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Category: materials

“We have developed a hydrogel based rapid E. coli detection system that will turn red when E. coli is present,” says Professor Sushanta Mitra, Lassonde School of Engineering. “It will detect the bacteria right at the water source before people start drinking contaminated water.”

The new technology has cut down the time taken to detect E. coli from a few days to just a couple of hours. It is also an inexpensive way to test drinking water (C$3 per test estimated), which is a boon for many developing countries, as much as it is for remote areas of Canada’s North.

“This is a significant improvement over the earlier version of the device, the Mobile Water Kit, that required more steps, handling of liquid chemicals and so on,” says Mitra, Associate Vice-President of Research at York U. “The entire system is developed using a readily available plunger-tube assembly. It’s so user-friendly that even an untrained person can do the test using this kit.”

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One of the hurdles of realizing the promise of nanoparticles is that scientists can’t view where they go or how the nanoparticles interact with structures once they are inside of the body. A new technique that involves injecting an acrylamide hydrogel into organs and tissues removed from mice allows researchers to image nanoparticles more than 25 times deeper than is possible with current methods, to a depth of more than 1 millimeter. Lipids are what cause tissues to look opaque. By using the hydrogel to bind all of the molecules together except for lipids, which washed away easily, the team, led by Warren C. W. Chan, were able to make the tissues look transparent but remain intact. The work, published in ACS Nano, may help researchers be able to tell if therapy-loaded nanoparticles are delivering the cargo to the desired destination. Check out the video below.

ExclusiveTechnologies.

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Twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) with van Hove Singularity (VHS) has exhibited novel twist-angle-dependent chemical and physical phenomena. However, scalable production of high-quality tBLG is still in its infancy, especially lacking the angle controlled preparation methods. Here, we report a facile approach to prepare tBLG with large domain sizes (100 μm) and controlled twist angles by a clean layer-by-layer transfer of two constituent graphene monolayers. The whole process without interfacial polymer contamination in two monolayers guarantees the interlayer interaction of the π-bond electrons, which gives rise to the existence of minigaps in electronic structures and the consequent formation of VHSs in density of state. Such perturbation on band structure was directly observed by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy with submicrometer spatial resolution (micro-ARPES). The VHSs lead to a strong light–matter interaction and thus introduce ∼20-fold enhanced intensity of Raman G-band, which is a characteristic of high-quality tBLG. The as-prepared tBLG with strong light–matter interaction was further fabricated into high-performance photodetectors with selectively enhanced photocurrent generation (up to ∼6 times compared with monolayer in our device).

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The world’s first graphene-based electronic paper for use in both hard and flexible displays for electronic devices has been developed in China.

Electronic paper display company Guangzhou OED Technologies announced it has developed the graphene-based e-paper, which it described as being more pliable and having higher light transmittance than existing types of e-paper.

As a result, graphene-based displays would be brighter but also cheaper, as graphene is based on the abundant element carbon, the firm said. Conventional e-paper is made of the rather costly rare metal indium.

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A video of a fully bendable smartphone with a graphene touch display debuts at a Chinese trade show.

A Chinese company just showed off a fully bendable smartphone with a graphene screen during a trade show at Nanping International Conventional Center in Chongqing. Videos of the incredibly flexible phone are making the rounds, and no wonder, as it looks rather impressive.

It isn’t yet known which company developed the bendable smartphone, and very few details have emerged about it. What we do know is that it weighs 200g, the smartphone can be worn around the wrist, and the screen is fully touch enabled.

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When Thomas Edison wanted a filament for his light bulb, he scoured the globe collecting thousands of candidates before settling on bamboo. (It was years before people were able to make tungsten work properly.) That’s our traditional way of getting materials. We picked up stones for axes, chopped wood for housing and carved tools out of bone.

Nano-architects design materials that can work together at very tiny scales, like these interlocking gears made of carbon tubes and benzene molecules. NASA

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