Undergraduate Designer Makes Nanostructured Clothes That Block Poisonous Gases

Gas-Trapping Gear Cornell student Allie Thielens, left, models the gas-absorbing hood and mask designed by fellow student Jennifer Keane, right. Mark Vorreuter, Cornell University

 

A new type of cloth can guard against noxious gases and odors by trapping their molecules inside its fibers, according to Cornell University. A Cornell undergrad fashioned the cloth into protective head gear, seen here in a summery shade of turquoise.

The cloth is made of cellulose fibers and metal-organic framework molecules, crystalline compounds that form a porous structure. The pores can trap and store molecules of gas, serving as wearable filtration systems.

Metal-organic frameworks are often studied for their ability to store beneficial gases, like hydrogen for a fuel cell, for instance. There are several ways to build MOFs, including the use of petroleum-derived chemicals and even edible compounds. But they usually come in a powdered form that is sensitive to air exposure, making them difficult to weave into a garment.

Marcia Da Silva Pinto, a postdoctoral researcher in fiber science, and assistant fiber science professor Juan Hinestroza spent months figuring out how to bind the MOFs and cellulose fiber together. Now the researchers are able to make large surfaces of fabric coated with the MOFs, and hope to make integrated nanofibers next, Hinestroza said. 

The fabrics would be tailored to fit a specific compound by designing pore sizes that correspond to the molecular size of the gas.

Jennifer Keane, a fiber science and apparel design major, worked with Da Silva Pinto and Hinestroza to make a gas-absorbing hood and mask. The project received funding from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

 [Cornell News via MedGadget]

Researchers Succeed in Quantum Teleportation of Light Waves

This is a Teleportation Device The setup Noriyuki Lee and colleagues used to teleport quantum light.Science/AAAS

 

In a real-life use of Schrödinger's theoretical paradoxical cat, researchers report that they were able to quickly transfer a complex set of quantum information while preserving its integrity. The information, in the form of light, was manipulated in such a way that it existed in two states at the same time, and it was destroyed in one spot and recreated in another. The new breakthrough is a major step toward building safe, effective quantum computers. 

No felines were harmed in the making of this experiment, which actually studied wave packets of light that existed in a state of quantum superposition, meaning they existed in two different phases simultaneously. This phenomenon is described in Erwin Schrodinger’s quantum mechanics thought experiment, in which a cat is simultaneously dead and alive, depending on the state of a subatomic particle.

In this experiment, researchers in Australia and Japan were able to transfer quantum information from one place to another without having to physically move it. It was destroyed in one place and instantly resurrected in another, “alive” again and unchanged. This is a major advance, as previous teleportation experiments were either very slow or caused some information to be lost. 

The team employed a mind-boggling set of quantum manipulation techniques to achieve this, including squeezing, photon subtraction, entanglement and homodyne detection. The photo above depicts their device, nicknamed the Teleporter, in the lab of Akira Furusawa at the University of Tokyo. 

The results pave the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of information, according to Elanor Huntington, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who was part of the study.
“If we can do this, we can do just about any form of communication needed for any quantum technology,” she said in a news release.

Instead of using ones and zeroes, quantum computers store data as qubits, which can represent one and zero simultaneously. This superposition enables the computers to solve multiple problems at once. The new, faster teleportation process means scientists can move blocks of this quantum information around within a computer or across a network, Huntington said. 

Optics researcher Philippe Grangier at the Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau, France, said it was a major breakthrough.

“It shows that the controlled manipulation of quantum objects has progressed steadily and achieved objectives that seemed impossible just a few years ago,” he wrote in an editorial that accompanies the study.

[Science]

 

Now In Production: Human Skin Grown In a Robot-Controlled German Skin Factory

Skin Scaffold A matrix with a vascular system, or BioVaSc (biological vascularized scaffold), on which skin cells can be cultivated at the Fraunhofer skin factory.

The skin factory concept at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology, where scientists hoped to mass-produce skin at low cost for clinical testing and other uses. Now it’s come online, with robots squeezing pink solution into pipettes and turning out sheets of human flesh.

The factory can produce 5,000 penny-sized discs of whitish translucent tissue every month. The designers say it can also come in shades of brown. Each disc will cost about $72, a bit more than expected when the project was in its planning stages two years ago. The German newspaper Der Spiegel took a tour of the facility with its director, Heike Walles; check out their coverage here.

Robots and computers control the skin-making process, which takes place in a sterile, climate-controlled setting. The skin broth is closely monitored for any signs of infection and computers guide the lasers and blades that cut swatches of skin. The goal is to pave the way for factory-produced human tissue, complete with blood vessels, that could be used to treat injuries or various medical conditions.

As Der Spiegel puts it, Walles believes factories like this one will be the only way to efficiently produce new tissue like bladders, tracheas, cartilage and even human organs. She and others have successfully produced engineered tissue for human transplantation, but the process is hugely expensive and labor-intensive. An automated manufacturing facility could make it cheaper and simpler, she says.

For now, the tissue is being used in animal testing and could even be used for products like cosmetics, but it is still a long way from being transplanted. European Union regulations require several stages of animal testing before it could be used in a clinical setting, Der Spiegel reports.

[Der Spiegel]

Reprogrammable Chips Could Allow You to Update Your Hardware Just Like Software

The rapid pace of innovation and the relentless pressure of Moore’s Law means new and better gadgets are always coming to market, but it also means whatever you just bought for several hundred (or thousand) dollars will likely be obsolete in a matter of months (see: the iPhone through the iPhone 4). But a new kind of shape-shifting chip--if it can be tamed and perfected--could change all that, allowing device hardware to be reconfigured when updated designs become available.

Essentially, startup Tabula is trying to create the hardware equivalent of software--a chip that can be updated over time to implement hardware improvements without scrapping a device outright. If such programmable chips could be made fast, and more importantly cheap, devices with reprogrammable components could supplant the fixed hardware devices ubiquitous today.

Reprogrammable chips aren’t completely novel. An existing type of chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is currently used in some finished devices and in many prototypes before production begins (chips are cheapest when you press a million or more, so FPGAs make good stand-ins for prototypes). But FPGAs are inherently large because they need space for all that reprogrammable circuitry. In turn, that makes them both slow and expensive.

Tabula’s chips enjoy several advantages over FPGAs, the company says. To solve the size problem, the chips are cleverly designed to mimic the way a stacked, 3-D chip might function. The company likens it to stepping into an elevator that doesn’t move up or down. If when the doors close the floor outside is quickly rearranged to look like a different floor, when the doors open a person inside the elevator would think he or she has traveled to a different floor. This also improves speed, because the person doesn’t actually have to actually travel anywhere.

Tabula’s chips are capable of reconfiguring themselves in eight different ways at a rate of 1.6 gigahertz (that’s 1.6 billion times per second). That essentially means a single chip can function like an eight-layer 3-D chip, fooling data into thinking it has hopped to a completely new layer of the chip.

That capability, along with the advantage of being updatable, could spell big changes for the computer and electronic device industries. But stumbling blocks remain: Reconfigurable chips suck a lot of power, and there’s still that cost thing to overcome. But it's worth noting that Tabula just received $108 million in funding, the largest round of investment acquired by a chipmaker in a decade, so at least a few in-the-know investors think the company can iron out the wrinkles and drive down the cost. If it means not having to buy a new smartphone every year to stay on the bleeding edge of technology, a small premium up front might be worth it.

[Technology Review]

Tapping Light's Magnetic Properties, Innovative Tech Harvests Solar Energy Without Solar Cells

One of the major barriers between solar energy and solar-derived electricity is solar cells themselves--commercial solar cells aren’t very efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, but they are the best thing we’ve got. Now, a team of University of Michigan researchers have potentially devised a better way to convert solar energy into electricity: get rid of the semiconductor-based solar cells altogether and tap into the magnetic effects of light.

The researcher say the’ve essentially found a way to make an “optical battery” by extracting a very strong magnetic field from light, which generally exhibits weak magnetic effects. Those effects are generally so weak that until now scientists ignored them altogether. But the Michigan team found that by running light through a non-conductive material at the right intensity, the light field can generate magnetic effects 100 million times stronger than previously thought.

That’s more than a few orders of magnitude, and plenty to make those once-negligible magnetic effects quite interesting from an energy standpoint. By focusing this magnetic field on a material, it can be used to separate the positive and negative charges within the material, setting up a voltage. The discovery could lead to a new kind of solar cell that dispenses with semiconductors, instead relying on cheap and abundant glass for most of the components. 

The technique is not perfect. To work, the sunlight must be focused to an intensity of 10 million watts per square centimeter. That’s pretty intense--way more intense than natural sunlight--but the researchers are looking for other materials that could work at lower intensities. With better materials--and the researchers think they are out there--the technique could achieve 10 percent efficiency: on par with today’s commercial semiconductor cells, minus the costly semiconductors.


 [University of Michigan]

Police and Firefighters in the U.S. Get a Tiny, Throwable Recon Robot

 


U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have been making use of a tiny, tossable robot for recon and observation for several years, and now--thanks to a decision handed down by the FCC--law enforcement and firefighters can deploy the hardy little ‘bot, known as the Recon Scout Throwbot.

You read that correctly: a potentially life-saving tool that’s earned broad approval by service members serving in some of the toughest regions in the world was previously denied to first responders and law enforcement stateside because the robot couldn’t get a waiver to operate in a certain block of spectrum needed to transmit its live video feed. We’ll save you the rant about a bloated and slow-moving bureaucracy. Suffice it to say, Throwbot now has its waiver and is ready to recon.

And recon it can. At just 1.2 pounds and eight inches long, the camera-equipped rolling robot can be quite literally tossed like a football onto rooftops or through building windows. Its design ensures it lands upright in pretty much any situation where it hits a flat surface, and once deployed it can stealthily move under furniture, cars, or other cover and beam back live video to a command station 1,000 feet away. It is designed to be controlled by an operator working alongside it via a simple joystick control that also sports a small display that provides a ‘bots’-eye view.

Such a small, durable, and easily deployable robot with video streaming capability has so many potential (and critical) uses that it’s mind-numbing to think that it took this long for something like broadcast spectrum to get approved. See Throwbot get thrown in the video below.

New Graphene Material is Paper-Thin and Ten Times Stronger Than Steel

Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney have created a new material that is lighter, less dense, harder, and stronger than steel. But this material isn’t one of those breakthroughs that only sounds good on paper. It is paper, and it could be a game-changer for materials science if it can live up to researchers’ hopes.
This graphene paper is constructed of graphite reformed by chemical processes into monolayer hexagonal carbon lattices stacked as thin as a sheet of paper, and it is remarkably strong. 


Compared to steel, the prepared GP is six times lighter, five to six times lower density, two times harder with 10 times higher tensile strength and 13 times higher bending rigidity.

That’s no incremental improvement on the qualities of steel, but a huge leap forward in terms of overall material strength (plus, like paper, it is flexible). And because it is graphene, it is also imbued with some interesting electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties.

But perhaps best of all, graphene paper not outrageously difficult or expensive to manufacture, and as such it could have huge implications for the aviation and automotive industries, where manufacturers have already been turning to composites and carbon fiber materials to cut weight and thus increase fuel economies.

[UTS]

Self-Correcting Laser Rifle

Rifle Sighting System A new rifle sighting system precisely measures the deflection of the barrel relative to the sight and then electronically makes corrections. Ron Walli/Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

When you’re aiming at a target two miles away, the slightest perturbation could end up causing a catastrophic miss — not good enough for today’s military. Until guns can aim themselves, snipers need the most accurate weapons possible. Engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory came up with a laser-guided correction system that ensures a shooter’s crosshairs are always on the mark.

The new Reticle Compensating Rifle Barrel Reference Sensor measures slight disruptions in a gun barrel, automatically compensating for how they would impact a bullet’s trajectory and adjusting the gun’s crosshairs accordingly. This hyper-accuracy can enable snipers to take full advantage of modern guns with huge ranges up to two miles, ORNL explains.

It works by measuring slight variations across a rifle barrel. High-caliber rifles usually have a series of grooves on the exterior, called flutes, which help reduce weight and dissipate heat, allowing the barrel to cool off more quickly after firing a round. ORNL researchers led by Slobodan Rajic added glass optical fibers to these grooves. Laser diodes send a beam of light into the optical fibers, which split it in two directions, along the top and side of the barrel.

Using these beams and other sensor inputs, algorithms calculate how accurately a gun’s sights — the reticle — correlates to the barrel’s actual position. The shooter has crosshairs that automatically adjust for environmental conditions in real time, ONRL says.

The system’s resolution is 250 times better than traditional reticles, shifting by 1/1,000th of a minute of angle.

To accompany the accurate crosshairs, Rajic and colleagues are also developing a laser-based bullet tracking system, which would provide a marksman with information about the bullet’s flight path. That sounds kind of like Darpa’s One Shot self-aiming system, which will calculate ballistics and ensure a perfect shot regardless of wind, humidity and other conditions.

The reticle system is targeted for military and police forces, according to ORNL.

 [via Engadget]