Jul 24 2010
Unbreakable AMOLED Display
Just imagine the applications!
Jul 23 2010
Maya Aztec Rubber?
So you think rubber is a recent invention? Think again…
Ancient civilizations in much of Mexico and Central America were making different grades of rubber 3,000 years before Charles Goodyear “stabilized” the stuff in the mid-19th century, new research suggests.
The Aztec, Olmec, and Maya of Mesoamerica are known to have made rubber using natural latex—a milky, sap-like fluid found in some plants. Mesoamerica extends roughly from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua
Jul 22 2010
Electrified Eyeglasses
What’s better than a pair of bifocal eyeglasses? How about self adjusting electrified bifocal eyeglasses?
Watch out Ben, the future is upon us!
The spectacles, which are due to be launched in the US this year and the UK next year, use lenses that change their strength when a small electrical current passes through them.
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Jul 21 2010
Singing Interactive Fibers?
Can your fibers Sing, Hear, and generate Electricity? These can…
Research scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are singing a new tune with a new type of interactive fiber that has the ability to detect and create sound. For associate professor Yoel Fink and his team at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, the threads used in textiles and even optical fibers are too passive to be truly useful. It may have taken a decade, but the researchers have finally developed a far more sophisticated version, one that enables fabrics to interact with their environment.
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Jul 20 2010
Tailpipe Filter Traps CO2
This seems like a simple idea and as is always the case will the benefits outweigh the costs? But can we afford to not do everything we can, no what the cost to protect our environment?
The flow-thru filter is easily attached to the tailpipe of the vehicle. The filter matrix is treated with a basic chemical compound. The vehicle exhaust is then diverted into the carbon-capture filter, which traps CO2 in a flow-by chemical reaction. The filter matrix acts as a carbon sink, capturing harmful CO2. Once the filter is saturated with carbon, after approximately 3500 miles, it can be easily removed from the device and exchanged with a new filter.
The captured CO2 from the saturated filter is water-soluble and can then be safely converted into a useful industrial solid. This process provides a safe method of carbon storage.
The CO2 filter is positioned within the stainless steel housing to absorb the engine CO2 waste content by impulse collisions within the filter media. The impulse is equal to the change in momentum at points along the length of the filter. The impulse advantage is the product of the force of exhaust acting on the filter at impact points and the time the action takes place. The flow-by reaction in effect is a mild alkaline pH reacting with dilute acetic CO2 in the exhaust. Eventually the base solution becomes acetic when the filter is saturated with CO2.
Jul 19 2010
Pour Yourself Some Wood
Two German scientists invented “liquid wood,” which has the potential to save significant fossil fuel and natural resources.
How about a renewable plastic that has wood-like qualities but can be cast by a machine? A group of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology in Pfinztal near Karlsruhe invented just that in the late 1990s.
Jul 18 2010
Dem Dry Bones? No, Dem Live Bones!
Scientists could use the technique to reconstruct almost any intricate bone shape in the lab, using digital images as a model
Figuring out a good bone replacement for limbs has proved a problem since the days of the wooden peg leg. Yet scientists have now grown two small bones based on digital images and a 3-D scaffolding, the New York Times reports.
Jul 17 2010
Cheap Solar Panels?
I hope they get on the ball with this, we need this now more than ever.
GE has confirmed long-standing speculation that it plans to make thin-film solar panels that use a cadmium- and tellurium-based semiconductor to capture light and convert it into electricity. The GE move could put pressure on the only major cadmium-telluride solar-panel maker, Tempe, AZ-based First Solar, which could drive down prices for solar panels.
Last year, GE seemed to be getting out of the solar industry as it sold off crystalline-silicon solar-panel factories it had acquired in 2004. The company found that the market for such solar panels–which account for most of the solar panels sold worldwide–was too competitive for a relative newcomer, says Danielle Merfeld, GE’s solar technology platform leader.
Jul 16 2010
A Swell Idea
This is an interesting idea, but I wonder how it would work in real use? Also at what temperature does the reaction takes place especially if these were stored / transported in a hot environment. But it would be fun to see these in production.
Jul 15 2010
Quantum Computers?
Two experimental systems at the forefront of modern physics research — a single trapped ion and a quantum atomic gas — have been combined for the first time by researchers at Cambridge.
The picture shows the team’s experimental apparatus comprising of the ion trap inside the vacuum chamber. The inset shows schematically the single ion (red) in the Bose-Einstein condensate (dark grey).
