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If anyone has been pulled along by a kite as a child, they will have had firsthand experience of the true power of the wind. Therefore, it make perfect sense for us to use this perfect tool for capturing the wind’s energy and use it to power our homes or to run our cars.

Some experts estimate that the total energy contained in wind is 100 times the amount needed by everyone on the planet. However, most of this energy is at high altitude, far beyond the reaches of any wind turbine.

So it’s little wonder that researchers across the world have been working on generating electrical power from kites that can catch these high winds

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A long-elusive goal of physics has been reached – producing a pulse of light so short that it contains just a single oscillation of a light wave.

The flashes are almost as short as a light pulse can be, according to the laws of physics. The new super-short pulses could used as flashguns to sense very small, very fast events such as a single photon interacting with a single electron, says Alfred Leitenstorfer of the University of Konstanz in Germany. A single-cycle pulse packs in energy more densely than a pulse containing more wave peaks and troughs.

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Researchers from the University of Groningen have clarified the structure of an enzyme that disturbs the communication processes between bacteria. By doing so they have laid the foundations for a new method of tackling bacterial infections such as cystic fibrosis. An article on the structure and function of the so-called quorum-quenching acylase was published on 21 December 2009 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
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Could a mixture of water and clay replace plastics? The desire to wean the world off oil has sparked all manner of research into novel transportation fuels, but manufacturing plastics uses large amounts of oil too. Researchers at the University of Tokyo, Japan, think their material could be up to the task.

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Squealing tires and the crunch of impact – when an accident occurs, the steel sheets that form a motor vehicle’s bodywork must provide adequate impact protection and shield its passengers to the greatest extent possible. But the strength of the steels that are used throw up their own challenges, for example when automobile manufacturers have to punch holes in them for cable routing. Struggling to pierce the hard steel, mechanical cutting tools rapidly wear out. And because they also leave some unwanted material on the underside of the steel (burr, as the experts call it), additional time has to be spent on a finishing process. One possible alternative is to use lasers as cutters, but they require a great deal of energy, which makes the entire process time-consuming and costly. Continue Reading »

As engineers attempt to integrate electronics into things like clothing and medical devices, they’re increasingly running up against the material properties of the substances we use to make the hardware. A lot of the materials that go into a typical electronic device are brittle, inflexible, and prone to damage, and materials scientists are looking at a variety of options for replacing them. A recent paper in Advanced Functional Materials describes a technique for forming an antenna from liquid metal. The resulting (not-so-) hardware is flexible, self-healing, and can change the frequency that it’s sensitive to based on the stress it’s subjected to. Continue Reading »

Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters. Continue Reading »

It’s a touchscreen, a solar panel, a computer circuit, and soon, it could be used at home.

Taking advantage of ink’s natural tendency to create “coffee rings,” a group of Israeli scientists has developed a type of ink jet dye that could one day create a range of power-hungry, and power-producing, devices at home.

“Usually these ‘coffee stains’ are a major problem in ink jet printing,” said Shlomo Magdassi, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and co-author of a new paper in the journal ACS Nano. “I got the idea that we could turn this big problem into a big advantage.”
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An aircraft that combines massive freight capacity, high efficiency and low cost is taking shape in a hangar outside Toledo, Ohio, and could be airborne next year.
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Ordinary paper could one day be used as a lightweight battery to power the devices that are now enabling the printed word to be eclipsed by e-mail, e-books and online news. Continue Reading »