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[materialsscienceandengineering]

New Possibilities Discovered for Room-Temperature Superconductivity

Scientists discover that triggering superconductivity with a flash of light involves the same fundamental physics that are at work in the more stable states needed for devices, opening a new path toward producing room-temperature superconductivity.

Researchers can learn more about a system by jolting it into a slightly unstable state – scientists call this “out of equilibrium” – and then watching what happens as it settles back down into a more stable state, much like people can learn more about themselves by stepping outside of their comfort zones.

Experiments with the superconducting material yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO, have shown that under certain conditions, knocking it out of equilibrium with a laser pulse allows it to superconduct – conduct electrical current with no loss – much closer to room temperature than researchers expected. Given that scientists have been working on room-temperature superconductors for more than three decades, this might be a significant breakthrough.

But do observations of this unstable state have any relevance on how high-temperature superconductors might function in the real world, where uses such as power lines, maglev trains, particle accelerators, and medical equipment demand their stability?

Read more.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Why We Should Be Talking About Energy Storage

To reach our global goal of being net zero carbon emissions by 2050, we must solve one problem - energy storage. Thank you to Toyota for lending us the #Mirai and for sponsoring this series.  Scientists, researchers, and engineers are working to develop innovative ways of addressing the intermittency of wind and solar energy. I got to talk to them in part 3 of my renewable energy road trip with Toyota in their #Mirai

Previous videos in this series: The Truth about Driving a Hydrogen Car [https://youtu.be/hghIckc7nrY] Hydrogen vs. Battery Electric Cars [https://youtu.be/dWAO3vUn7nw]

[thecrashcourse]

Turns out we couldn’t teach the history of the universe in 10 episodes, so Emily Graslie is back for more Big History!

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Carbon nanotubes self-assemble into tiny transistors

Carbon nanotubes can be used to make very small electronic devices, but they are difficult to handle. University of Groningen scientists, together with colleagues from the University of Wuppertal and IBM Zurich, have developed a method to select semiconducting nanotubes from a solution and make them self-assemble on a circuit of gold electrodes. The results were published in the journal Advanced Materials on 5 April.

The results look deceptively simple: a self-assembled transistor with nearly 100 percent purity and very high electron mobility. But it took ten years to get there. University of Groningen Professor of Photophysics and Optoelectronics Maria Antonietta Loi designed polymers which wrap themselves around specific carbon nanotubes in a solution of mixed tubes. Thiol side chains on the polymer bind the tubes to the gold electrodes, creating the resultant transistor.

Patent

‘In our previous work, we learned a lot about how polymers attach to specific carbon nanotubes’, Loi explains. These nanotubes can be depicted as a rolled sheet of graphene, the two-dimensional form of carbon. 'Depending on the way the sheets are rolled up, they have properties ranging from semiconductor to semi-metallic to metallic.’ Only the semiconductor tubes can be used to fabricate transistors, but the production process always results in a mixture.

Read more.

[thecrashcourse]

These creation myths establish very different relationships between humans and nature.

[marthajefferson]

The Blue Lava of Kawah Ijen Volcano. The ‘blue lavas’ are a rare phenomenon, only visible on the Kawah Ijen Volcano, in Indonesia. It may look like the volcano is spewing blue lava, but in fact, the shocking blue fire occurs when the volcanic sulphuric gases combust. Emerging from cracks in the volcano’s side, these gases ignite when coming into contact with air. It’s not actual blue lava, but blue flames. (video)

[color-palettes]

Behind the Waterfall - Submitted by Hoplocats​

#d2c9ee #b8a8df #9e88cc #836bb4 #5e468b

[materialsscienceandengineering]

No ink required: paper can be printed with light

In an effort to curb the adverse environmental impacts of paper production, researchers in a new study have developed a light-printable paper—paper that can be printed with UV light, erased by heating to 120 °C (250 °F), and rewritten more than 80 times. The secret to printing with light lies in the color-changing chemistry of nanoparticles, a thin coating of which can be easily applied to conventional paper to transform it into the light-printable version.

The researchers, Wenshou Wang and coauthors at Shandong University in China; the University of California, Riverside; and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have published a paper on the light-printable rewritable paper in a recent issue of Nano Letters.

“The greatest significance of our work is the development of a new class of solid-state photoreversible color-switching system to produce an ink-free light-printable rewritable paper that has the same feel and appearance as conventional paper, but can be printed and erased repeatedly without the need for additional ink,” Yadong Yin, Chemistry Professor at the University of California, Riverside, told Phys.org. “Our work is believed to have enormous economic and environmental merits to modern society.”

Read more.

[zlukaka]

Everything movies taught me about archery is wrong. This is a complete mind-blower. 8D

If you are even remotely interested in archery or medieval combat, check this out, it’s just great!

[luffik]

OMFG EVERYONE PLEASE DROP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WATCH IT RIGHT NOW O_O

[secondlina]

HOLY HELL

[medievalpoc]

Not only is this fascinating, there are a lot of images from art history here. It just goes to show that what you can learn from the past isn’t limited to facts you can know, but things you can do.

My favorite part?

He learned this doing research for LARPs (Live Action Role Playing):

Lars Andersen originally started using bow and arrow to fight in pretend battles during Larps (live action role play) events, where he played a soldier in a medieval-inspired army. While Larps can be about anything – the Danish/Polish Harry Potter inspired larp College of Wizardry (cowlarp.com) recently got world-wide media attention and there wasn’t a rubber sword in sight there – many Larps take place in fantasy worlds inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. And it was at one of these Larps, that Lars started to learn to shoot fast while moving.

In 2012, Lars Andersen released his video, “Reinventing the fastest forgotten archery”, where he showed how he had learned to shoot from old archery manuscripts. Using these old, forgotten techniques, Lars demonstrated how he was now the fastest archer on the planet, and after its release, the video got 3 million hits on YouTube in two days.

Since the 2012 video was released, Lars has studied and practiced, and he is now able to fire three arrows in 0.6 seconds – a truly stunning feat making him much faster than the legendary fictional archer Legolas (played by Orlando Bloom in the Lord of the Rings movies).

The time benchmark he was trying to achieve, according to the video, was the expectation of the speed at which “Saracen“ archers were expected to shoot. In fact, most of the source material as far as I can see isn’t European.

A lot of the techniques described are also used in Mongolian Archery, which requires being able to shoot from horseback, and is traditionally practiced by men and women. You can see a video here.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

How to reuse materials from trash

Most people can agree that it would be more sustainable to reuse materials in the trash that we throw away to make new products. Even though, it’s not that much of the waste that is being used again. What is it that makes recovering resources from waste so difficult? In the doctoral thesis “Designing out waste: exploring barriers for material recirculation” by Isabel Ordonez Pizarro we find out what some of the common problems are when it comes to recirculating materials in society and suggestions for how to overcome them. 

​Since the topic is so broad, Isabel has done several studies where she has looked at three different stages that might be needed to recirculate materials in society, and the material flow between these. The stages are production, use of products and disposal of products.

“By comparing the results found in all these studies together, we could see that there were six main problems common for all stages. For example lack of reliable information on secondary materials and unclear responsibilities. The results gave us a better understanding of the difficulties for material recirculation in society. To be able to work in waste management, production systems or sustainable consumption, you need to be aware that these are stages inside a larger recirculation system, and that all stages need to move towards the same goal of material recirculation,” Isabel says.

To be able to reach the goal of material recirculation, Isabel has four suggestions for policy instruments and argues that designers working in the waste management branch would facilitate collaboration with production and waste sorting for users.

Read more.

[gloveonafoot]

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Crystal unclear: Why might this uncanny crystal change laser design?

Laser applications may benefit from crystal research by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and China’s Shandong University. They have discovered a potential way to sidestep longstanding difficulties with making the crystals that are a crucial part of laser technology. But the science behind their discovery has experts scratching their heads.

The findings, published today in Science Advances, suggest that the relatively large crystals used to change several properties of light in lasers – changes that are crucial for making lasers into practical tools – might be created by stacking up far smaller, rod-shaped microcrystals that can be grown easily and cheaply.

So far, the team’s microcrystals outperform conventional crystals in some ways, suggesting that harnessing them could signal the end of a long search for a fast, economical way to develop large crystals that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to create. But the microcrystals also challenge conventional scientific theory as to why they perform as they do.

The color you see in a laser’s light is often different than the one it initially generates. Many lasers create infrared light, which then passes through a crystal converting its energy – and therefore its wavelength – to light of a visible color like green or blue.

Read more.

[rudescience]

The Physics Of Heat sinks: Thermal Transfer

A Heat sink is a passive heat exchange device that transfers the heat generated by an electrical or mechanical device. It’s purpose is to keep things operationally cool. An electronic device for examples generates heat through the inefficient electrical resistance that generates heat which needs to be dissipated in order to keep the device operational. It’s commonly used to cool CPU’s and GPU’s and different types of semiconductors.

The heat sink transfers thermal energy from a higher temperature device to a lower temperature medium, most commonly a fluid (air, water etc..). The thermal transfer is conducted through convection, radiation, and conduction.

To understand the principle of a heat sink, consider Fourier’s law of heat conduction. Fourier’s law of heat conduction, simplified to a one-dimensional form in the x-direction, shows that when there is a temperature gradient in a body, heat will be transferred from the higher temperature region to the lower temperature region. The rate at which heat is transferred by conduction, qk , is proportional to the product of the temperature gradient and the cross-sectional area through which heat is transferred.

Consider a heat sink in a duct, where air flows through the duct. It is assumed that the heat sink base is higher in temperature than the air. Applying the conservation of energy, for steady-state conditions, and Newton’s law of cooling to the temperature nodes shown in the diagram gives the following set of equations:

More science and gifs on my blog: rudescience Gif made from: This video by LinusTechTips References: (x), (x), (x).

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Researchers gain a better understanding of the transformation of steel

Heating iron can alter its structure and is one of the methods for making various types of steel with different properties. That process is similar to the formation of frost flowers: one iron crystal structure transforms into another at a nucleus point, and the process expands further from that point. This type of nucleation in materials has the largest impact on their final properties, but is still the least understood in the field of metallurgy. For example, we still know little about how and where exactly this nucleation starts. Researchers at TU Delft have now shed new light on this subject in their publication ‘Preferential Nucleation during Polymorphic Transformations’ in Scientific Reports (Nature) of Wednesday 3 August.

The researchers demonstrated this nucleation process live by heating an iron sample to 1,000 degrees in a specially produced furnace at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, and monitoring the transformation process using X-rays. In this way, they were able to identify the places and their properties that were the most likely starting points for the nucleation process of the transition from ferrite to austenite.

Read more.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

‘Green’ electronic materials produced with synthetic biology

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report in the current issue of Small that they have genetically designed a new strain of bacteria that spins out extremely thin and highly conductive wires made up of solely of non-toxic, natural amino acids.

Researchers led by microbiologist Derek Lovely say the wires, which rival the thinnest wires known to man, are produced from renewable, inexpensive feedstocks and avoid the harsh chemical processes typically used to produce nanoelectronic materials.

Lovley says, “New sources of electronic materials are needed to meet the increasing demand for making smaller, more powerful electronic devices in a sustainable way.” The ability to mass-produce such thin conductive wires with this sustainable technology has many potential applications in electronic devices, functioning not only as wires, but also transistors and capacitors. Proposed applications include biocompatible sensors, computing devices, and as components of solar panels.

Read more.

[joshbyard]

New Laser Fabrication Techniques Unlock the Incredible Potential of Metamaterials

Researchers have long believed that it would someday be possible to produce artificial materials, or “metamaterials,” and that they would bring about some stunning, otherworldly technologies—the sort that have figured in science fiction tales for years. These innovations include invisibility cloaks that could mask the presence of objects or their electromagnetic signatures, “unfeelability cloaks” that could mechanically mask the tactile feel of an object, superlenses that could resolve features too small to be seen with ordinary microscope lenses, and power absorbers that could capture essentially all of the sunlight hitting a solar cell.

To achieve these advances we’ll need better metamaterials, and those are on the way. Metamaterials are made up of “meta-atoms”—small two- or three-dimensional structures made of polymer, dielectric material, or metal. When these structures are arranged in regular, repeating crystals, they can be used to manipulate electromagnetic radiation in new ways. Ultimately, the capabilities of a metamaterial are determined by the size, shape, and quality of these structures. And the technology to fabricate meta-atoms has recently turned a corner.

Over the past few years, research groups around the world have succeeded in developing a way to draw meta-atoms using lasers. The resulting structures can now take on nearly any shape and be stacked in three dimensions in dense, crystal-like arrangements. What’s more, they can be made small enough to exhibit unique mechanical and thermal properties and to alter the flow of light in a range of wavelengths—including the long-inaccessible visible chunk of the spectrum. Thanks to this microscopic fabrication technology, we can finally see a path beyond the materials nature has provided us into entirely new realms that are limited only by our imaginations.

(via How to Make a Better Invisibility Cloak—With Lasers - IEEE Spectrum)

[foodffs]

Purple Ombre Messy Ruffle Cake

Really nice recipes. Every hour.

Show me what you cooked!