Climate Change From Black Carbon Depends On Altitude

Scientists have known for decades that black carbon aerosols add to global warming. These airborne particles made of sooty carbon are believed to be among the largest man-made contributors to global warming because they absorb solar radiation and heat the atmosphere. New research from Carnegie's Long Cao and Ken Caldeira, along with colleagues George Ban-Weiss and Govindasamy Bala, quantifies how black carbon's impact on climate depends on its altitude in the atmosphere. Their work, published online by the journal Climate Dynamics, could have important implications for combating global climate change. Black carbon is emitted from diesel engines and burning wood, among other sources. In the atmosphere, it acts as an absorbing aerosol—a particle that absorbs the sun's heating rays. (Other types of aerosols reflect the sunlight back out into space, providing a cooling effect.) The climate effect of black carbon is difficult to quantify because these particles heat the air around them, affecting clouds even before they begin to heat the land and ocean surface.

The team's research involved idealized simulations of adding a theoretical megatonne of black carbon uniformly around the globe at different altitudes in the atmosphere. They found that the addition of black carbon near the land and ocean surface caused the surface to heat. As the altitude of black carbon increased, surface warming decreased. The addition of black carbon to the stratosphere caused the land and oceans to cool. This cooling occurred despite the fact that the black carbon caused the Earth as a whole to absorb more energy from the sun. When black carbon is high in the atmosphere, it can lose its energy to space while helping to shade the land and ocean surface.

"Black carbon lower in the atmosphere is more effective at warming the surface, even though black carbon particles at higher altitudes absorb more solar radiation," said Ban-Weiss, formerly of Carnegie and currently at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He continued: "Just analyzing instantaneous changes in absorption of radiation from black carbon cannot accurately predict changes in surface temperatures. If we want a consistent framework for predicting changes in surface air temperature from black carbon we need to account for rapid atmospheric responses in things like clouds."

Black carbon also had varying effects on precipitation. In the lower layers it increased precipitation and in the upper layers it decreased precipitation, a result of changes in atmospheric stability.

"We showed that black carbon near Earth's surface has the greatest effect on global warming. Unfortunately, this is exactly where we are putting most of the black carbon that we add to the atmosphere," Caldeira said. "This black carbon also often causes health problems, so cleaning up these emissions would help both the environment and human health."

Major sources of black carbon emissions into the lower atmosphere include forest fires, cooking stoves, and emissions from trucks and automobiles. Aircraft are a notable source of emissions to the upper atmosphere.

Read more...

Plasma Nanoscience Needed For Green Energy Revolution

A step change in research relating to plasma nanoscience is needed for the world to overcome the challenge of sufficient energy creation and storage, says a leading scientist from CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering and the University of Sydney, Australia. Professor Kostya (Ken) Ostrikov of the Plasma Nanoscience Centre Australia, CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering, has highlighted, in IOP Publishing's Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, the unique potential of plasma nanoscience to control energy and matter at fundamental levels to produce cost-effective, environmentally and human health friendly nanoscale materials for applications in virtually any area of human activity.

Professor Ostrikov is a pioneer in the field of plasma nanoscience, and was awarded the Australian Future Fellowship (2011) of the Australian Research Council, Walter Boas Medal of the Australian Institute of Physics (2010), Pawsey Medal of the Australian Academy of Sciences (2008), and CEO Science Leader Fellowship and Award of CSIRO (2008) on top of gaining seven other prestigious fellowships and eight honorary and visiting professorships in six different countries.

He said: "We can find the best, most suitable plasmas and processes for virtually any application-specific nanomaterials using plasma nanoscience knowledge.

"The terms 'best' and 'most-suitable' have many dimensions including quality, yield, cost, environment and human friendliness, and most recently, energy efficiency."

Plasma nanoscience involves the use of plasma – an ionised gas at temperatures from just a few to tens of thousands Kelvin – as a tool to create and process very small (nano) materials for use in energy conversion, electronics, IT, health care, and numerous other applications that are critical for a sustainable future.

In particular, Ostrikov points out the ability of plasma to synthesise carbon nanotubes – one of the most exciting materials in modern physics, with extraordinary properties arising from their size, dimension, and structure, capable of revolutionising the way energy is produced, transferred and stored.

Until recently, the unpredictable nature of plasma caused some scientists to question its ability to control energy and matter in order to construct nanomaterials, however Ostrikov draws on existing research to provide evidence that it can be controlled down to fundamental levels leading to cost-effective and environmentally friendly processes.

Read more...

Making Temporary Changes To Brain Could Speed Up Learning,Study Reports

In a breakthrough that may aid treatment of learning impairments, strokes, tinnitus and chronic pain, UT Dallas researchers have found that brain nerve stimulation accelerates learning in laboratory tests. Another major finding of the study, published in the April 14 issue of Neuron, involves the positive changes detected after stimulation and learning were complete. Researchers monitoring brain activity in rats found that brain responses eventually returned to their pre-stimulation state, but the animals could still perform the learned task. These findings have allowed researchers to better understand how the brain learns and encodes new skills.

Previous studies showed that people and animals that practice a task experience major changes in their brains. Learning to read Braille with a single finger leads to increased brain responses to the trained digit. Learning to discriminate among a set of tones leads to increased brain responses to the trained tones.

But it was not clear whether these changes are just coincidence or whether they truly help with learning. The current research demonstrates that changes in the brain are meaningful and not merely coincidental, said Dr. Amanda Reed, who wrote the article with colleagues from The University of Texas at Dallas' School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Reed and her fellow researchers used brain stimulation to release neurotransmitters that caused the brain to increase its response to a small set of tones. The team found that this increase allowed rats to learn to perform a task using these tones more quickly than animals that had not received stimulation. This finding provides the first direct evidence that a larger brain response can aid learning.

Future treatments that enhance large changes in the brain may also assist with recovery from stroke or learning disabilities. In addition, some brain disorders such as tinnitus or chronic pain occur when large-scale brain changes are unable to reverse. So this new understanding of how the brain learns may lead to better treatments for these conditions.

Read more...

Researchers Discover The Cause Of İrradiation-induced İnstability İn Materials Surfaces

A new discovery about the dynamic impact of individual energetic particles into a solid surface improves our ability to predict surface stability or instability of materials under irradiation over time. The finding may lead to the design of improved structural materials for nuclear fission and fusion power plants, which must withstand constant irradiation over decades. It may also accelerate the advent of fusion power, which does not produce radioactivity.

Publishing in Nature Communications, Michael Aziz, Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies, and Michael Brenner, Glover Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics, both at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and colleagues developed a new rigorous mathematical theory that is "fed" the measured shape of the average crater resulting from the impact of an energetic particle.

The impacts, lasting a few trillionths of a second, are simulated using intensive computer calculations. The theory then "up-scales" the cumulative effect of individual energetic particle impacts to predict surface topography evolution over thousands of seconds or longer.

"Our results illustrate how large-scale computer simulations can be combined with rigorous mathematical analysis to yield precise predictions of new phenomena on length and timescales that would otherwise be computationally impossible," says Brenner.

The researchers were surprised to discover that stability/instability is not determined by the atoms that are blasted away, but instead by the atoms that are knocked around and re-settle nearby.

"Our discovery overturns a long-held paradigm about what causes surfaces to erupt into patterns under energetic particle bombardment. The blasting away of individual atoms from energetic particle impacts has long been thought to determine whether a surface is stable or unstable," says Aziz.

"The effect of atoms blasted away turns out to be so small that it is essentially irrelevant. The lion's share of the responsibility of what makes a surface stable or unstable under irradiation comes from the cumulative effect of the much more numerous atoms that are just knocked to a different place but not blasted away."

Read more...

Device Proves Solar Cell Potential Of High Bandgap İnorganic Nanowire Arrays

A report, published in the March 14 edition of the Journal of Materials Chemistry, announced the successful fabrication and testing of a new type solar cell using an inorganic core/shell nanowire structure. Arrays of core/shell nanowires (described has "quantum coaxial cables") had previously been theorized as a potential structure that, while composed of chemically more stable large bandgap inorganic materials, should also be capable of absorbing the broad range of the wavelengths present in sunlight. High bandgap semiconductors are generally considered not effective at absorbing most of the available wavelengths in solar radiation by themselves. For instance, high bandgap zinc oxide (ZnO) is transparent in the visible but absorptive in the ultraviolet range, and thus is widely used in sunscreens but was not considered useful in solar cells.

In the report, a team of researchers from Xiamen University in China and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte describe successfully creating zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires with a zinc selenide (ZnSe) coating to form a material structure known as a type-II heterojunction that has a significantly lower bandgap than either of the original materials. The team reported that arrays of the structured nanowires were subsequently able to absorb light from the visible and near-infrared wavelengths, and show the potential use of wide bandgap materials for a new kind of affordable and durable solar cell.

"High bandgap materials tend to be chemically more stable than the lower bandgap semiconductors that we currently have," noted team member Yong Zhang, a Bissell Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Energy Production and Infrastructure Center (EPIC) at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

"And these nanowire structures can be made using a very low cost technology, using a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technique to grow the array," he added. "In comparison, solar cells using silicon and gallium arsenide require more expensive production techniques."

Based on a concept published in Nano Letters in 2007 by Zhang and collaborators Lin-Wang Wang (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Angelo Mascarenhas (National Renewable Energy Laboratory), the array was fabricated by Zhang's current collaborators Zhiming Wu, Jinjian Zheng, Xiangan Lin, Xiaohang Chen, Binwang Huang, Huiqiong Wang, Kai Huang, Shuping Li and Junyong Kang at the Fujian Key Laboratory of Semiconductor Materials and Applications in the Department of Physics at Xiamen University, China.

Read more...

Tissue Engineers Use New System To Measure Biomaterials,Structures

Tissue engineering makes biologists builders, but compared to their civil engineering counterparts, they don't know much about the properties of the materials and structures they use, namely living cells. To improve that knowledge, Brown University researchers have developed a simple and reliable system for measuring the power that cells employ to assemble into three-dimensional tissue. The research appears online the week of April 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to helping engineers evaluate how quickly and stably different cell types will combine into desired structures, the power measurements could also improve scientists' understanding of natural tissue growth, such as in fetal development, and how cancerous cells sometimes break off from a tumor and travel in the body, said Jeffrey Morgan, the paper's senior author and associate professor of medical science in Brown's Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology.

"Cells are the ultimate building parts, and it's important to understand how they are held together, how they assemble together and the energies with which they do that, if you want to delve into the field of tissue engineering," said Morgan, who last year co-developed the first artificial human ovary. "Sometimes these complex processes go wrong, and that's where it's relevant to cancer in terms of cell-to-cell adhesion. But it also plays out very nicely in developmental biology where a very complex 3-D orchestration of cell movement and forces gives rise to new tissues and organs."

Climb the cone

In the system, the researchers deposited cells in very small wells made of a specially designed hydrogel. The wells each have a cone of different steepness rising in the middle, like Bundt cake pans do. The cells form a doughnut shape around the cone. The mutual attraction of the cells then causes the doughnut of living cells to slide up the cone while a video microscope watches. The observed rate at which this mass of cells overcomes the force of gravity to ascend the cone yields a valuable number for the overall power exerted by the cells.

"There's no need to calibrate this device, because gravity is consistent and reliable and there are no moving parts other than the living cells," Morgan said.

Such overall measures of energy, time, and power have been hard to obtain, said lead author and doctoral candidate Jacquelyn Youssef. Many scientists have studied distinct forces and energies within and among cells, such as the bonding strength between particular proteins, but such measures leave tissue engineers to estimate the total energy in a structure by adding up what's known about the cells, related proteins, and their many interactions.

"What we've developed looks at all these things in this one system together," Youssef said. "There's lots of moving parts."

Read more...

Berkeley Lab Researchers Report Tandem Catalysis İn Nanocrystal İnterfaces

In a development that holds intriguing possibilities for the future of industrial catalysis, as well as for such promising clean green energy technologies as artificial photosynthesis, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have created bilayered nanocrystals of a metal-metal oxide that are the first to feature multiple catalytic sites on nanocrystal interfaces. These multiple catalytic sites allow for multiple, sequential catalytic reactions to be carried out selectively and in tandem. "The demonstration of rationally designed and assembled nanocrystal bilayers with multiple built-in metal–metal oxide interfaces for tandem catalysis represents a powerful new approach towards designing high-performance, multifunctional nanostructured catalysts for multiple-step chemical reactions," says the leader of this research Peidong Yang, a chemist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, and the University of California Berkeley's Chemistry Department and Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Yang is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research that appears in the journal Nature Chemistry. The paper is titled "Nanocrystal bilayer for tandem catalysis."

Co-authoring the paper were Yusuke Yamada, Chia-Kuang Tsung, Wenyu Huang, Ziyang Huo, Susan Habas, Tetsuro Soejima, Cesar Aliaga and leading authority on catalysis Gabor Somorjai.

Catalysts – substances that speed up the rates of chemical reactions without themselves being chemically changed – are used to initiate virtually every industrial manufacturing process that involves chemistry. Metal catalysts have been the traditional workhorses, but in recent years, with the advent of nano-sized catalysts, metal,oxide and their interface have surged in importance.

"High-performance metal-oxide nanocatalysts are central to the development of new-generation energy conversion and storage technologies," Yang says. "However, to significantly improve our capability of designing better catalysts, new concepts for the rational design and assembly of metal–metal oxide interfaces are needed."

Read more...

US House Budget Plans Would Jeopardize Scientific Research Facilities

It is important that the United States begin to live within its means and address the federal deficit. But APS believes that as a nation we need to be smart about how we do it. Cutting spending across the board without a clear understanding of what it means for America's future jeopardizes the very future we want to secure for our children. For more than half a century, science and technology have been the primary drivers of job creation and economic growth. Slashing spending on science, as the budget plans of the House of Representatives call for, is bad policy and bad economics. The cuts contained in the bill H.R. 1 – the legislative vehicle for funding the government for the balance of the fiscal year – would eliminate almost $1 billion from the Department of Energy's Office of Science budget.

Such a reduction would force all Department of Energy user facilities to shut down operations, lay off or fire as many as 10,000 technical workers, send thousands of construction workers home without pay and force 26,000 scientists and engineers in virtually every congressional district in the country to end their research or take it to other countries.

The national laboratories are the home to approximately 40 "user facilities," which are vital to the research performed by scientists and engineers in companies and universities throughout the nation. The specialized instruments represent a federal investment of tens of billions of dollars and have paid handsome dividends for many years. Shutting them down wastes taxpayer money and jeopardizes America's spirit of innovation.

According to the National User Facility Organization, which represents the 30,000 scientists, engineers and students who conduct research at the national laboratories, closing the facilities would have a devastating effect on America's ability to remain a global scientific leader.

"The impact of any facility shutdown on our students is very grave since most of those sophisticated experiments were planned and scheduled for several years," said Rene Bellwied, professor of physics at the University of Houston and chair of NUFO. "Losing access to the experimental facilities will mean a loss of at least months or even years of research for many of our young people."

Companies such as Eli Lily, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Intel and IBM rely on the national facilities to help them develop new consumer products, new energy technologies and drug therapies for curing diseases.

"If there are reductions in the operations of the Advanced Photon Source, we will consider other options, including the possibility of conducting our research overseas," said Stephen Wasserman, a chemist at Eli Lilly Co. who uses the Advanced Photon Source at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Wasserman's research consists of studying protein structures that help the company develop future pharmaceuticals.

Read more...

Newly Merged Black Hole Eagerly Shreds Stars

A galaxy's core is a busy place, crowded with stars swarming around an enormous black hole. When galaxies collide, it gets even messier as the two black holes spiral toward each other, merging to make an even bigger gravitational monster. Once it is created, the monster goes on a rampage. The merger kicks the black hole into surrounding stars. There it finds a hearty meal, shredding and swallowing stars at a rapid clip. According to new research by Nick Stone and Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), upcoming sky surveys might offer astronomers a way to catch a gorging black hole "in the act."

Before the merger, as the two black holes whirl around each other, they stir the galactic center like the blade of a blender. Their strong gravity warps space, sending out ripples known as gravitational waves. When the black holes merge, they emit gravitational waves more strongly in one direction. That inequality kicks the black hole in the opposite direction like a rocket engine.

"That kick is very important. It can shove the black hole toward stars that otherwise would have been at a safe distance," said Stone.

"Essentially, the black hole can go from starving to enjoying an all-you-can-eat buffet," he added.

When tidal forces rip a star apart, its remains will spiral around the black hole, smashing and rubbing together, heating up enough to shine in the ultraviolet or X-rays. The black hole will glow as brightly as an exploding star, or supernova, before gradually fading in a distinctive way.

Importantly, a wandering, supermassive black hole is expected to swallow many more stars than a black hole in an undisrupted galactic center. A stationary black hole disrupts one star every 100,000 years. In the best-case scenario, a wandering black hole could disrupt a star every decade. This would give astronomers a much better opportunity of spotting these events, particularly with new survey facilities like Pan-STARRS and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Catching the signal from a disrupted star is a good start. However, astronomers really want to combine that information with gravitational wave data from the black hole merger. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a future mission designed to detect and study gravitational waves, could provide that data.

Gravitational wave measurements yield very accurate distances (to better than one part in a hundred, or 1 percent). However, they don't provide precise sky coordinates. A star's tidal disruption will let astronomers pinpoint the galaxy containing the recently merged black-hole binary.

By correlating the galaxy's redshift (a change in its light that's caused by the expanding universe) with an accurate distance, astronomers can infer the equation of state of dark energy. In other words, they can learn more about the force that's accelerating cosmic expansion, and which dominates the cosmic mass/energy budget today.

"Instead of 'standard candles' like supernovae, the black hole binary would be a 'standard siren.' Using it, we could create the most accurate cosmic 'ruler' possible," stated Loeb.

Read more...

ReardonSmith Partners With Savile Row For New Resort Community İn Mozambique

ReardonSmith have announced a collaboration with Savile Row, the South African architectural and design firm. The two practices are already working on a spectacular opportunity in Mozambique. The project is the masterplanning and design of an entirely new resort community spanning 800 hectares of land and 1.6 kilometres of sandy beach along the Indian Ocean.

The site of the Mozambique project is located on a peninsula. The terrain is diverse in vegetation, rich in natural beauty and suggests abundant opportunity to create a resort that will provide a wide range of experiences for national and international visitors. An elephant reserve borders one side, the ocean another, there are lush coastal dune forests, lakes and savanna grasslands. The architectural response to this canvas is to be that of minimal intrusion, rehabilitating the landscape and providing opportunity to benefit the local population. When completed, the resort is likely to include a range of high quality accommodation together with varied leisure and conference facilities. Reflecting the sustainability criteria of the team, a large proportion of the site will be given over to providing a habitat for wildlife and indigenous flora and fauna, and an agricultural zone will provide home-grown foodstuffs.

Both Savile Row and ReardonSmith are confident that their alliance represents a unique combination of skills, experience and resources for the African region. Adrian Davidson, one of the founders of Savile Row, explains: “We are, and intend to remain, a niche practice working on bespoke projects across all sectors in Africa. ReardonSmith, by contrast, has specialised exclusively in hotel and resort architecture around the world for over 20 years, so has a huge body of experience in this field as well as all the design and technical resources of a comparatively large London studio. However, we are the same in our shared ethos of quality and in our absolute commitment to creating spaces that improve the human experience.”

This is the first time that London-based ReardonSmith has opened a branch office despite working on a wide diversity of hospitality projects across Europe, Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. For Kirsten Goosen, the company’s Development Director - Africa, it was the desire to return to her native South Africa after a decade working with ReardonSmith in the UK, together with her belief that many parts of the continent are now on the cusp of significant expansion in business and tourism travel, that inspired her to take a lead in establishing the Cape Town branch office. “Everyone has been very welcoming, but we are under no illusion that ReardonSmith will have to work hard and prove itself in Africa,” she says. “By collaborating with such a talented and well-respected practice as Savile Row, we hope to be able to make an early contribution to the design and development of hotels and resorts, particularly where markets are opening up, such as in the sub-Saharan countries.”

Read more...

Penn Research Advances Understanding Of Lead Selenide Nanowires

The advancements of our electronic age rests on our ability to control how electric charge moves, from point A to point B, through circuitry. Doing so requires particular precision, for applications ranging from computers, image sensors and solar cells, and that task falls to semiconductors. Now, a research team at the University of Pennsylvania's schools of Engineering and Applied Science and Arts and Sciences has shown how to control the characteristics of semiconductor nanowires made of a promising material: lead selenide.

Led by Cherie Kagan, professor in the departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering and Chemistry and co-director of Pennergy, Penn's center focused on developing alternative energy technologies, the team's research was primarily conducted by David Kim, a graduate student in the Materials Science and Engineering program.

The team's work was published online in the journal ACS Nano and will be featured in the Journal's April podcast.

The key contribution of the team's work has to do with controlling the conductive properties of lead selenide nanowires in circuitry. Semiconductors come in two types, n and p, referring to the negative or positive charge they can carry. The ones that move electrons, which have a negative charge, are called "n-type." Their "p-type" counterparts don't move protons but rather the absence of an electron — a "hole" — which is the equivalent of moving a positive charge.

Before they are integrated into circuitry, the semiconductor nanowire must be "wired up" into a device. Metal electrodes must be placed on both ends to allow electricity to flow in and out; however, the "wiring" may influence the observed electrical characteristics of the nanowires, whether the device appears to be n-type or p-type. Contamination, even from air, can also influence the device type. Through rigorous air-free synthesis, purification and analysis, they kept the nanowires clean, allowing them to discover the unique properties of these lead selenide nanomaterials.

Researchers designed experiments allowing them to separate the influence of the metal "wiring" on the motion of electrons and holes from that of the behavior intrinsic to the lead selenide nanowires. By controlling the exposure of the semiconductor nanowire device to oxygen or the chemical hydrazine, they were able to change the conductive properties between p-type and n-type. Altering the duration and concentration of the exposure, the nanowire device type could be flipped back and forth.

Read more...

Technique For Letting Brain Talk To Computers Now Tunes İn Speech

Patients with a temporary surgical implant have used regions of the brain that control speech to "talk" to a computer for the first time, manipulating a cursor on a computer screen simply by saying or thinking of a particular sound. "There are many directions we could take this, including development of technology to restore communication for patients who have lost speech due to brain injury or damage to their vocal cords or airway," says author Eric C. Leuthardt, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Scientists have typically programmed the temporary implants, known as brain-computer interfaces, to detect activity in the brain's motor networks, which control muscle movements.

"That makes sense when you're trying to use these devices to restore lost mobility — the user can potentially engage the implant to move a robotic arm through the same brain areas he or she once used to move an arm disabled by injury," says Leuthardt, assistant professor of neurosurgery, of biomedical engineering and of neurobiology, "But that has the potential to be inefficient for restoration of a loss of communication."

Patients might be able to learn to think about moving their arms in a particular way to say hello via a computer speaker, Leuthardt explains. But it would be much easier if they could say hello by using the same brain areas they once engaged to use their own voices.

The research appears April 7 in The Journal of Neural Engineering.

The devices under study are temporarily installed directly on the surface of the brain in epilepsy patients. Surgeons like Leuthardt use them to identify the source of persistent, medication-resistant seizures and map those regions for surgical removal. Researchers hope one day to install the implants permanently to restore capabilities lost to injury and disease

Read more...

New Poll Suggests Leaders Need To Listen More Closely To Americans

With Congress at a budget impasse, a new poll suggests the nation's leaders should look more deeply at the public's priorities, particularly regarding proposed cuts to medical, health and scientific research. Research!America urges our nation's leaders to put the public's interest and the nation's future ahead of politics and to move past polarizing budget battles and the uncertainty of continuing resolutions that resolve nothing. Americans are hungry for solutions from Washington. The poll, commissioned by Research!America, surveyed a mix of self-described conservatives (32%), liberals (32%) and moderates (36%). Among the findings:

As we emerge from the recession, 78% of Americans think federal funding for health research is important for job creation and the economy;
61% say accelerating our nation's investment in research to improve health is a priority;
76% think global health R&D is important to the U.S. economy; and
84% think it is important that the government plays a role in research for prevention and wellness.
The poll shows that Americans support the entire research enterprise, from federally funded research to research funded by the private sector, but that few—just 11%—say they are very well informed about their elected officials' positions on medical, health and scientific research.

To address this gap, Research!America and more than a dozen partner organizations have joined forces for the 2011 launch of Your Congress–Your Health, a non-partisan constituent education initiative that asks members of the 112th Congress to share their positions on research and related issues.

Former Congressman John E. Porter (R-IL), Research!America's chair, said: "Today we face the most daunting challenge to research funding in perhaps 65 years. Now is a crucial time to ask elected officials their views on medical and health research. Research, and the work building on it, creates high-tech, high-paying jobs, grows our economy, and pays for the investment thousands of times over in health care cost savings. We must insist on these investments to maintain our leadership. Our health, our economy and our well-being depend on it."

The poll shows that 90% of Americans think the U.S. is in danger of losing its global competitive edge in science, technology and education—a 5% increase since May 2010—and an astounding 98% think education and training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is important to U.S. competitiveness and future economic prosperity. Global rankings show the U.S. slipping behind other nations in math and science education.

Read more...

Research into Batteries Will Give Electric Cars The Same Range As Petrol Cars

Li-air batteries are a promising opportunity for electric cars. "If we succeed in developing this technology, we are facing the ultimate breakthrough for electric cars, because in practice, the energy density of Li-air batteries will be comparable to that of petrol and diesel, if you take into account that a combustion engine only has an efficiency of around 30 percent," says Tejs Vegge, senior scientist in the Materials Research Division at Risø DTU. If batteries with an energy density this great become a reality, one could easily imagine electrically powered trucks. The electric car was introduced by Edison as early as 1900. But, as we all know, Henry Ford's vehicle concept with a noisy, smelly combustion engine won the race to become people's most treasured individual means of transport, despite the fact that in principle, the combustion engine is hopeless.

Then, as now, the Achilles' heel of the electric car was the limited energy density of the batteries, which will only sustain short drives. Now – 110 years later – the battery technology, combined with the effect electronics and the electric engine, have come so far in performance, size and price that the electric car is again becoming interesting. The electric car does not pollute locally and it can, if used cleverly, be utilised to introduce more renewable energy into the electricity supply.

Electric cars are the perfect match for a society that has abandoned the use of fossil fuels.

This is why electric cars have been reborn as an important factor in the vision of a society without fossil fuels, and the first electric cars have already hit the roads, albeit in very limited numbers and with very short ranges between recharges.

The advantages of the electric car are first and foremost that it can be integrated into the electricity system and potentially serve as a buffer in the electricity system of tomorrow, where most of our electricity originates from fluctuating renewable energy. Where there is excess electricity from e.g. wind turbines, the electric cars can be charged. When there is a shortage of electricity, some of the power can be returned to the electricity grid. The other major advantage is that, if mass-produced, the electric car could be cheaper to produce than the current cars.

2 tonnes of batteries or 50 litres of petrol

Today, battery packs are expensive and are only able to store a relatively low amount of energy. Researchers all over the world are working to change that. In the current setting, an electric car is no good if you are taking the family on holiday to Lake Garda in Italy. For electric cars to become the consumers' preferred mode of transport, the battery capacity must be significantly increased. In Risø Energy Report 9, page 58, you can read that the energy density in today's batteries is almost two orders lower than that of fossil fuels. This means that a battery pack containing energy corresponding to 50 litres of petrol, would weigh between 1.5 and 2 tonnes.

Read more...

Force Of Acoustical Waves Tapped For Metamaterials

A very simple bench-top technique that uses the force of acoustical waves to create a variety of 3D structures will benefit the rapidly expanding field of metamaterials and their myriad applications—including "invisibility cloaks." Metamaterials are artificial materials that are engineered to have properties not found in nature. Thesematerials usually gain their unusual properties—such as negative refraction that enables subwavelength focusing, negative bulk modulus, and band gaps—from structure rather than composition.

By creating an inexpensive bench-top technique, as described in the American Institute of Physics' journal Review of Scientific Instruments, Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) researchers are making these highly desirable metamaterials more accessible.

Their technique harnesses an acoustical wave force, which causes nano-sized particles to cluster in periodic patterns in a host fluid that is later solidified, explains Farid Mitri, a Director's Fellow, and member of the Sensors & Electrochemical Devices, Acoustics & Sensors Technology Team, at LANL.

"The periodicity of the pattern formed is tunable and almost any kind of particle material can be used, including: metal, insulator, semiconductor, piezoelectric, hollow or gas-filled sphere, nanotubes and nanowires," he elaborates.

The entire process of structure formation is very fast and takes anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes. Mitri and colleagues believe this technique can be easily adapted for large-scale manufacturing and holds the potential to become a platform technology for the creation of a new class of materials with extensive flexibility in terms of periodicity (mm to nm) and the variety of materialsthat can be used.

"This new class of acoustically engineered materials can lead to the discovery of many emergent phenomena, understanding novel mechanisms for the control of material properties, and hybrid metamaterials," says Mitri.

Read more...

Engineers Create Vibrant Colors İn Vertical Silicon Nanowires

Engineers may soon be singing, "I'm going to wash that gray right out of my nanowires," thanks to a colorful discovery by a team of researchers from Harvard University and Zena Technologies. In contrast to the somber gray hue of silicon wafers, Kenneth B. Crozier and colleagues demonstrated that individual, vertical silicon nanowires can shine in all colors of the spectrum. The vibrant display, dependent on the diameter of the individual wires, is even visible to the naked eye. In addition to adding a splash of color to the lab, the finding has potential for use in nanoscale image sensor devices, offering increased efficiency and the ability to detect color without the use of filters.

"It is surprising," says Crozier, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS). "A lot of people are making nanowires, and you really don't think of the color so much. In this vertical configuration you can get very strong color effects, and you can tune them over a range of wavelengths of the visible region. The strong effects can be seen right down to the level of the individual wire."

The finding, published in the March 17, 2011, online edition of Nano Letters, may be the first experimental report that silicon nanowires can take on a variety of colors depending on their diameter and under bright-field illumination. Previous work has shown that nanowires can take on different colors but only by looking at scattered, rather than directly reflected, light.

To create the multicolored array of vertical silicon nanowires, the engineers at Harvard and Zena Technologies used a combination of electron beam lithography and inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching.

A smooth wafer of silicon was plasma etched until all that remained were the vertically protruding nanowires, resembling bristles on a toothbrush. While the nanowires were created in arrays of thousands for convenience, the colors they exhibited were due to the properties of the individual wires, not by the way light was scattered or diffracted in the group.

"Each nanowire acts as a waveguide, like a nano-sized optical fiber—but an optically absorbing one," explains Crozier. "At short wavelengths there is not much optical coupling to the nanowire. At long wavelengths, the coupling is better, but the properties of the waveguide are such that there is not much absorption. In between, there is a range of wavelengths where the light is coupled to the nanowire and absorbed. This range is determined by the nanowire diameter. We made nanowires with diameters of 90, 100, and 130 nm that appeared red, blue and green, respectively."

Read more...

Search For Advanced Materials Aided By Discovery Of Hidden Symmetries İn Nature

A new way of understanding the structure of proteins, polymers, minerals, and engineered materials will be published in the May 2011 issue of the journal Nature Materials. The discovery by two Penn State University researchers is a new type of symmetry in the structure of materials, which the researchers say greatly expands the possibilities for discovering or designing materials with desired properties. The research is expected to have broad relevance in many development efforts involving physical, chemical, biological, or engineering disciplines including, for example, the search for advanced ferroelectric ferromagnet materials for next-generation ultrasound devices and computers. The paper describing the research will be posted early online by the journal on 3 April 2011, prior to its publication in the journal's May 2011 print edition. Before the publication of this paper, scientists and engineers had five different types of symmetries to use as tools for understanding the structures of materials whose building blocks are arranged in fairly regular patterns. Four types of symmetries had been known for thousands of years -- called rotation, inversion, rotation inversion, and translation -- and a fifth type -- called time reversal -- had been discovered about 60 years ago. Now, Gopalan and Litvin have added a new, sixth, type, called rotation reversal. As a result, the number of known ways in which the components of such crystalline materials can be combined in symmetrical ways has multiplied from no more than 1,651 before to more than 17,800 now. "We mathematically combined the new rotation-reversal symmetry with the previous five symmetries and now we know that symmetrical groups can form in crystalline materials in a much larger number of ways," said Daniel B. Litvin, distinguished professor of physics, who coauthored the study with Venkatraman Gopalan, professor of materials science and engineering.

The new rotation-reversal symmetry enriches the mathematical language that researchers use to describe a crystalline material's structure and to predict its properties. "Rotation reversal is an absolutely new approach that is different in that it acts on a static component of the material's structure, not on the whole structure all at once," Litvin said. "It is important to look at symmetries in materials because symmetry dictates all natural laws in our physical universe."

The most simple type of symmetry -- rotation symmetry -- is obvious, for example, when a square shape is rotated around its center point: the square shows its symmetrical character by looking exactly the same at four points during the rotation: at 90 degrees, 180 degrees, 270 degrees, and 360 degrees. Gopalan and Litvin say their new rotation-reversal symmetry is obvious, as well, if you know where to look.

The "eureka moment" of the discovery occurred when Gopalan recognized that the simple concept of reversing the direction of a spiral-shaped structure from clockwise to counterclockwise opens the door to a distinctly new type of symmetry. Just as a square shape has the quality of rotation symmetry even when it is not being rotated, Gopalan realized that a spiral shape has the quality of rotation-reversal symmetry even when it is not being physically forced to rotate in the reverse direction. Their further work with this rotation-reversal concept revealed many more structural symmetries than previously had been recognized in materials containing various types of directionally oriented structures. Many important biological molecules, for example, are said to be either "right handed" or "left handed," including DNA, sugars, and proteins.

"We found that rotation-reversal symmetry also exists in paired structures where the partner components lean toward each other, then away from each other in paired patterns symmetrically throughout a material," Gopalan said. These "tilting octahedral" structures are common in a wide variety of crystalline materials, where all the component structures are tightly interconnected by networks of shared atoms. The researchers say it is possible that components of materials with rotation-reversal symmetry could be engineered to function as on/off switches for a variety of novel applications.

The now-much-larger number of possible symmetry groups also is expected to be useful in identifying materials with unusual combinations of properties. "For example, the goal in developing a ferroelectric ferromagnet is to have a material in which the electrical dipoles and the magnetic moments coexist and are coupled in the same material -- that is, a material that allows electrical control of magnetism -- which would be very useful to have in computers," Gopalan said. The addition of rotation-reversal symmetry to the materials-science toolbox may help researchers to identify and search for structures in materials that could have strong ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties.

Read more...

Advance İn Microchannel Manufacturing Opens New İndustry Applications

Engineers at Oregon State University have invented a new way to use surface-mount adhesives in the production of low-temperature, microchannel heat exchangers - an advance that will make this promising technology much less expensive for many commercial applications. This type of technology will be needed, researchers say, in next-generation computers, lasers, consumer electronics, automobile cooling systems, fuel processors, miniature heat pumps and more.

New industries and jobs are possible. A patent has been applied for, the findings reported in the Journal of Manufacturing Processes, and the university is seeking a partner for further commercial development.

"Even though microchannel arrays have enormous potential for more efficient heat transfer and chemical reactions, high production costs have so far held back the broad, mainstream use of the technology," said Brian Paul, a professor in the OSU School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering.

"In certain applications, this new approach has reduced material costs by 50 percent," Paul said. "It could cut production bonding costs by more than 90 percent, compared to existing approaches to microchannel lamination. And the use of surface-mount adhesives is directly translatable to the electronics assembly industry, so there is less risk going to market.

"This type of manufacturing research could enable a microchannel revolution," he said.

Microchannels, the diameter of a human hair, can be patterned into the surface of a metal or plastic, and can be designed to speed up the heat exchange between fluids, or the mixing and separation of fluids during chemical reactions. The accelerated heat and mass transfer leads to smaller heat exchangers and chemical reactors and separators, such as a portable "home dialysis" system that evolved out of previous OSU research.

Cost and production issues, however, have until now constrained the wider industrial use of this technology. The new manufacturing technique developed at OSU should help change that.

"We have demonstrated the use of surface-mount adhesives to create microchannels on a wide variety of metals, including aluminum, which is very cheap," said Prawin Paulraj, an OSU doctoral candidate and lead author on the recent study. "Bonding aluminum is difficult with conventional techniques."

Read more...

Biomedical Engineers Develop Computational Model To Better Understand Genomes

Biomedical engineers have developed a computational model that will help biological researchers clearly identify the significance of variations between different genomes — the complex sequences of DNA and RNA at the foundation of all living organisms. The findings will be published March 31 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology. The international team of researchers, from the University of Virginia, USA, Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, Germany, demonstrated their approach by focusing on the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa—a bacterium that causes about 10 percent of hospital-acquired infections. The bacterium is especially problematic for burn victims and those with cystic fibrosis or those whose immune systems are compromised, and this new approach is an important first step toward improving their treatment.

In recent years, researchers have been mapping the genomes of multiple organisms and they can now measure the activity of specific genes across the entire genome at the same time and under multiple environments. The emerging field of systems biology integrates this information into computational models. While these models can be used to predict which genes are critical for various cell functions—such as how the cells will respond to medicine or how fast they will grow in different environments—there are still limitations to the science.

"Unfortunately, as these models get built, some of the differences between the models of two cells or two bacteria can be an artifact of the model-building process itself," said Jason Papin, one of the authors and an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at University of Virginia. "Our paper presents an approach for reconciling two models so that you can have confidence that the differences are actually present in the living systems. With the reconciled models, you can then start to ask very specific questions like which genes that are unique to each bacterium are essential for some basic processes."

To illustrate the efficacy of their approach, the researchers compared the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa—one of the principal antibiotic resistant bacteria—with the non-pathogen Pseudomonas putida. The reconciled models clarified how the explicit differences between the genomes of the bacteria mapped to differences in functions of the cells.

Read more...

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Electrify Polymerization

Scientists led by Carnegie Mellon University chemist Krzysztof Matyjaszewski are using electricity from a battery to drive atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), a widely used method of creating industrial plastics. The environmentally friendly approach, reported in the April 1 issue of Science, represents a breakthrough in the level of control scientists can achieve over the ATRP process, which will allow for the creation of even more complex and specialized materials. ATRP, first developed by Matyjaszewski in 1995, allows scientists to easily form polymers by putting together component parts, called monomers, in a controlled piece-by-piece fashion. Assembling polymers in such a manner has allowed scientists to create a wide range of polymers with highly specific, tailored functionalities. ATRP has been used to develop cosmetics, coatings, adhesives and drug delivery systems, and is used to develop "smart" materials — those that respond to environmental changes, such as changes in temperature, light, pressure or pH.

The current study represents the latest in a series of advances Matyjaszewski's research group has made since ATRP's inception that make the technique more precise and more environmentally friendly. In a process they are calling electrochemically mediated ATRP, or eATRP, the researchers used a computer-controlled battery to apply an electrochemical potential across the ATRP reaction.

"This marks the first time that we've paired electrochemistry with ATRP, and the results were startlingly successful," said Matyjaszewski, the J.C. Warner Professor of Natural Sciences at CMU. "We found that by adjusting the current and voltage we could slow and speed up, or even start and stop the reaction on-demand. This gives us a great deal more flexibility in conducting our reactions that should lead to the development of precisely engineered materials."

In traditional ATRP reactions scientists use a copper catalyst to grow a complex polymer structure by adding a few monomeric units at a time to the polymer chain. The process relies on paired reduction-oxidation (redox) reactions between two species of copper — the activator CuI and deactivator CuII — where the two catalysts exchange electrons back and forth. Occasionally, one of the exchanges will spontaneously stop, called a radical termination, resulting in the accumulation of CuII. To keep the polymerization going, researchers must rebalance the system by compensating for the excess CuII.

In the early ATRP experiments, scientists addressed this problem by adding more CuI to the system. This generated materials with high, sometimes toxic, levels of copper, reaching around 5,000 parts-per-million (ppm). Such levels of copper are hard to remove using current industrial equipment. As an alternative, Matyjaszewski and colleagues developed novel methods for using activators and reducing agents to reactivate the CuII. Most notably, they found that environmentally friendly reducing agents like sugars or vitamin C were highly effective in reducing the amount of copper catalyst used in ATRP reactions.

In the current study, Matyjaszewski and Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Andrew Magenau looked to electrochemistry as a means for maintaining balance in ATRP reactions. They found that adding electricity capitalized on the redox reaction by moderating the transfer of electrons. This allowed them to compensate for the radical terminations and reduce the amount of copper needed to run ATRP. As a result the amount of copper in the system was reduced to 50 ppm, a 100-fold decrease. In terms of creating a greener, less toxic form of ATRP, this amount rivaled Matyjaszewski's previous studies that used vitamin C and sugars as reducing agents, but has the added benefit of not requiring the addition of any additional organic or inorganic reducing agents.

The researchers found that applying electricity to the system also gave them more precise control over the reaction. The computer-controlled battery allowed them to manipulate the ATRP process in real-time by changing the current or voltage.

The researchers have used this process to create the standard types of polymers made with ATRP: star, brush and block copolymers. They believe that the meticulous control eATRP gives them over the rate of polymerization will allow for the creation of polymers with even more complex architectures.

Read more...