skimming the fluid onto the surface with a blade in a virtually oxygen-free, water-free environment. They next transformed this ink into polycrystalline silicon with a blast from an excimer laser, a tool commonly used for manufacturing smartphone displays. The laser pulse only lasted a few dozen nanoseconds, leaving the paper completely intact.

The final silicon film, which is about 200 nanometers thick, required “baking” at a maximum temperature of only 150 °C. The researchers found that the thin-film transistors they created using this new strategy performed on par with conventional polysilicon devices and far better than other ink materials.

The researchers say this work could lead to low-cost, high-speed, flexible, biodegradable, recyclable electronics that could show up in wearable electronics, solar cells, RFID tags, edible devices, and trillions of Internet of Things sensor nodes.

Ramshackle Infrastructure in US.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, the United States is currently ranked 19th in the world for the quality of its infrastructure coming in behind Spain, Portugal and Oman. The US problem is so big that in just one city, Pittsburgh, there are over 4,000 bridges serving 9 million passengers a day to keep track of.

According to an Associated Press analysis of over 600,000 bridges, more than 65,000 were deemed “structurally deficient” and over 20,000 as “fracture critical” or in imminent threat of collapse.

According to a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) the United States gets a D+ to reflect the current state of the country’s infrastructure. Seemingly oblivious to the need for critical infrastructure investment, the US House recently submitted a budget cutting funding for transportation programs by $51 billion or 93%. In short, the US Federal Fund for road and bridge repair has gone broke.

To complicate matters, a large number of US lawmakers have not accepted the idea of “climate change”. According to scientists it is likely that the old and decrepit US infrastructure will fare far worse due to the expected increase in coming years of extreme weather events that will further compromise the roads, bridges, water pipes, levies and other critical infrastructure.

To be fair, ASCE reports that 90% of the $267 billion earmarked for public sector construction spending is for building schools, highways and waste disposal facilities at the state and local level so that the funds must be allocated by state and local governments.

ASCE reports that by 2020, the US will lose 700,000 jobs, and if no improvements in infrastructure, 1.4 million jobs by 2040. Both foreign and domestic businesses will assess infrastructure, taxes and other factors in the US versus other destinations and begin making decisions to offshore new businesses.

Become a Superhero! Get Night Vision Injected into your Eyes.

A team of independent researchers called Science for the Masses has announced that they’ve successfully induced night vision in a human. They maintain that the procedure allowed their subject to see quite clearly in the dark at a distance of up to 50 meters.

How they managed to do the same: The researchers made use of a chemical compound chlorine e6 (Ce6), and injected it into one of their members, researcher Gabriel Licina. This chemical compound is found in some deep-sea fish and has light-amplification properties. About 50 microliters of solution was dropped into Licina’s eyes, aiming for the conjunctival sac, which carried the chemical to the retina. After about an hour, the effect kicked in.

To test the effect, Licina and three researchers performed a series of vision tests in a dark field. Licina was able to spot and recognize objects, symbols and people in the dark field moving against different backgrounds. He was even able to point out people hidden among trees and shrubs.

Lasers could be used to shoot down debris from space

The amount of space debris as a result of human activity has nearly doubled over the last 15 years, posing a threat to the International Space Station and satellites around it. The debris – consisting of satellites, rocket bodies and fragments from collisions – has a total mass of approximately 3,000 tons.  A group of international researchers say they can solve this ever-growing issue with a machine boasting a high-efficiency laser.

The debris exists in different orbits, making it extremely difficult to come up with a remediation solution. However, a team of international scientists says it might be able to solve the problem thanks to the EUSO telescope, which was initially developed to spot ultraviolet light.

“We realized that we could put it to another use,” says Toshikazu Ebisuzaki of Japan’s RIKEN research institute, one of the groups working on the project. “During twilight, thanks to EUSO’s wide field of view and powerful optics, we could adapt it to the new mission of detecting high-velocity debris in orbit near the ISS.”

Ebisuzaki and his team, decided to integrate another device, the CAN laser, which is made using optical fibers that help the system produce strong laser pulses. It was initially developed with the purpose of powering particle accelerators.

The researchers say that combining these two instruments will create a device that can track down and deorbit high-risk space debris. It works as follows:

The intense laser beam focuses on the debris

This results in a high-velocity plasma ablation

The reaction force reduces the debris’ orbital velocity

The debris re-enters earth’s atmosphere

The team, which includes researchers from the universities of Paris 7 and California at Irvine, is set to deploy a proof-of-concept version on the ISS measuring just 20 centimeters. “If that goes well, we plan to install a full-scale version on the ISS, incorporating a three-meter telescope and a laser with 10,000 fibers, giving it the ability to deorbit debris with a range of approximately 100 kilometers,” adds Ebisuzaki. “Looking further to the future, we could create a free-flyer mission and put it into a polar orbit at an altitude near 800 kilometers, where the greatest concentration of debris is found.”

Their debris strategy differs drastically from traditional ones that are ground based. According to Ebisuzaki, his group’s device is cost effective and would offer a manageable solution to this issue.

“We may finally have a way to stop the headache of rapidly growing space debris that endangers space activities,” he says. “We believe that this dedicated system could remove most of the centimeter-sized debris within five years of operation.”

Disney is Developing an Accessory that will control your smart phone.

Disney Research is apparently developing plastic accessories that can control phones, which might even be more far-out than MIT's thumbnail trackpads. They're called acoustruments, and they can control phones with sounds from their own speakers. How? Well, each acoustrument comes with a U-shaped tube that feeds ultrasonic sound from the phone's speaker to its mic. You can control the phone with that setup by disrupting the sound, say, by blocking holes on the tube like you would on a flute. Its controls don't necessarily have to be holes, either -- they could be buttons, switches, knobs, wheels, sliders and anything else that can alter the sound wave to indicate an action.

Thus far, the researchers have already developed an acoustrument that integrates with a phone case and acts as a camera shutter, one that acts as an alarm controller, another that turns a phone into a toy car and one that transforms a device into an interactive doll. They believe the accessories can be especially useful whenever you don't have access to the touch screen, such as when you're using your phone as a virtual reality device. We doubt we'll see acoustruments being sold on Amazon or elsewhere anytime soon, but the good news is that they're reportedly cheap to manufacture. Hopefully, that means they're also affordable if they do come out, so you can try the curious controllers without breaking the bank.

Using Solar Powered Wi-fi, Los Angeles prepares Against Quakes.

Earthquakes are not a new threat to America’s second most populous city, Los Angeles. Los Angeles has been at the epicenter of seismic risk for a long time. Twenty years ago, an earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale devastated Los Angeles, killing a large number of people.

The solar powered Wi-Fi system will help ensure communication: Since an earthquake could knock out Internet connectivity, Los Angeles is proactively addressing this earthquake vulnerability by proposing solar powered Wi-Fi. The city’s residents will be able to access the Internet if the primary system is disrupted in the event of a quake. People will be able to find important information related to food, water, traffic, or rescue operations. They could also get in touch with police, fire, or medical personnel.

Many buildings lack modern retrofitting: The old buildings in LA that were built in 50s and 60s pose a real challenge. As per a study, there are 1,451 old concrete buildings that have not been retrofitted, and many of them may collapse during an earthquake. As part of its seismic preparedness, the city plans to invest heavily in expensive retrofitting processes, like reinforcing buildings with steel braces.

21-Year-old Design Student Created a Real Life Batsuit

As a 24-year-old Engineering student, I found this really challenging.

Jackson Gordon is a 21-year-old design student/prop maker who focuses on bringing superhero suits to life.

His latest creation is a real life batsuit, fully capable of taking on multiple knife attacks, which includes stabbing and slashes to the suit.

Gordon’s militarized batsuit is made up of a mixture of Kevlar and composite armor, providing optimum safety and mobility for those who want to wear the batsuit on the move.

Students Develope a 3D printer for painless flu shots

Getting the flu shot is one of the many rituals that comes once a year, inoculating the population against a potentially life-threatening disease. However, for some, especially children, the experience can be frightening and painful. However, that may soon change thanks to a Rice University students’s 3D-printed invention.

The Comfortably Numb is a simple device that numbs the skin to decrease the sensation of the injection. The team of three freshmen, include Andy Zhang, Mika Hua, and Greg Allison, developed this easy-to-produce mechanism to create a portable and ready to use ice pack. The small device is composed of a 3D printed cylinder containing two chambers, one with water and the other with ammonium nitrate, and a metal plate attached at one end. When the device is activated by twisting the top, the two chambers open and the chemical reaction that occurs cools the metal plate, just like a cold pack.

From there, a physician or other medical worker places the plate against the skin to numb the are and then inject the vaccine.

A new Design that reduces the cost of waste water treatment

Shake, rattle and roll has slashed costs and reduced waste volumes at the Wanneroo Groundwater Treatment Plant.
The Wanneroo plant is successfully using a vibrating membrane to separate contaminants from its waste stream, producing a recyclable salt solution in the process.
The innovative system, called vibratory shear-enhanced processing (VSEP), relies on shaking and sideways forces to prevent large particles from blocking the membrane surface.

"Normal membrane treatments would clog up really quickly," co-author and Curtin University Associate Professor Anna Heitz says.

"With this system, the contaminants aren't sucked onto the surface of the membrane, there's always this vibration going, agitating the surface."

A/Prof Heitz's team found VSEP reliably trapped 97 per cent of organic contaminants above the membrane, allowing smaller salts to filter through and produce a concentrated salt solution that is re-used upstream.

"Prior to this process, you would just buy new salt," A/Prof Heitz says.

"Now we're recycling: we can separate the salt, reuse that salt, we don't have to throw it away."

The plant treats up to 50 per cent of its groundwater using beads of magnetic resin to adsorb naturally occurring contaminants, a process called magnetic ion exchange, or MIEX.

Once loaded with contaminants, these MIEX beads—manufactured in Australia by Aussie company Ixom—are also recyclable.

"You hit the resin beads with this highly concentrated salt solution, more concentrated than sea water, and the contaminants go into the salt solution, so you can reuse the beads," A/Prof Heitz says.

By washing the resin beads with salt solution produced using VSEP, the MIEX plant becomes even more efficient, she says.

"This project was about taking waste from cleaning the resin beads—waste which is really difficult to deal with and expensive to dispose of—and further treating it so you can recycle part of it," A/Prof Heitz says.

"You don't have as much waste, you save on salt costs, you save on tankerage costs."

In the first eight months of VSEP operation, the plant cut its salt costs by 38 per cent, recovering 75–85 per cent of the waste stream volume instead of paying for its disposal.

"You'd be able to use this process to clean up waste from other plants, for example water treatment plants in remote parts of Australia, where you can't discharge brine," A/Prof Heitz says.

$5,100 Hilti DD350 Drill Helps Thieves Steal $300 Million Worth of Jewels, Diamonds, and Cash.

Unfortunately, when you make a very expensive, heavy-duty drill, bad people tend to use it to do bad things.

In London, over Easter weekend, thieves used a $5,100 Hilti DD350 drill in order to bore holes into the vault wall at Hatton Garden.

Hatton Garden is an area widely known for its jewelry trade.

From there, the criminals were able to break into safety deposit boxes and get away with $300 million in jewels, diamonds, and cash.

In total, the thieves were able to crack open 70 deposit boxes, using in addition to the drill, crowbars, concrete drills, and an angle grinder.

“We are in the process of identifying the owners of the safety deposit boxes and as we do we are contacting them to take statements and find out what has been stolen. This is a slow and ongoing process,” Scotland Yard said in a statement.

Speed Limits of Future Quantum Computers predicted

Today’s quantum computing systems have just begun hinting at how future versions might outperform classical computers at solving certain complex problems. But new research has lowered the theoretical speed limit that future quantum computers will eventually run up against.

Quantum computing systems have the potential to perform certain calculations much faster than classical computers by using quantum bits, or qubits—things that rely on the phenomenon known as superposition to represent information as both 1 and 0 at the same time. Such systems could also exploit another physical phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. In entanglement, a single qubit shares its information state with many other qubits through quantum connections. But the latest calculations by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology place a new speed limit on how quickly entanglement can be established between distant qubits.

“Previous results suggested that the time needed for entanglement to spread throughout a system can be very small when interactions between qubits are long-ranged, leaving open the possibility of very fast transfer of information when interactions are long-ranged,” says Michael Foss-Feig, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. “Our result places a tighter constraint on how much time you need to distribute information and entanglement across a system of a given size.”

Foss-Feig was lead author of the NIST paper that appeared in the 13 April issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. He and his colleagues based their work on the research described in two previous papers that had examined the theoretical speed limits of the spread of quantum information. The first paper, published in 1972, discovered a finite speed limit for quantum information—known thereafter as the Lieb-Robinson bound—in cases of short-distance interactions between neighboring qubits.

A second study, published in 2005, suggested that the time needed for quantum information to propagate might only scale logarithmically, or a minuscule amount, with distance. In other words, the second paper’s results suggested that quantum computers could get a “qualitatively important speedup” by incorporating long-range interactions between qubits.

But the recent NIST research restated the speed limit of quantum information’s spread for long distances. Its mathematical proof shows that the time required for quantum information to spread across the system increases almost in proportion to the system size, bringing the speed limit for long-range interacting systems much closer to the limit for short-range interacting systems. Foss-Feig explains:

Our contribution has been to recognize that the bounds from the 2005 paper, while important, were qualitatively not tight. Those bounds suggested that quantum information could propagate much faster than is possible. So we’ve refined that picture and pushed it much closer to the picture that exists for short-range qubit interactions. We speculate that in many cases you could push the bounds for long-range interacting systems all the way up to the bounds for short-range interactions. We’ve already gone a good fraction of the way there.

Today’s quantum computing systems have already helped confirm the speed limit for short-range interactions because of their experiments with entangling neighbor qubits. For example, researchers hired by Google have been testing systems with entanglement between neighboring qubits.

The NIST group hopes to further refine their speed limit calculations in the future. But there is a caveat – their calculations are based on the assumption that long-range entanglement interactions decay at a particular rate. If the entanglement interactions don’t decay at all with distance, a qubit could theoretically transfer information instantaneously to another qubit very far away.

For his part, Foss-Feig doesn’t believe that any discussions of theoretical speed limits should dampen the enthusiasm for quantum computing. The current challenges of building practical quantum computers relate to other issues such as boosting the amount of time that qubits remain in their quantum states and reducing the number of errors.

“If we can someday make quantum computers as easily as silicon processors, the theoretical limits we’re exploring might inform what the ideal quantum computing architecture is,” Foss-Feig said. “But it doesn’t place any serious constraints on anything we’re doing with current quantum computing systems.”

A Cleaner and Healthier Environment with the aid of Artificial Photosynthesis

A system of artificial photosynthesis can collect carbon dioxide before it escapes into our atmosphere as a greenhouse gas and convert it to useful products including drugs and alternative fuels, researchers say.

The breakthrough technology is a hybrid of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that can take in carbon dioxide and use solar energy to convert it into pharmaceutical drugs, biodegradable plastics or liquid fuels.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, developed the system.

The hybrid system mimics natural photosynthesis, the process used by plants to take energy from sunlight and synthesize carbohydrates out of water and carbon dioxide.

In the hybrid system, however, the CO2 and water are used to synthesis acetate, a basic building block for biosynthesis, the researchers explain.

"We believe our system is a revolutionary leap forward in the field of artificial photosynthesis," says study leader Peidong Yang, a chemist at the Berkeley Lab. "Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground."

In the system, an "artificial forest" of silicon and titanium oxide nanowires in light-capturing arrays are seeded with bacterial populations, creating a solar-powered environmental-friendly chemistry factory that can use sequestered CO2 as its fuel source, the researchers report in the journal Nano Letters.

The bacteria is Sporomusa ovate, chosen for its excellent catalyst capabilities, they said.

"S. ovata is a great carbon dioxide catalyst as it makes acetate, a versatile chemical intermediate that can be used to manufacture a diverse array of useful chemicals," says chemist and biosynthesis expert Michelle Chang, who holds appointments at both the Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley.

Technologies are being developed to capture and store carbon dioxide before it adds to the growing problem of the warming atmosphere, but that storage presents its own environmental problems, the Berkeley scientists note.

Their artificial photosynthesis system would be one way to put that stored CO2 to work, using it to synthesize a number of "targeted, value-added chemical products," says Christopher Chang, an expert in catalysts used in carbon-neutral energy conversions.

Any system for artificial photosynthesis must meet a dual challenge of light-capture efficiency levels and sufficient catalytic activity, the researchers point out.

Their nanowire array/bacteria hybrid system is capable of converting solar energy at an efficiency of around 0.38 percent under simulated sunlight, around the same level as that of a natural leaf, they say, while showing an impressive ability to generate the desired chemical molecules.

"We are currently working on our second-generation system which has a solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency of 3 percent," Yang says. "Once we can reach a conversion efficiency of 10 percent in a cost-effective manner, the technology should be commercially viable."

World Economic Forum's Top 10 Emerging Technologies, 2015.

Technologies that seemed like dreams just a decade ago are coming of age. We can continue to dream but the world can get a lot of mileage from technologies available today.

IndustryTap reported on the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in “World Economic Forum 2015: “The New Global Context.” On March 4, 2015 WEF’s Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies released its list of the top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2015 to underscore the most powerful areas of innovation today that are most likely to transform the world we live in for the better.

The Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies is made up of 18 experts who are continuously focused on technological trends. Here are the trends along with links to more information, including articles written on IndustryTap.com

1. Fuel cell vehicles – Zero-emission cars that run on hydrogen. We may begin hearing about the possibility of large scale production.

2. Next-generation robotics - More widespread use of robotics in the industry and consumer sectors. Robotics will help both near and far, including in space. Here’s an article on advanced telerobotics in space.

3. Recyclable thermoset plastics – New plastics that will cut landfill waste. Thermoplastics are also now being used to manufacture jet engine parts created with 3D Printers.

4. Precise genetic engineering techniques – Improved genetic engineering technology and genetic engineering. IndustryTap reported on the “Spider Goat,” that creates “milk” which can be made into an elastic material stronger than Kevlar.

5. Additive manufacturing – For a great article and animation, see: The Process of Building Superproducts.

6. Emergent artificial intelligence - ABB has invested in AI, see information here and the dangers of AI, here.

7. Distributed manufacturing – This relates to ubiquitous access to engineering systems online and the rapid delivery of products anywhere in the world.

8. ‘Sense and avoid’ drones - IndustryTap has written extensively about drones, and they are getting smarter, lighter, and more durable and efficient.

9. Neuromorphic technology - A number of companies and countries are heavily invested in studying the human brain in creating technologies that mimic human decision-making.

10. Digital genome – According to the WEC Meta-Council, in the near future, people will carry their genetic code on a USB stick and in the end begin battling major human diseases including aging. In addition, DNA may be the next storage medium capable of holding 100 million hours of video in a teacup of DNA.

China to Build World's First Floating City

China has a lot of land area. But with its huge population, overcrowding is still a big problem, much as it is in Japan. For this reason, both countries have turned to the idea of offshore floating cities and platforms to help relieve pressure and offer an alternative to traditional urban living, building new airports, and more.

China construction firm CCCC-FHDI, currently at work on the Hong Kong, Zhuhai, Macau bridge, has been tapped by AT Design to build a four square-mile (10.4 sq. km) floating island, which will be the world’s first floating city. AT Design envisions creating a prototype city that can be used around the world to meet the long-term needs of humanity for habitable living space.

The design will utilize prefabricated hexagonal modules that will “tessellate” or move together as one plane, but in a flexible manner. CCCC is currently using this technology to build parts of the Hong Kong, Zhuhai, Macau bridge that will connect Hong Kong with the western edge of the Pearl River Delta.

The China Transport Investment Company has not yet determined the location and time frame for the project but is considering a small-scale version to be built in 2015, possibly near Hong Kong.

According to Slavomir Siska, a designer of the project, the island would be accessed via underwater tunnels. Living spaces in the floating city would potentially house thousands and provide typical urban services, facilities, transportation, and gardens. The floating city, or ocean metropolis, would also be a tourist destination with hotels, offices, retail space, museums, and more.

US navy now uses drones to fly fighter aircrafts

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus recently stated that the US Navy would be moving away from manned fighter jets in the future and more towards utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.

At the Sea-Air-Space 2015 conference on Wednesday, Mabus said in a speech that the currently used F-35 Lightning fighter “should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.”

He added, “Removing a human from the machine can open up room to experiment with more risk, improve systems faster, and get them to the fleet quicker.”

Essentially, worrying about the human safety factor is eliminated when drones can be used instead.

The Navy has also been experimenting with 3D-printing recently, so obviously if they want to test a new vehicle or aircraft comprised of 3D-printed parts for the first time, it makes much more sense to use a drone and not put a human in harm’s way.

Advancements in technology are allowing the Navy to explore and test new concepts quicker than ever before, a major advantage that needs to be harnessed when talking about the insane amount of money that goes into some projects, such as the F-35.

Lastly, Mabus said the Navy “cannot allow these overly complex, form-over-substance, often useless, and too often harmful, practices to slow or prevent development of some game changers, while simultaneously giving our potential adversaries the competitive advantage.”

An engineering design that camouflages with nature, How interesting!!!

It can shift from red to green to violet. It can mimic patterns and designs. And it can do all of this in a flash—literally.
The same qualities that define the cuttlefish—a sea dweller that uses its powers of dynamic camouflage to survive and communicate—also apply to a new engineering feat that behaves much like nature's master of disguise.
A team of UNL researchers has developed a structure that can begin replicating color and texture within seconds of exposure to pulses of light. The new design responds to much lower-intensity light and at faster rates than its few predecessors, said Li Tan, associate professor of mechanical and materials engineering.

"This is a relatively new community of research," said Tan, who co-authored a recent paper outlining the team's design. "Most of the people (in it) are inspired by the cuttlefish, whose skin changes color and texture, as well.

"Changing color is relatively easy; a TV can do that. Changing texture is harder. We wanted to combine the two."

To do so, the team has created a structure consisting of three layers: a base that insulates against heat, a middle that readily absorbs light, and a top made of either a liquid or solid.

Paper, glass, foil, silicon and other materials have all proven suitable for the middle layer, so long as it includes a distribution of colored pixels. The middle and top layers also contain colloids: microscopic particles of soda lime, glass or copper.

When a moderately intense laser strikes the middle layer, it begins warming any pixels that absorb it—that is, those that don't share the light's color. Through the process of convection, these localized increases in temperature trigger ruptures along the surface of the top layer or volcano-like eruptions within it.
In both cases, the resulting suction draws the colloids toward the heated, light-absorbing areas—thereby reproducing the color that shines upon the surface. If the light is red, for instance, the colloids migrate to cover green pixels and leave only the red exposed. Under violet light, the particles obscure the majority of red pixels while leaving most of the green uncovered.

This same photo-thermal principle allows the team to replicate or create patterns, Tan said, either by directing lights in deliberate trajectories or simply flashing them through transparent images overlaying the structure.

The team has used these techniques to write words and mimic checkerboard patterns, among others. When the top layer is a solid, cooling it will obscure the word or pattern, which reappears upon reheating.

According to Tan, the design's first apparent application—camouflage—probably won't see the light of day for a while. The more immediate potential application, Tan said, relies on the photo-thermal principle that drives the design's color and texture changes. In the same way that the technique can direct the assembly of microscopic colloids, it might also accelerate the accumulation of cells and facilitate the growth of biological tissue, he said.

"Starting from small building blocks and growing them into large structures usually takes a very long time," Tan said. "In our case, it really doesn't."

Using Molybdenum disulfide electrode may increase storage capacity in battery

While the prospect of aluminum-ion batteries may have received a lift recently, the workhorse battery for both our handheld electronic devices and our electric vehicles remains the ubiquitous lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery.

And now, researchers at Kansas State University (KSU) have taken a fresh look at the venerable Li-ion battery: Using the two-dimensional material molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) on its electrodes, they say, may dramatically boost its storage capacity. What they have come up with is a hybrid material that combines MoS2 with silicon carbonitride (SiCN); it can store double the charge of electrodes using MoS2 on its own.

Last year, KSU researchers, led by Gurpreet Singh, demonstrated the effectiveness of MoS2 in overcoming some of the key shortcomings of sodium-ion batteries. It appears Singh and his colleagues have turned their attention to addressing the issues of cycling stability and capacity retention as seen with previous research in which bulk MoS2 was used.

In research published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the KSU team observed that MoS2 sheets that had been wrapped in silicon carbonitride could store twice as much lithium as pure MoS2. The reason may be the same mechanism underlying the issues the researchers faced when studying sulfur-ion batteries: sulfur gets into the electrolyte, reducing its capacity.

"This kind of behavior is similar to a lithium-sulfur type of battery, which uses sulfur as one of its electrodes," Singh said in a press release. "Sulfur is notoriously famous for forming intermediate polysulfides that dissolve in the organic electrolyte of the battery, which leads to capacity fading. We believe that the capacity drop observed in molybdenum disulfide sheets is also due to loss of sulfur into the electrolyte."

By wrapping the MoS2 in silicon carbonitride, which is a ceramic material capable of withstanding high temperatures, the MoS2 is prevented from giving off its sulfur atoms and creating the polysulfides that would eventually dissolve in the electrolyte.

"The silicon carbonitride-wrapped molybdenum disulfide sheets show stable cycling of lithium-ions irrespective of whether the battery electrode is on copper foil-traditional method or as a self-supporting flexible paper as in bendable batteries," Singh said in the release.

In a full comparative table provided in the open-access research paper,  you can see the big difference in durability between the SiCN-MoS2 hybrid versus the MoS2 on its own. The MoS2 material on a traditional electrode starts with a charge capacity of 595 milliampere-hour per gram, and after just 20 cycles, falls precipitously to just 16 mAh/g. Meanwhile the SiCN-MoS2 on a traditional electrode, starts at 572 mAh/g and after 20 cycles is still at 104.8 mAh/g. When a SiCN-MoS2 paper electrode is used, the new formulation’s numbers are even more impressive, starting at 623.5 mAh/g and registering 417.8 mAh/g after 20 cycles.

In further research, Singh intends to see how this battery design might function in an actual handheld device. The key to this line of research will be testing its ability to store energy over the course of hundreds of charge-discharge cycles.

New materials are discovered that could improve battery power.

Researchers say a new compound could affect fuel cells and make batteries more powerful. It has unique properties that enhance ion flow, opening new opportunities for battery performance.

A battery’s power is reliant on how fast ions pass through the electrolyte. It’s something that engineers, including the researchers of this new study, have been working on for years.

The team, comprised of engineers and scientists from Clemson University and the University of South California, attempted to solve this problem using gadolinium doped ceria (GDC). It’s a material that contains tiny grains, which ions travel through with ease. But gadolinium typically accumulates at the boundaries of these grains, which in turn slows down the ions.

"The origin of the low grain boundary conductivity is known to be segregation of gadolinium in the grain boundary which leads to a built-in charge at the interface referred to as the space charge effect," said Fanglin Chen, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of South California.

He added:  "This built-in charge serves as a barrier for ion transport at the interface. The challenge is how to effectively avoid the segregation of (gadolinium) in the grain boundary. The grain boundary is extremely narrow, on the order of a few nanometers. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to characterize and rationally control the amount of (gadolinium) in such a narrow region."

In an attempt to solve this issue, the researchers summoned cobalt iron spinel (CFO). They discovered the compound eliminated the excess gadolinium from the grain boundaries and cleared the way for ions, simplifying travel through the electrolyte.  

"The CFO reacts with the excess (gadolinium) present in the grain boundary of GDC to form a third phase,” said researcher Kyle Brinkman. “It was found that this new phase could also serve as an excellent oxygen ionic conductor. We further investigated the atomic microstructure around the grain boundary through a series of high resolution characterization techniques and found that (gadolinium) segregation in the grain boundary had been eliminated, leading to dramatic improvement in the grain boundary oxygen.

This discovery has huge implications for batteries and fuel cells. "The ability to control the performance of materials by tuning small interfacial regions represents a huge opportunity in the design of materials for use in energy conversion and storage," said Brinkman.

Brinkman and his team still have a lot of research to accomplish. The compounds they used works at a temperature that is too hot for humans. The researchers are currently looking at other compounds that may do the same thing at cooler temperatures. Still, this discovery is significant and may come in handy for various industries, including the ever-growing electric car market.    

MIT chemists device sensors that detect spoilt meat

MIT chemists have devised an inexpensive, portable sensor that can detect gases emitted by rotting meat, allowing consumers to determine whether the meat in their grocery store or refrigerator is safe to eat.

The sensor, which consists of chemically modified carbon nanotubes, could be deployed in “smart packaging” that would offer much more accurate safety information than the expiration date on the package, says Timothy Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry at MIT.

It could also cut down on food waste, he adds. “People are constantly throwing things out that probably aren’t bad,” says Swager, who is the senior author of a paper describing the new sensor this week in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The paper’s lead author is graduate student Sophie Liu. Other authors are former lab technician Alexander Petty and postdoc Graham Sazama.

The sensor is similar to other carbon nanotube devices that Swager’s lab has developed in recent years, including one that detects the ripeness of fruit. All of these devices work on the same principle: Carbon nanotubes can be chemically modified so that their ability to carry an electric current changes in the presence of a particular gas.

In this case, the researchers modified the carbon nanotubes with metal-containing compounds called metalloporphyrins, which contain a central metal atom bound to several nitrogen-containing rings. Hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood, is a metalloporphyrin with iron as the central atom.

For this sensor, the researchers used a metalloporphyrin with cobalt at its center. Metalloporphyrins are very good at binding to nitrogen-containing compounds called amines. Of particular interest to the researchers were the so-called biogenic amines, such as putrescine and cadaverine, which are produced by decaying meat.

When the cobalt-containing porphyrin binds to any of these amines, it increases the electrical resistance of the carbon nanotube, which can be easily measured.

“We use these porphyrins to fabricate a very simple device where we apply a potential across the device and then monitor the current. When the device encounters amines, which are markers of decaying meat, the current of the device will become lower,” Liu says.

In this study, the researchers tested the sensor on four types of meat: pork, chicken, cod, and salmon. They found that when refrigerated, all four types stayed fresh over four days. Left unrefrigerated, the samples all decayed, but at varying rates.

There are other sensors that can detect the signs of decaying meat, but they are usually large and expensive instruments that require expertise to operate. “The advantage we have is these are the cheapest, smallest, easiest-to-manufacture sensors,” Swager says.

“There are several potential advantages in having an inexpensive sensor for measuring, in real time, the freshness of meat and fish products, including preventing foodborne illness, increasing overall customer satisfaction, and reducing food waste at grocery stores and in consumers’ homes,” says Roberto Forloni, a senior science fellow at Sealed Air, a major supplier of food packaging, who was not part of the research team.

The new device also requires very little power and could be incorporated into a wireless platform Swager’s lab recently developed that allows a regular smartphone to read output from carbon nanotube sensors such as this one.

The researchers have filed for a patent on the technology and hope to license it for commercial development. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Sound waves are now used to detect rare cancer.

Cancer cells often break free from their original locations and circulate through the bloodstream, allowing them to form new tumors elsewhere in the body. Detecting these cells could give doctors a new way to predict whether patients’ tumors will metastasize, or monitor how they are responding to treatment, but finding these extremely rare cells has proven challenging because there might be only one to 10 such cells in a 1-milliliter sample of a patient’s blood.

A team of engineers from MIT, Penn State University, and Carnegie Mellon University is developing a novel way to isolate these cells: using sound waves to separate them from blood cells.

Their new cell-sorting device is 20 times faster than the original version that they first reported last year, approaching the speed that would be necessary to make it useful for testing patient blood samples. The researchers have also demonstrated that the device can successfully capture circulating tumor cells from patient samples, which could enable many clinical applications as well as fundamental research on how these cells escape from their original tumor site.

Ming Dao, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Subra Suresh, president of Carnegie Mellon and, at MIT, the Vannevar Bush Professor Emeritus of Engineering and a former dean of engineering; and Tony Jun Huang, a professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State, are senior authors of a paper describing the device in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 6.

The research team also includes the lead author, Peng Li, a postdoc at Penn State; Zhangli Peng, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame; and Joseph Drabick, a professor of medicine at Penn State’s Hershey Cancer Institute, among others.

Quantum Dots and the efficient management of energy

A device based on tiny fluorescent crystals known as quantum dots could harvest useful energy from waste heat from electronics, researchers say.

Quantum dots are semiconductor crystals each made of as little as a few dozen atoms. When quantum dots absorb energy, because they are so tiny, there is usually virtually nothing else for the energy to do except reemerge as light, a quality that has driven Samsung, Hisense, Sharp, LG and other television manufacturers to explore TVs and other displays based on quantum dots.

Quantum dots can also convert energy  into electric current, and last year MIT researchers showed quantum dots could help significantly boost solar cell efficiencies. Now a team of physicists at the University of Würzburg in Germany and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland reveal that a microscopic device based on quantum dots can generate electricity by harvesting waste heat from electronic circuits, which comes in the form of tiny random fluctuations of voltage and current.

The invention is a rectifier, a device that converts alternating current to direct current. At the heart of this rectifier are two coupled quantum dots made of gallium arsenide and aluminum gallium arsenide. One dot is connected to an electronic circuit, which provides AC in the form of voltage fluctuations, while the other quantum dot is where the direct current flows out to picowatts of power.

The researchers suggest this strategy could be used for harvesting and reusing waste heat at the nano-scale, for autonomous and energy-efficient electronic applications.

Energy consumption in cars improved using ultrasound technology.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield have discovered new ways of monitoring the conditions of combustion engines using ultrasound.

Professor of Lubrication Engineering at the university, Rob Dwyer-Joyce has overseen the use of the method, typically used in healthcare to examine the inside of the human body but could now be utilized for the inside of machinery, particularly cars.

Ultrasound can be used to monitor the movements of the pistons, which move the car forward, inside an engine, allowing you to make sure they are moving up and down correctly, how much oil they will need and determine whether or not a servicing is need.

The research aims “to improve energy consumption in cars”, explains Professor Rob Dwyer-Joyce.

“Our method will allow engine manufacturers to adjust lubrication levels with confidence and ensure they are using the optimum level for any particular engine, rather than over-lubricating, to ensure engine safety,” he says. “The energy used by the piston rings alone amounts to around 4p in every liter of fuel – there is a lot at stake in getting the lubrication right.”

The research, which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, is still on-going and could still yield positive results in energy consumption and engine maintenance.

See how the Sun ironically cools a room-Engineerinh design.

An automatic, solar-powered window blind that spreads like flowers opening in the sun has been invented by engineers in Germany.

The blind system, designed by researchers from the Fraunhofer Society as a way of cooling offices with large glass facades, comprises a network of wires that change shape when heated, opening a patchwork of circular fabric shades.

This allows the blind to adjust itself automatically to the amount of sunlight hitting the window without additional power, said André Bucht, researcher and department head at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology (IWU), where the technology was developed.

“Picture the façade element as a sort of membrane that adapts to weather conditions throughout each day and during the various seasons of the year, providing the ideal amount of shade however strong the sun,” said Bucht in a statement.

“We don’t need any power since we can rely solely on thermal energy to control the façade element.”

Each textile module is built with integrated shape-memory actuators: thin 80-millimeter-long wires of nickel-titanium alloy that can be bent but return to their original shape when heated.

The wires are activated when they heat up in the sun and noiselessly contract to open the textile components, covering the window. As soon as the sun disappears behind a cloud, the components close leaving the window transparent again.

The system can be attached to the outside of windows or installed between panes of glass, and comes with a range of design options, allowing you to choose the pattern, shape and colour of the individual components.

“For instance, you might want to replace the circular design with triangles or a honeycomb arrangement,” said Bucht.

“You can also control the level of sun exposure for individual sections of the façade – just the top left area, for instance. What’s more, the membrane even fits on curved areas of glass. We’ve reached the point where the design has become independent of the shape of the building.”

The researchers now want to collaborate with industry partners to develop and test a range of prototypes for private and office buildings, with both new-build and retrofitted variants, and launch them commercially by mid-2017.

“One priority will be to design fabric elements that are stable enough to withstand any weather,” said Bucht.

They also plan to include other elements such as variable heat insulation, he added. “It might be possible to store solar thermal energy and then release it when needed to heat the interior, for instance at night. Another idea is to coat the flower fabric components with malleable, organic solar cells in order to generate electricity that can be used within the building.”

The original concept came from design student Bára Finnsdottir from the Department of Textile and Surface Design at Weissensee School of Art in Berlin, which worked with Fraunhofer IWU to produce a demonstration model.

“The challenge in this project was how to bring together innovative technology and design,” said Prof Christiane Sauer from the Weissensee School of Art. “Having designers and scientists work together is the key to pioneering concepts for smart building envelopes.”

The demonstrator, comprising a matrix of 72 fabric components, will be on display at the major manufacturing exhibition Hannover Messe later this month.

Cinema Experience to change with the new technology from Dolby

AMC and Dolby are teaming up in order to develop around 100 high-tech laser powered theaters over the next decade. The main goal is to bring crisper images and more lifelike sounds to cinemas through the use of Dolby Vision, a brand new laser projection system that blows away the picture quality of current screens. In addition, the new state-of-the-art theaters will feature Dolby’s Atmos sound system, which amplifies lifelike sounds of events in the films from people to music and even object noises. While sounds are flowing all around moviegoers, their reclining seats will also vibrate in conjunction with the action on the screen, a potential reason to go to the theater and not stream films from home. “Guests should be prepared to be blown away when we launch this amazing theater experience,” AMC Chief Executive Gerry Lopez said in a statement. As someone who subscribes to both Netflix and Amazon Prime, these companies will be hard-pressed to get people of my generation to come to the theater even if they have live animals jump off the screen. I do appreciate Dolby’s optimism, however. “We have what we believe is the ability to deliver a differentiated and unique experience that moviegoers can’t find anywhere else,” said Doug Darrow, senior vice president of cinema at Dolby.