After spending nearly two-and-a-half years together, a NASA spacecraft will bid farewell to its asteroid companion Monday and begin the long journey back to Earth.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, and it carries a generous amount of material collected from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
A team of international researchers, including Dr. Rich Crane from the Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter, have developed a new method to extract metals, such as copper, from their parent ore body.
The research team has provided a proof of concept for the application of an electric field to control the movement of an acid within a low permeability copper-bearing ore deposit to selectively dissolve and recover the metal in situ.
This is in contrast to the conventional approach for the mining of such deposits where the material must be physically excavated, which requires removal of both overburden and any impurities within the ore (known as gangue material).
The “graphene revolution” is almost here. Australian scientists specializing in aluminum-ion batteries are now working with Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group to commercialize a technology that could transform energy storage.
The new Stan Smith Mylo is made from materials derived from mushroom and aims to add to Adidas’ sustainability efforts.
Circa 2016
Clothing of the future could have the ability to repair itself after a tear – all you need to do is add water.
Researchers have developed a coating for textiles that can heal itself, and neutralize harmful chemicals.
They say this could one day be used to make chemically protective suits, helping to keep everyone from soldiers to farmers safe from toxic materials.
A Dutch couple have become the proud new tenants of the country’s first ever 3D-printed house.
Elize Lutz and Harrie Dekkers have been given the digital key to the gray, boulder-shaped building in the Bosrijk neighborhood of Eindhoven, in the southern Netherlands.
The single-story home has more than 1000 square feet of floor area, with a spacious living room and two bedrooms.
The U. S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and American Semiconductor have combined traditional manufacturing techniques with 3D printed circuitry to produce a flexible Silicon-on-polymer chip.
Besides its material qualities, the new chip has a memory more than 7000 times larger than any comparable commercially available devices, making it suitable as a micro-controller to be integrated into other objects.
Graphene excels at removing contaminants from water, but it’s not yet a commercially viable use of the wonder material.
That could be changing.
In a recent study, University at Buffalo engineers report a new process of 3D printing graphene aerogels that they say overcomes two key hurdles—scalability and creating a version of the material that’s stable enough for repeated use—for water treatment.
UCLA materials scientists have developed a class of optical material that controls how heat radiation is directed from an object. Similar to the way overlapping blinds direct the angle of visible light coming through a window, the breakthrough involves utilizing a special class of materials that manipulates how thermal radiation travels through such materials.
Recently published in Science, the advance could be used to improve the efficiency of energy-conversion systems and enable more effective sensing and detection technologies.
“Our goal was to show that we could effectively beam thermal radiation —the heat all objects emanate as electromagnetic waves —over broad wavelengths to the same direction,” said study leader Aaswath Raman, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “This advance offers new capabilities for a range of technologies that depend on the ability to control the flows of heat in the form of thermal radiation. This includes imaging and sensing applications that rely on thermal sources or detecting them, as well as energy applications such as solar heating, waste heat recovery and radiative cooling, where restricting the directionality of heat flow can improve performance. ”.
“Multiple printers constructed the building in 200 hours using local soil, meaning it’s zero-waste and needed no materials to be transported to the site.”
Fred Oesch.
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