Thanks to a recent breakthrough by researchers from Newcastle University and Northumbria University in the UK, that dream may not be so far-fetched.
Chemists have made an iridescent, plant-based film that gets cooler in sunlight.
The material, which comes in a range of shining colours, could one day coat buildings and cars, lowering the need for air conditioning.
The film exhibits a smart property: called passive daytime radiative cooling, or PDRC, it doesn’t absorb much light, and it radiates heat out at a wavelength that escapes the atmosphere and zooms straight into space.
Year 2013 😗😁
Shamees Aden, a British designer and scientist, has come up with a concept for a pair of self-repairing shoes of synthetic protocell materials.
Protocells are molecules that on their own are not alive, but when used with other types of protocells can mimic the properties of living organisms. They react to heat, light and pressure like live cells.
Continue reading “New self-repairing bio-shoe concept unveiled” »
An international team of scientists has imaged and analyzed THz waves that propagate in the form of plasmon polaritons along thin anisotropic semiconductor platelets with wavelengths reduced by up to 65 times compared to THz waves in free space.
What’s even more intriguing is that the wavelengths vary with the direction of propagation. Such THz waves can be applied for probing fundamental material properties at the nanometer scale and pave the way to the development of ultra-compact on-chip THz devices. The work has been published in Nature Materials.
Polaritons are hybrid states of light and matter that arise from the coupling of light with matter excitations. Plasmon and phonon polaritons are among the most prominent examples, formed by the coupling of light to collective electron oscillations and crystal lattice vibrations, respectively.
Inside a lab, scientists marvel at a strange state that forms when they cool down atoms to nearly absolute zero. Outside their window, trees gather sunlight and turn them into new leaves. The two seem unrelated—but a new study from the University of Chicago suggests that these processes aren’t so different as they might appear on the surface.
The study, published in PRX Energy on April 28, found links at the atomic level between photosynthesis and exciton condensates—a strange state of physics that allows energy to flow frictionlessly through a material. The finding is scientifically intriguing and may suggest new ways to think about designing electronics, the authors said.
“As far as we know, these areas have never been connected before, so we found this very compelling and exciting,” said study co-author Prof. David Mazziotti.
As freshwater scarcity affects millions worldwide, scientists and engineers have looked for new ways of filtering unwanted metals and minerals out of water while retaining those elements for re-use elsewhere.
Capacitive deionization (CDI), a technology in which a membrane made from electrode materials removes metal ions from water, has proved a promising technique for such next-generation water filters. Researchers from University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory envisioned the technique could be made even more efficient if they modified the molecular surface of the electrodes.
Continue reading “New technology more efficiently removes heavy metals from water” »
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The concept proposed by the team not only promises to reduce the operating cost of each system but also devise a way to store and transport liquified hydrogen, which is widely considered to be one of the primary sources of clean energy in the future. “The liquified hydrogen would be used to cool the superconductor guideway as it is stored and transported, reducing the need for a separate specialized pipeline system capable of cooling the fuel to 20 degrees Kelvin, or minus 424 Fahrenheit,” said a media release.
New findings enable experimental studies to control and further develop the multiscale phenomena of complex interdependent materials.
Bar-Ilan University researchers Havlin and Frydman have demonstrated the “network of networks” theory using a controlled system of interdependent superconducting networks. The study confirms that coupled networks exhibit abrupt transitions under varying temperatures, validating Havlin’s 2010 theory. This groundbreaking research has significant implications across physics, materials science, and device applications, potentially leading to new developments in self-healing systems, sensitive sensors, and network metamaterials.
Metamaterials are engineered materials that have properties not usually found in nature.
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A new method enables 2D-material semiconductor transistors to be directly integrated onto a fully fabricated 8-inch silicon wafer, which could enable a new generation of transistor technology, denser device integration, new circuit architectures, and more powerful chips.
