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.