Lifeboat Foundation

New applications in energy, defense and telecommunications could receive a boost after a team from The University of Texas at Austin created a new type of “nanocrystal gel”—a gel composed of tiny nanocrystals each 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair that are linked together into an organized network.

The crux of the team’s discovery is that this new material is easily tunable. That is, it can be switched between two different states by changing the temperature. This means the material can work as an optical filter, absorbing different frequencies of light depending on whether it’s in a gelled state or not. So, it could be used, for example, on the outside of buildings to control heating or cooling dynamically. This type of optical filter also has applications for defense, particularly for thermal camouflage.

The gels can be customized for these wide-ranging applications because both the nanocrystals and the molecular linkers that connect them into networks are designer components. Nanocrystals can be chemically tuned to be useful for routing communications through fiber optic networks or keep the temperature of space craft steady on remote planetary bodies. Linkers can be designed to cause gels to switch based on ambient temperature or detection of environmental toxins.

Cornell chemists have discovered a class of nonprecious metal derivatives that can catalyze fuel cell reactions about as well as platinum, at a fraction of the cost.

This finding brings closer a future where hydrogen fuel cells efficiently power cars, generators and even spacecraft with minimal greenhouse gas emissions.

“These less expensive metals will enable wider deployment of hydrogen fuel cells,” said Héctor D. Abruña, the Émile M. Chamot Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “They will push us away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources.”

The basics for tracking include blood biomarkers that have been studied for 50 – 100+ years, depending on the biomarker. Most of these biomarkers are commonly measured at a yearly physical, and are relatively cheap (35 $USD for the standard chemistry panel and complete blood count).

In a paper published by Science, DeepMind demonstrates how neural networks can improve approximation of the Density Functional (a method used to describe electron interactions in chemical systems). This illustrates deep learning’s promise in accurately simulating matter at the quantum mechanical.

In a paper published in the scientific journal Science, DeepMind demonstrates how neural networks can be used to describe electron interactions in chemical systems more accurately than existing methods.

Density Functional Theory, established in the 1960s, describes the mapping between electron density and interaction energy. For more than 50 years, the exact nature of mapping between electron density and interaction energy — the so-called density functional — has remained unknown. In a significant advancement for the field, DeepMind has shown that neural networks can be used to build a more accurate map of the density and interaction between electrons than was previously attainable.

Continue reading “DeepMind Simulates Matter on the Nanoscale With Artificial Intelligence” »

Today’s rechargeable batteries are a wonder, but far from perfect. Eventually, they all wear out, begetting expensive replacements and recycling.

“But what if batteries were indestructible?” asks William Chueh, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University and senior author of a new paper detailing a first-of-its-kind analytical approach to building better batteries that could help speed that day. The study appears in the journal Nature Materials.

Chueh, lead author Haitao “Dean” Deng, Ph.D. ‘21, and collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, MIT and other research institutions used artificial intelligence to analyze new kinds of atomic-scale microscopic images to understand exactly why batteries wear out. Eventually, they say, the revelations could lead to batteries that last much longer than today’s. Specifically, they looked at a particular type of lithium-ion batteries based on so-called LFP materials, which could lead to mass-market electric vehicles because it does not use chemicals with constrained supply chains.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have succeeded in developing a simple hydrocarbon molecule with a logic gate function, similar to that in transistors, in a single molecule. The discovery could make electric components on a molecular scale possible in the future. The results are published in Nature Communications.

Manufacturing very small components is an important challenge in both research and development. One example is transistors—the smaller they are, the faster and more energy efficient our computers become. But is there a limit to how small logic gates can become? And is it possible to create electric machines on a molecular scale? Yes, perhaps, is the answer from a chemistry research team at Lund University.

“We have developed a simple hydrocarbon molecule that changes its form, and at the same time goes from insulating to conductive, when exposed to electric potential. The successful formula was to design a so-called anti-aromatic ring in a molecule so that it becomes more robust and can both receive and relay electrons,” says Daniel Strand, chemistry researcher at Lund University.

Adult frogs can’t usually regrow a lost leg, but they can after treatment with a regenerative cocktail — and the new leg even contains functioning nerves.

Adult frogs can gain the ability to regrow a lost leg if they are treated with a device containing a silk gel infused with five regenerative chemicals. The limbs the frogs grow can apparently move and sense as well as the original legs.

Although tadpoles and young froglets can regenerate hindlimbs, adult frogs, like humans, lack the capacity to regrow their legs.

Continue reading “Frogs regrow amputated legs after treatment with a chemical cocktail” »

A comprehensive investigation by KAUST researchers sets the record straight on the formation of hydrogen peroxide in micrometer-sized water droplets, or microdroplets, and shows that ozone is the key to this transformation1,2.

The air-water interface is a crucial site for numerous natural, domestic and industrial processes such as ocean-atmosphere exchange, cloud and dew formation, aerated beverages and bioreactors. Yet, probing chemical transformations at the air–water interface is challenging due to the lack of surface-specific techniques or computational models.

Recent research revealed that water spontaneously transforms into 30–110 micromolar hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) in microdroplets, obtained by condensing vapor or spraying water using pressurized nitrogen gas. The textbook understanding of water is thus challenged by how the mild temperature and pressure conditions, together with the absence of catalysts, co-solvents and significant applied energy, could break covalent O–H bonds. It was hypothesized that this unusual phenomenon resulted from an ultrahigh electric field at the air-water interface that assists OH radical formation, but no direct evidence has been reported.

The ExplOrigins early career group invites you to join the 2022 Exploration and Origins Colloquium on February 17th–18th, 2022! The live broadcast portion of this colloquium will begin at 10am ET on February 18th.

We are thrilled to have Dr. Amy Mainzer as our plenary speaker. Dr. Mainzer is a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, principal investigator of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission, and lead of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission. She also has achieved excellence in science communication, serving as the science curriculum consultant, on-camera host, and executive producer of the PBS Kids series Ready Jet Go! and as the science consultant for the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up.

Continue reading “Exploration & Origins Colloquium 2022: Space Exploration, Origins, & Astrobiology” »