UCLA researchers and colleagues have designed a new device that creates electricity from falling snow. The first of its kind, this device is inexpensive, small, thin and flexible like a sheet of plastic. “The device can work in remote areas because it provides its own power and does not need batteries,” said senior author Richard Kaner, who …
Hydrogen is a clean and renewable energy carrier that can power vehicles, with water as the only emission. Unfortunately, hydrogen gas is highly flammable when mixed with air, so very efficient and effective sensors are needed. Now, researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, present the first hydrogen sensors ever to meet the future performance …
Can water reach minus 263 degrees Celsius without turning into ice? Yes it can, say researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, if it is confined in nanometre-scale lipid channels. Making ice cubes is a simple process: you take a plastic ice-cube tray like you’d find in most households, fill it with water …
Scientists at the Sensitive Instrument Facility of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory achieved real-time atom rearrangement monitoring using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy during the synthesis of intermetallic nanoparticles (iNPs). In collaboration with Wenyu Huang, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Iowa State University and a scientist at Ames Laboratory, …
Tiny nanoclusters of metal atoms—such as gold and silver—have properties which mean they can be used as semiconductors, a joint Swansea-Hamburg research team has discovered. The finding opens the door to a wide range of potential new applications, from phone displays and flatter screens to wearable technology. Semiconductors are at the heart of modern electronics. …
Periodontitis affects nearly half of Americans ages 30 and older, and in its advanced stages, it could lead to early tooth loss or worse. Recent studies have shown that periodontitis could also increase risk of heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. A team of UCLA researchers has developed methods that may lead to more effective and …
Nanoparticles composed of nickel and iron have been found to be more effective and efficient than other, more costly materials when used as catalysts in the production of hydrogen fuel through water electrolysis. The discovery was made by University of Arkansas researchers Jingyi Chen, associate professor of physical chemistry, and Lauren Greenlee, assistant professor of …
The next time you set a kettle to boil, consider this scenario: After turning the burner off, instead of staying hot and slowly warming the surrounding kitchen and stove, the kettle quickly cools to room temperature and its heat hurtles away in the form of a boiling-hot wave. We know heat doesn’t behave this way …
A team of researchers led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a simple method that could turn ordinary semiconducting materials into quantum machines—superthin devices marked by extraordinary electronic behavior. Such an advancement could help to revolutionize a number of industries aiming for energy-efficient electronic systems—and provide a platform …
The work provides a step towards chemical cognition in synthetic protocells and could be useful in biosensing and therapeutics. Molecular computers made from DNA use programmable interactions between DNA strands to transform DNA inputs into coded outputs. However, DNA computers are slow because they operate in a chemical soup where they rely on random molecular …
