Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: nanotechnology – Page 132

Are you ready to put mini robots in your mouth?

Do you get lazy about brushing your teeth? Well, soon microbots could do the whole thing for you. A multidisciplinary team at the University of Pennsylvania has created a novel automated way to perform brushing and flossing through robotics, according to a press release published by the institution last month.

The development could be particularly useful for those who lack the manual dexterity to clean their teeth effectively themselves.

A shapeshifting robotic microswarm may one day act as a toothbrush, rinse, and dental floss in one.

Continue reading “Shapeshifting Microrobots Can Brush and Floss Teeth” | >

Solar cell manufacturing just became easier, more efficient, and less costly. A team of researchers at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with UC Berkeley, has discovered a unique material that can be used as a simpler approach to solar cell manufacturing, the team reported.

This material is a crystalline solar material with a built-in electric field — also known as “ferroelectricity” — that was reported earlier this year in the journal Science Advances.

Light microscopy image of nanowires, 100 to 1,000 nanometers in diameter, grown from cesium germanium tribromide (CGB) on a mica substrate. The CGB nanowires are samples of a new lead-free halide perovskite solar material that is also ferroelectric. (Credit: Peidong Yang and Ye Zhang/Berkeley Lab)

Solar panels, also known as photovoltaics, rely on semiconductor devices, or solar cells, to convert energy from the sun into electricity.

Continue reading “Scientists Grow Lead-Free Solar Material With a Built-In Switch” | >

Inside a living cell, proteins and other molecules are often tightly packed together. These dense clusters can be difficult to image because the fluorescent labels used to make them visible can’t wedge themselves in between the molecules.

MIT researchers have now developed a novel way to overcome this limitation and make those “invisible” molecules visible. Their technique allows them to “de-crowd” the molecules by expanding a cell or before labeling the molecules, which makes the molecules more accessible to fluorescent tags.

This method, which builds on a widely used technique known as previously developed at MIT, should allow scientists to visualize molecules and cellular structures that have never been seen before.

Read more | >

Hydrogen fuel promises to be a clean and abundant source of energy in the future – as long as scientists can figure out ways to produce it practically and cheaply, and without fossil fuels.

A new study provides us with another promising step in that direction.

Scientists have described a relatively simple method involving aluminum nanoparticles that are able to strip the oxygen from water molecules and leave hydrogen gas.

Read more | >

Alloy that exceeds the strength and ductility of other state-of-the-art additively manufactured materials. This breakthrough could lead to higher-performance components for applications in aerospace, medicine, energy, and transportation. The work was done by researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Georgia Institute of Technology. It was led by Wen Chen, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UMass, and Ting Zhu, professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, will be published today (August 3, 2022) in the journal Nature.

High entropy alloys (HEAs) have become increasingly popular as a new paradigm in materials science over the past 15 years. They are comprised of five or more elements in near-equal proportions and offer the ability to create a near-infinite number of unique combinations for alloy design. Traditional alloys, such as brass, stainless steel, carbon steel, and bronze, contain a primary element combined with one or more trace elements.

Read more | >

Watch over 2,400 documentaries for free for 30 days AND get a free Nebula account by signing up at https://curiositystream.com/upandatom and using the code “upandatom”. Once you sign up you’ll get an email about Nebula. If you don’t get one, contact the curiosity stream support team and they will set you up with a free Nebula account right away.

Nebula: https://watchnebula.com/

Hi! I’m Jade. If you’d like to consider supporting Up and Atom, head over to my Patreon page smile
https://www.patreon.com/upandatom.

Visit the Up and Atom store.

Continue reading “The Physics of Self-Replication and Nanotechnology” | >

Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have developed a simple, rapid method to simultaneously identify multiple food poisoning bacteria, based on color differences in the scattered light by nanometer-scaled organic metal nanohybrid structures (NHs) that bind via antibodies to those bacteria. This method is a promising tool for rapidly detecting bacteria at food manufacturing sites and thereby improving food safety. The findings were published in Analytical Chemistry.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), every year food poisoning affects 600 million people worldwide—almost 1 in every 10 people—of which 420,000 die. Bacterial tests are conducted to detect food poisoning bacteria at food manufacturing factories, but it takes more than 48 hours to obtain results due to the time required for a bacteria incubation process called culturing. Therefore, there remains a demand for rapid testing methods to eliminate food poisoning accidents.

Responding to this need, the research team led by Professor Hiroshi Shiigi at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka Metropolitan University, utilized the optical properties of organic metal NHs—composites consisting of polyaniline particles that encapsulate a large number of metal nanoparticles—to rapidly and simultaneously identify food poisoning-inducing bacteria called enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (E. coli O26 and E. coli O157) and Staphylococcus aureus.

Read more | >

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated in a proof-of-concept study that a hands-free device could successfully automate the treatment and removal of dental plaque and bacteria that cause tooth decay.

In the future, a shape-shifting robotic microswarm may serve as a toothbrush, rinse, and dental floss all in one. The technology, created by a multidisciplinary team at the University of Pennsylvania, has the potential to provide a brand-new, automated method for carrying out the repetitive but important daily duties of brushing and flossing. For people who lack the manual dexterity to efficiently clean their teeth alone, this system could be extremely helpful.

These microrobots are composed of iron oxide nanoparticles with catalytic and magnetic properties. Researchers were able to control their movement and configuration using a magnetic field to either produce bristle-like structures that remove dental plaque from the wide surfaces of teeth or elongated threads that can slide between teeth like a piece of floss. In both situations, the nanoparticles are driven by a catalytic reaction to release antimicrobials that eliminate harmful oral bacteria on site.

Read more | >

Researchers looking to synthesize a brighter and more stable nanoparticle for optical applications found that their creation instead exhibited a more surprising property: bursts of superfluorescence that occurred at both room temperature and regular intervals. The work could lead to the development of faster microchips, neurosensors, or materials for use in quantum computing applications, as well as a number of biological studies.

Superfluorescence occurs when atoms within a material synchronize and simultaneously emit a short but intense burst of light. The property is valuable for quantum optical applications, but extremely difficult to achieve at room temperatures and for intervals long enough to be useful.

The material in question—lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticle, or UCNP—was synthesized by the research team in an effort to create a “brighter” optical material. They produced hexagonal ceramic crystals ranging from 50 nanometers (nm) to 500 nm in size and began testing their lasing properties, which resulted in several impressive breakthroughs.

Read more | >