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Category: materials

New material improving stealth mode vehicles and planes.

When Surrey NanoSystems introduced the original Vantablack, the company said the carbon nanotube material is capable of absorbing 99.96 percent of light that touches it. It’s so dark, it can fool your eyes into seeing a smooth surface even when the nanotubes were actually grown on crumpled foil (seriously — watch the video below the fold). Well, the new version of Vantablack is darker than that. In fact, Surrey can’t even give us the percentage of light that gets absorbed, because its spectrometers can’t measure it.

In this video below (and the GIF above), you can see the material engulf the laser pointer in darkness when it moves across:

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This does make it easier for the whole concept of Singularity to exist.

Scientists prove we are tantalisingly close to creating the next generation of computer components made of organic living materials, as we move beyond Moore’s Law and into exotic new devices.

Posted by Chloe Green.

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The strangest life forms on Earth just got a lot stranger.

In 2003, Didier Raoult of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues discovered a new kind of virus lurking inside single-celled protozoans.

Like other viruses, it couldn’t grow on its own, lacking the biochemical machinery to build proteins and genes. Instead, it had to infect host cells and use their material to produce new viruses.

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Tweaking the structure of graphene so that it matches patterns found in the eyes of moths could one day give us “smart wallpaper,” among a host of other useful technologies.

Using a novel technique called “nano texturing,” scientists at the University of Surrey in England have successfully modified ultra-thin graphene sheets to create the most efficient light-absorbent material to date, which is capable of generating electricity from both captured light and waste heat. They described their work in a new paper in Science Advances.

Graphene is often touted as a wonder material because of its many useful properties, most notably its excellent electrical conductivity and remarkable mechanical strength. This makes it promising for any number of practical applications (a big part of why it proved Nobel-worthy in 2010). Here, let the good folks at SciShow explain:

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What could be better than a material that’s super flexible, only one atom thick, and is 200 times stronger than steel? A material that’s equally strong and flexible, also only one atom thick, and inexpensive.

Scientists are asserting that this new discovery could potentially upstage the world’s greatest wonder material, graphene.

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And, this will only be the beginning because with the lightering weight materials that have been develop we will see some amazing VR suits coming.

Virtual reality could one day incorporate all the senses, creating a rich and immersive experience, but existing virtual reality headsets only simulate things you can see and hear. But now, a group of engineers wants to help people “touch” virtual environments in a more natural way, and they built a wearable suit to do just that.

Designed by Lucian Copeland, Morgan Sinko and Jordan Brooks while they were students at the University of Rochester, in New York, the suit looks something like a bulletproof vest or light armor. Each section of the suit has a small motor in it, not unlike the one that makes a mobile phone vibrate to signal incoming messages. In addition, there are small accelerometers embedded in the suit’s arms.

The vibrations provide a sense of touch when a virtual object hits that part of the body, and the accelerometers help orient the suit’s limbs in space, the researchers said. [Photos: Virtual Reality Puts Adults in a Child’s World].

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European turboprop aircraft manufacturer ATR said a prototype ATR 72 conducted a demonstration flight to test an all-electrical energy management system that aims to optimize electrical power distribution.

The flight is the second the ATR 72 demonstration aircraft has flown as part of the European Union’s “Clean Sky Joint Undertaking” program. The first test flight by the ATR 72 prototype, conducted in July 2015, trialed “new and more effective composite insulation materials and new vibro-acoustic sensors integrated into a large panel of the ATR aircraft fuselage,” ATR said in a statement.

The manufacturer said the two demonstration flights “also tested new generation optical fibers for improved identification of micro-cracks and easier maintenance.”

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The new paper is based on one particular theory of the origin of the IBEX ribbon, in which the particles streaming in from the ribbon are actually solar material reflected back at us after a long journey to the edges of the sun’s magnetic boundaries. (NASA Image)

BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA – The new paper is based on one particular theory of the origin of the IBEX ribbon, in which the particles streaming in from the ribbon are actually solar material reflected back at us after a long journey to the edges of the sun’s magnetic boundaries.

A giant bubble, known as the heliosphere, exists around the sun and is filled with what’s called solar wind, the sun’s constant outflow of ionized gas, known as plasma.

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Demonstrating a strategy that could form the basis for a new class of electronic devices with uniquely tunable properties, researchers at Kyushu University were able to widely vary the emission color and efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes based on exciplexes simply by changing the distance between key molecules in the devices by a few nanometers.

This new way to control electrical properties by slightly changing the device thickness instead of the materials could lead to new kinds of organic electronic devices with switching behavior or that reacts to external factors.

Organic such as OLEDs and organic solar cells use thin films of for the electrically active materials, making flexible and low-cost devices possible.

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