Scientists Seek To Create Inorganic Life. Antimagnets That Nullify Magnetic Fields. Nanotechnology pushes battery life to eternity. (PhysOrg.com) -- A simple tap from your finger may be enough to charge your portable device thanks to a discovery made at RMIT University and Australian National University. In a crucial step towards the development of self-powering portable electronics, researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne have for the first time characterised the ability of piezoelectric thin films to turn mechanical pressure into electricity. The pioneering result is published in the 21 June Issue of the leading materials science journal, Advanced Functional Materials. Lead co-author Dr Madhu Bhaskaran said the research combined the potential of piezoelectrics - materials capable of converting pressure into electrical energy - and the cornerstone of microchip manufacturing, thin film technology.
"The concept of energy harvesting using piezoelectric nanomaterials has been demonstrated but the realisation of these structures can be complex and they are poorly suited to mass fabrication. Zombie Ant Manipulation Method Revealed in Detail: Study | Science. Zombie ants biting the underside of leaves as a result of infection by O. unilateralis.
(PLoS ONE) Just how exactly parasitic fungi turn their ant hosts into zombies has been unveiled in a new study, to be published in the journal BMC Ecology. Scientists looked at the carpenter ant Camponotus leonardi, which inhabits the rainforest canopy in Thailand. They found that the ant’s behavior changes significantly after infection by the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis for a number of reasons. As the fungal cells multiply inside the worker ant, the ant’s muscles shrink and its central nervous system stops functioning normally. Thus the ant begins to move around randomly and loses the colony’s trail. These physiological changes also cause the ant to convulse and fall down from the forest canopy to the understory around 25 centimeters above the ground, where the ant remains lost in conditions ideal for the fungus to grow and reproduce.
"The fungus attacks the ants on two fronts. Top Ten New Species Named for This Year | Science. By Cassie RyanEpoch Times Staff Created: May 23, 2011 Last Updated: March 8, 2012 It is flat like a pancake and researchers say when it moves on the sea floor it resembles a 'walking bat' with its odd arm-like fins bouncing it across the abyss. (Prosanta Chakrabarty/Louisiana State University, USA) A T. rex leech, a pancake batfish, and an underwater mushroom are among the winners on this year’s top 10 new species list, announced today, May 23, to coincide with the 304th birthday of Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, who fathered modern taxonomy and the classification system used by scientists.
Tyrannobdella rex, a Peruvian leech under 2 inches long, has a single jaw with gigantic teeth to match its name, meaning “tyrant leech king.” It was first discovered when a leech attached itself to the inside of someone’s nose. Jumping cockroach, Saltoblattella montistabularis. (Mike Picker/University of Cape Town, South Africa) This bioluminescent fungi casts an eerie, yet beautiful glow. New Elements Added to the Periodic Table | Science. By Alex JohnstonEpoch Times Staff Created: June 9, 2011 Last Updated: June 9, 2011 Two new elements, 114 and 116, were introduced to the periodic table. (Photos.com) Two new elements were introduced to the periodic table on Wednesday, even though they only exist for moments in real time.
The elements are currently unnamed and are both extremely radioactive, existing for at most a few seconds at a time before dissipating. The details of the new elements, currently referred to as 114 and 116, have been published in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry. Over the past few years, laboratories have made claims for the discovery of new chemical elements 113, 114, 115, 116, and 118. "Our experiments last for many weeks, and typically, we make an atom every week or so," said chemist Ken Moody of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who belongs to the team who discovered the elements, according to The Associated Press. Scientists finely control methane combustion to get different products. Scientists have discovered a method to control the gas-phase selective catalytic combustion of methane, so finely that if done at room temperature the reaction produces ethylene, while at lower temperatures it yields formaldehyde.
The process involves using gold dimer cations as catalysts -- that is, positively charged diatomic gold clusters. Being able to catalyze these reactions, at or below room temperature, may lead to significant cost savings in the synthesis of plastics, synthetic fuels and other materials. The research was conducted by scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Ulm. It appears in the April 14, 2011, edition of The Journal of Physical Chemistry C. This time around, the team has discovered that, by using the same gas-phase gold dimer cation catalyst, methane partially combusts to produce formaldehyde at temperatures below 250 Kelvin or -9 degrees Fahrenheit.
Video: Magnetic Gels That Swim, Shimmy, and 'Walk' DNA nanoforms: Miniature architectural forms -- some no larger than viruses -- constructed through DNA origami. Miniature architectural forms -- some no larger than viruses -- have been constructed through a revolutionary technique known as DNA origami. Now, Hao Yan, Yan Liu and their colleagues at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have expanded the capability of this method to construct arbitrary, two and three-dimensional shapes, mimicking those commonly found in nature. Such diminutive forms may ultimately find their way into a wide array of devices, from ultra-tiny computing components to nanomedical sentries used to target and destroy aberrant cells or deliver therapeutics at the cellular or even molecular level.
In the April 15 issue of Science, the Yan group describes an approach that capitalizes on (and extends) the architectural potential of DNA. The new method is an important step in the direction of building nanoscale structures with complex curvature -- a feat that has eluded conventional DNA origami methods. Graphene. A team of researchers from the University of Arizona and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have increased the toughness of ceramic composites by using graphene reinforcements that enable new fracture resistance mechanisms in the ceramic. The research, lead by Assistant Professor Erica L. Corral from the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and Professor Nikhil Koratkar from the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, was recently published in ACS Nano, the monthly journal of the American Chemical Society.
"Our work on graphene ceramic composites is the first of its kind in the open literature and shows mechanisms for toughening using two-dimensional graphene sheets that have yet to be seen in ceramic composites," said Corral. This is the first published work describing the use of graphene nanofiller to reinforce ceramics and will appear in the journal ACS Nano. New spin on graphene makes it magnetic. A team led by Professor Andre Geim, a recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for graphene, can now show that electric current -- a flow of electrons -- can magnetise graphene.
The results, reported in Science, could be a potentially huge breakthrough in the field of spintronics. Spintronics is a group of emerging technologies that exploit the intrinsic spin of the electron, in addition to its fundamental electric charge that is exploited in microelectronics. Billions of spintronics devices such as sensors and memories are already being produced. Every hard disk drive has a magnetic sensor that uses a flow of spins, and magnetic random access memory (MRAM) chips are becoming increasingly popular.
The findings are part of a large international effort involving research groups from the US, Russia, Japan and the Netherlands. The key feature for spintronics is to connect the electron spin to electric current as current can be manipulated by means routinely used in microelectronics. New way to control magnetic properties of graphene discovered. University of Maryland researchers have discovered a way to control magnetic properties of graphene that could lead to powerful new applications in magnetic storage and magnetic random access memory. The finding by a team of Maryland researchers, led by Physics Professor Michael S. Fuhrer of the UMD Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials is the latest of many amazing properties discovered for graphene.
A honeycomb sheet of carbon atoms just one atom thick, graphene is the basic constituent of graphite. Some 200 times stronger than steel, it conducts electricity at room temperature better than any other known material (a 2008 discovery by Fuhrer, et. al). Graphene is widely seen as having great, perhaps even revolutionary, potential for nanotechnology applications. The 2010 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to scientists Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim for their 2004 discovery of how to make graphene.
What the Heck is Three-Phase Power (and how can you get some)? I recently moved my shop, and in addition to the big issues, from forklift rental to sleep deprivation, we also had to deal with things like three-phase power, a variation of power delivery often used for big equipment. The old shop had it and the new shop doesn't. So what the heck is three-phase power and how can you convert machinery to go from the more common single-phase to three-phase and vice versa? Read on. For us, the impact was limited because only the air compressor had a three-phase motor. Some of the welding equipment had been running on three-phase, but can easily be re-configured to run on either three-phase or single-phase.
But first, a short explanation of three-phase power. Alternating current does just as it's name implies and alternates cyclically, first flowing in one direction in a circuit and then reversing to flow in the other. Three-phase power provides three alternating currents—essentially three separate electric services—uniformly separated in phase angle. 1. Unprecedented Cosmic Explosion Spawns an Intergalactic Mystery. A mystery is unfolding out there in the cosmos, and NASA's Swift, Hubble Space Telescope, and Chandra X-Ray Observatory are teaming up to solve the case. But while researchers have pieced together some of the pieces of the puzzle over the last week, the huge, high-energy blast continues to brighten and fade, making it the brightest, longest-lasting such burst of energy researchers have ever seen.
It all started when Swift's Burst Alert Telescope picked up a powerful gamma-ray burst on March 28, at which point it notified scientists the world over. Astronomers sometimes see gamma-ray bursts like this when a star dies, but these bursts generally last a few hours or less. The plot thickened when the burst didn't fade away.
Dozens of telescopes turned toward the enigma, and it was concluded that the source of the gamma-ray burst is at the center of a galaxy some 3.8 billion light-years away. The burst was still repeating itself, brightening and fading over and over. "Einstein's Pedometer" App Measures How Special Relativity Affects Your Daily Activity. Runners live longer, so they say, and a new iPhone app proves it through the theory of special relativity. Just in time for marathon season! As your velocity increases, time as you experience it slows down relative to something moving slower than you. A passenger on a spaceship traveling near the speed of light would appear to have aged less than his friends when he returned to Earth, for instance.
Similarly, a fast runner appears to gain time compared to a slow runner. Einstein's Pedometer brings special relativity to your daily activities, showing how much time you gain by moving. The faster you move, the more nanoseconds you gain relative to your stationary friends. The iPod app, designed by a Japanese developer, uses the iPhone's GPS capabilities and Lorentz transformation equations to calculate this.
Einstein's Pedometer is free on the App Store, available for iPod touch, iPhone and iPad devices. [Gizmag] How to turn the vacuum into a superconductor - physics-math - 08 April 2011. TURNING a vacuum into a superconductor could be as simple as zapping it with a super-powerful magnet. That's according to Maxim Chernodub of the University of Tours in France, who believes powerful magnetic fields could pluck charged particles out of the vacuum of space and set them flowing as a current that never encounters any resistance. This seemingly bizarre proposal is a consequence of the uncertainty principle of quantum theory, which says we can never be sure that a vacuum is truly empty.
Instead, space is fizzing with "virtual" particles, which tend to disappear almost as soon as they form. In principle, however, they could stick around long enough to become real, if they could avoid adding energy to the universe's current tally - in accordance with the law of conservation of energy. That's exactly what happens when charged particles that behave like tiny bar magnets pop out of the vacuum in a strong magnetic field. More From New Scientist More from the web (YouTube) Recommended by.