Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019

Brazilian design studio Furf designed furniture made with a leather-like material made from leaves, developed by organic tannery Nova Kaeru.

Vegan, plastic free leather alternatives are a booming industry at the moment. One of the most notable examples is Piñatex, made from leftover leaves after the pineapple harvest, but there are also leather-like materials made of anything from tree bark to fruit leftovers to mycelium (for an extensive list of options, click here).

Continue reading “Furniture made from leaf leather” »

An ink made using engineered bacterial cells can be 3D-printed into structures that release anti-cancer drugs or capture toxins from the environment.

The microbial ink is the first printable gel to be made entirely from proteins produced by E.coli cells, without the addition of other polymers.

“This is the first of its kind… a living ink that can respond to the environment. We have repurposed the matrix that these bacteria normally utilise as a shielding material to form a bio-ink,” says Avinash Manjula-Basavanna at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

It’s one thing to produce nano-scale materials, but it’s an entirely different thing imaging them.

Nanomaterials have many applications, especially in electronics, but they have one issue: They are so small that they don’t reflect enough light to show fine details, such as colors, even with the aid of the most powerful microscopes.

Now, researchers from UC Riverside may have come up with a solution. They have conceived of an imaging technology that compresses lamp light into a nanometer-sized spot, holding that light at the end of a silver nanowire. This allows it to reveal previously invisible details such as colors.

Continue reading “‘Squeezed’ Light Can Give Nano-Imaging a Much Needed Boost” »

A team of researchers at the University of Groningen has developed a multicomponent nanopore machine that approaches single molecule protein sequencing—it uses a design that allows for unfolding, threading and degrading a desired protein. In their paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry, the group describes their nanopore machine, how it works and how close it comes to allowing single molecule protein sequencing. Yi-Lun Ying with Nanjing University has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining the purpose of macromolecular machines and the work done by the team with this new effort.

It has been a goal of chemists for many years to create a machine of some type that would allow easy analysis of individual protein molecules, similar to devices that have been created to sequence nucleic acids. Such efforts have been stymied by the high degree of complexity of protein molecules. In this new effort, the researchers have come close to achieving that goal. They have built a tiny (900 kDa) multicomponent nanopore machine that is capable of unfolding a given protein and then presenting it to a protein nanopore (a tiny cavity or pore).

The researchers built the machine by placing a chopper of sorts on top of material borrowed from a bacterium. The material works as a tunnel, directing bits from the chopper through a membrane that was designed to mimic the surface of a cell. The chopper breaks a protein into fragmented bits that are easily exported through the nanopore. As they do so, the fragments impact the flow of charged molecules, which leads to the generation of an electrical signal.

Just as a voltage difference can generate electric current, a temperature difference can generate a current flow in thermoelectric materials governed by its “Peltier conductivity” ℗. Now, researchers from Japan demonstrate an unprecedented large P in a single crystal of Ta₂PdSe₆ that is 200 times larger than the maximum P commercially available, opening doors to new research avenues and revolutionizing modern electronics.

We know that current flows inside a metallic conductor in presence of a voltage difference across its ends. However, this is not the only way to generate current. In fact, a temperature difference could work as well. This phenomenon, called “Seebeck effect,” laid the foundation of the field of thermoelectrics, which deals with materials producing electricity under the application of a temperature difference.

Similar to the concept of an electrical conductivity, thermoelectricity is governed by the Peltier conductivity, P, which relates the thermoelectric current to the temperature gradient. However, unlike its electrical counterpart, P is less explored and understood. For instance, is there a theoretical upper limit to how large P can be? Far from being a mere curiosity, the possibility of a large P could be a game changer for modern-day electronics.

By combining two-dimensional materials, researchers create a macroscopic quantum entangled state emulating rare earth compounds.

COVID-19 facemasks & marine plastic pollution.

Our oceans will be flooded with an estimated 1.56 billion face masks in 2020 says a report released today by Hong-Kong-based marine conservation organization OceansAsia. This will result in an additional 4,680 to 6,240 metric tonnes of marine plastic pollution, says the report, entitled “Masks on the Beach: The Impact of COVID-19 on Marine Plastic Pollution.” These masks will take as long as 450 years to break down, slowly turning into micro plastics while negatively impacting marine wildlife and ecosystems.

The report used a global production estimate of 52 billion masks being manufactured in 2020, a conservative loss rate of 3%, and the average weight of 3 to 4 grams for a single-use polypropylene surgical face mask to arrive at the estimate.

Continue reading “Estimated 1.56 billion face masks will have entered oceans in 2020” »

When physicist Tyler Cocker joined Michigan State University in 2018, he had a clear goal: build a powerful microscope that would be the first of its kind in the United States.

Having accomplished that, it was time to put the microscope to work.

“We knew we had to do something useful,” said Cocker, Jerry Cowen Endowed Chair in Experimental Physics in the College of Natural Science’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. “We’ve got the nicest microscope in the country. We should use this to our advantage.”

The findings could inform the design of new materials such as iridescent windows or waterproof textiles.

If you brush against the wings of a butterfly, you will likely come away with a fine sprinkling of powder. This lepidopteran dust is made up of tiny microscopic scales, hundreds of thousands of which paper a butterfly’s wings like shingles on a wafer-thin roof. The structure and arrangement of these scales give a butterfly its color and shimmer, and help shield the insect from the elements.

Now, MIT