Lifeboat Foundation

A new robot created by researchers at Northwestern University looks and behaves like a tiny aquatic animal, and could serve a variety of functions, including moving things place to place, catalyzing chemical reactions, delivering therapeutics and much more. This new soft robot honestly looks a heck of a lot like a lemon peel, but it’s actually a material made up of 90% water for the soft exterior, with a nickel skeleton inside that can change its shape in response to outside magnetic fields.

These robots are very small — only around the size of a dime — but they’re able to perform a range of tasks, including walking at the same speed as an average human, and picking up and carrying things. They work by either taking in or expelling water through their soft components, and can respond to light and magnetic fields thanks to their precise molecular design. Essentially, their molecular structure is crafted such that when they’re hit by light, the molecules that make them up expel water, causing the robot’s “legs” to stiffen like muscles.

Northwestern University researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind life-like material that acts as a soft robot. It can walk at human speed, pick up and transport cargo to a new location, climb up hills and even break-dance to release a particle.

Nearly 90% water by weight, the centimeter-sized robot moves without complex hardware, hydraulics or electricity. Instead, it is activated by light and walks in the direction of an external rotating magnetic field.

Resembling a four-legged octopus, the robot functions inside a water-filled tank, making it ideal for use in aquatic environments. The researchers imagine customizing the movements of miniature robots to help catalyze different chemical reactions and then pump out the valuable products. The robots also could be molecularly designed to recognize and actively remove unwanted particles in specific environments, or to use their mechanical movements and locomotion to precisely deliver bio-therapeutics or cells to specific tissues.

JILA researchers have developed tools to “turn on” quantum gases of ultracold molecules, gaining control of long-distance molecular interactions for potential applications such as encoding data for quantum computing and simulations.

The new scheme for nudging a molecular gas down to its lowest energy state, called quantum degeneracy, while suppressing chemical reactions that break up molecules finally makes it possible to explore exotic quantum states in which all the molecules interact with one another.

The research is described in the Dec. 10 issue of Nature. JILA is a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The observation of a chemical reaction at the molecular level in real time is a central theme in experimental chemical physics. An international research team has captured roaming molecular fragments for the first time. The work, under the supervision of Heide Ibrahim, research associate at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), was published in the journal Science.

The research group of the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre of INRS, with support of Professor François Légaré, has used the Advanced Laser Light Source (ALLS). They have succeeded in shooting the first molecular film of “roamers”—hydrogen fragments, in this case—that orbit around HCO fragments) during a chemical reaction by studying the photo-dissociation of formaldehyde, H₂CO.

In groundbreaking new research, an international team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has developed a unique process for producing a quantum state that is part light and part matter.

The discovery provides fundamental new insights for more efficiently developing the next generation of quantum-based optical and electronic devices. The research could also have an impact on increasing efficiency of nanoscale chemical reactions.

The research is published in Nature Photonics.

In recent years, it has become possible to use laser beams and electron beams to “print” engineering objects with complex shapes that could not be achieved by conventional manufacturing. The additive manufacturing (AM) process, or 3D printing, for metallic materials involves melting and fusing fine-scale powder particles—each about 10 times finer than a grain of beach sand—in sub-millimeter-scale “pools” created by focusing a laser or electron beam on the material.

“The highly focused beams provide exquisite control, enabling ‘tuning’ of properties in critical locations of the printed object,” said Tresa Pollock, a professor of materials and associate dean of the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. “Unfortunately, many advanced metallic alloys used in extreme heat-intensive and chemically corrosive environments encountered in energy, space and nuclear applications are not compatible with the AM process.”

The challenge of discovering new AM-compatible materials was irresistible for Pollock, a world-renowned scientist who conducts research on advanced metallic materials and coatings. “This was interesting,” she said, “because a suite of highly compatible alloys could transform the production of metallic materials having high economic value—i.e. materials that are expensive because their constituents are relatively rare within the earth’s crust—by enabling the manufacture of geometrically complex designs with minimal material waste.

Serena Corr looks at the science behind batteries, discusses why we are hunting for new ones and investigates what tools we use to pave this pathway to discovery.
Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/lZjqiR0czLo.

The hunt is on for the next generation of batteries that will power our electric vehicles and help our transition to a renewables-led future. Serena shows how researchers at the Faraday Institution are developing new chemistries and manufacturing processes to deliver safer, cheaper, and longer-lasting batteries and provide higher power or energy densities for electric vehicles.

Continue reading “The Hunt for New Batteries — with Serena Corr” »

Exciting momentum!! — Home Depot Founder, Bernie Marcus (age 91), and the Adolph Coors Foundation (beer family), putting millions of $$$ into comprehensive integrative health and wellness — Good to see the trend!!

The Marcus Institute of Integrative Health was established in Philadelphia in 2017 by Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health, and a multi-million $$$ grant from the Marcus Foundation (headed by it’s Chairman, Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of The Home Depot) to expand the research, education and clinical care profile of Jefferson’s integrative medicine program, and to set the international standard of excellence in evidence-based, patient-centered integrative care.

Continue reading “Dr Daniel Monti — CEO & Founding Director, Marcus Institute of Integrative Health — Jefferson Health” »

Columbia team discovers 6-nanometer-long single-molecule circuit with enormous on/off ratio due to quantum interference; finding could enable faster, smaller, and more energy-efficient devices.

Researchers, led by Columbia Engineering Professor Latha Venkataraman, report today that they have discovered a new chemical design principle for exploiting destructive quantum interference. They used their approach to create a six-nanometer single-molecule switch where the on-state current is more than 10,000 times greater than the off-state current–the largest change in current achieved for a single-molecule circuit to date.

This new switch relies on a type of quantum interference that has not, up to now, been explored. The researchers used long molecules with a special central unit to enhance destructive quantum interference between different electronic energy levels. They demonstrated that their approach can be used to produce very stable and reproducible single-molecule switches at room temperature that can carry currents exceeding 0.1 microamps in the on-state. The length of the switch is similar to the size of the smallest computer chips currently on the market and its properties approach those of commercial switches. The study is published today in Nature Nanotechnology.