Mar 31, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Harnessing the properties of materials so that technology can continue to move forward means getting to grips with increasingly more challenging systems. A team led by a researcher from Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo has turned its focus to chiral molecular and...
Perseverance analyzes the first sounds from Mars
Apr 01, 2022 (Nanowerk News) The NASA Perseverance rover, which has been exploring the Jezero Crater on Mars since February 2021, has recorded the acoustic environment of the red planet for the first time. Using the SuperCam microphone developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a consortium of French universities...
Estimates of the carbon cycle – vital to predicting climate change
Apr 01, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Virginia Tech researchers, in collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, have discovered that key parts of the global carbon cycle used to track movement of carbon dioxide in the environment are not correct, which could significantly alter conventional carbon cycle models. The estimate of how...
Accelerating write/erase cycles in all-optical magnetization switching
Apr 01, 2022 (Nanowerk News) According to an estimate of IBM the current daily production of digital information exceeds 2.5 quintillion bytes (equivalent to about 50 million of dual-layer Blu-ray discs, which stacked on top of each other would be 60 km high) and continues to grow at a staggering...
Self-standing mesoporous Si film can power lithium-ion batteries
Mar 31, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Battery researchers at the University of Eastern Finland have developed a self-standing mesoporous silicon (Si) film anode for lithium-ion batteries (Journal of Power Sources, "Self-Standing Mesoporous Si Films as Anodes for Lithium-Ion Microbatteries"). This film electrode does not need carbon additives and binders to connect...
Scavenger nanoparticles could make fuel cell-powered vehicles a reality
Mar 31, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago are among a collaborative team that has developed a material that could give fuel cell systems a competitive edge over the battery systems that currently power most electric vehicles. In contrast to lithium batteries, fuel cell technology relies...
Physicists engineer ferroelectricity into well-known family of semiconductors
Mar 31, 2022 (Nanowerk News) MIT physicists and colleagues have engineered a new property into a well-known family of semiconductors by manipulating ultrathin sheets of the materials only a few atomic layers thick. The work is important because the new materials themselves could have interesting applications in computing and more....
Solving the challenges of robotic pizza-making
Mar 31, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot. For...
Scientists bioprint tissue-like constructs capable of controlled, complex shape change
Mar 31, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Where standard 3D printing uses a digital blueprint to manufacture an object out of materials like plastic or resin, 3D bioprinting manufactures biological parts and tissues out of living cells, or bioinks. A fourth dimension — shape transformation over time — can be achieved by...