An invention may turn one of the most widely used materials for biomedical applications into wearable devices to help monitor heart health.
A team from Purdue University developed self-powered wearable triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-based contact layers for monitoring cardiovascular health. TENGs help conserve mechanical energy and turn it into power.
The Purdue team’s work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.
Circa 2017
Data storage technology continues to shrink in size and grow in capacity, but scientists have just taken things to the next level — they’ve built a nanoscale hard drive using a single atom.
By magnetising an atom, cooling it with liquid helium, and storing it in an extreme vacuum, the team managed to store a single bit of data (either a 1 or a 0) in this incredibly miniscule space.
Not enough room for your holiday photos then, but according to the team from IBM Research in California, this proof-of-concept approach could eventually lead to drives the size of a credit card that could hold the entire iTunes or Spotify libraries, at about 30 million songs each.
New types of cathodes, suitable for advanced energy storage, can be developed using beyond-lithium ion batteries.
The rapid development of renewable energy resources has triggered tremendous demands in large-scale, cost-efficient and high-energy-density stationary energy storage systems.
Lithium ion batteries (LIBs) have many advantages but there are much more abundant metallic elements available such as sodium, potassium, zinc and aluminum.
Circa 2018
Back in July 2018, researchers at Purdue University created the world’s fastest-spinning object, which whipped around at 60 billion rpm – and now that seems like the teacup ride at Disneyland. The same team has now broken its own record using the same technique, creating a new nano-scale rotor that spins five times faster.
Like the earlier version, the whirling object in question is a dumbbell-shaped silica nanoparticle suspended in a vacuum. When it’s set spinning, this new model hit the blistering speed of over 300 billion rpm. For comparison, dentist drills are known to get up to about 500,000 rpm, while the fastest pulsar – which is the speediest-spinning known natural object – turns at a leisurely 43,000 rpm.
Setting this record involves shining two lasers at the nanoparticle. One holds it in place, while the other starts it spinning. When the photons that make up light strike an object, they exert a tiny amount of force on it, known as radiation pressure. Normally this force is too weak to have any noticeable effect, but in a vacuum where there’s very little friction record speeds can be reached. That’s the case here, and it also applies to the concept of light sails, which could one day propel spacecraft at high speeds.
Nanoscale thermal physics guarantees our decline, no matter how many diseases we cure.
A team led by Prof. Du Jiangfeng, Prof. Shi Fazhan, and Prof. Wang Ya from University of Science and Technology of China, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed a robust electrometric method utilizing a continuous dynamic decoupling technique, where the continuous driving fields provide a magnetic-field-resistant dressed frame. The study was published in Physical Review Letters on June 19.
Characterization of electrical properties and comprehension of the dynamics in nanoscale become significant in the development of modern electronic devices, such as semi-conductor transistors and quantum chips, especially when the feature size has shrunk to several nanometers.
The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond—an atomic-scale spin sensor—has shown to be an attractive electrometer. Electrometry using the NV center would improve various sensing and imaging applications. However, its natural susceptibility to the magnetic field hinders effective detection of the electric field.
In a new study, a group of researchers led by Prof. Lior Klein, from the physics department and the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar-Ilan University, has shown that relatively simple structures can support an exponential number of magnetic states—much greater than previously thought. They have additionally demonstrated switching between the states by generating spin currents. Their results may pave the way to multi-level magnetic memory with an extremely large number of states per cell; it could also have application in the development of neuromorphic computing, and more. Their research appears as a featured article on the cover of a June issue of Applied Physics Letters.
Spintronics is a thriving branch of nano-electronics which uses the spin of the electron and its associated magnetic moment in addition to the electron charge used in traditional electronics. The main practical contributions of spintronics are in magnetic sensing and non-volatile magnetic data storage, and researchers are pursuing breakthroughs in developing magnetic-based processing and novel types of magnetic memory.
Spintronics devices commonly consist of magnetic elements manipulated by spin-polarized currents between stable magnetic states. When spintronic devices are used for storing data, the number of stable states sets an upper limit on memory capacity. While current commercial magnetic memory cells have two stable magnetic states corresponding to two memory states, there are clear advantages to increasing this number, as it will potentially allow increasing memory density and enable the design of novel types of memory.
Rigid electromagnetic actuators have a variety of applications, but their bulky nature limits human-actuator integration or machine-human collaborations. In a new report on Science Advances, Guoyong Mao and a team of scientists in soft matter physics and soft materials at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, introduced soft electromagnetic actuators (SEMAs) to replace solid metal coils with liquid-metal channels embedded in elastomeric shells. The scientists demonstrated the user-friendly, simple and stretchable construct with fast and durable programmability.
They engineered a SEMA based soft miniature shark and a multi-coil flower with individually controlled petals, as well as a cubic SEMA to perform arbitrary motion sequences. The team adapted a numerical model to support device miniaturization and reduce power consumption with increased mechanical efficiency. The SEMAs are electrically controlled shape-memory systems with applications to empower soft grippers for minimally invasive medical applications. The scientists highlighted the practicality of small size and multi-coil SEMAs for promising applications in medicine, much like in the classic sci-fi movie “Fantastic Voyage,” in which a miniature submarine destroyed a blood clot to save a patient’s life. In reality, Mao et al. aim to develop and deploy SEMA-based advanced microrobots for such futuristic medical applications, including drug delivery and tissue diagnostics with nano-precision.
While so many of us are working at home during the coronavirus pandemic, we do worry that serendipitous hallway conversations aren’t happening.
Last year, before the pandemic, it was one of those conversations that led researchers at ETH Zurich to develop a way of making chocolates shimmer with color—without any coloring agents or other additives.
The project, announced in December, involves what the scientists call “structural color”. The team indicated that it creates colors in a way similar to what a chameleon does—that is, using the structure of its skin to scatter a particular wavelength of light. The researchers have yet to release details, but Alissa M. Fitzgerald, founder of MEMS product development firm AMFitzgerald, has a pretty good guess.
The rapid development of renewable energy resources has triggered tremendous demands in large-scale, cost-efficient and high-energy-density stationary energy storage systems.
Lithium ion batteries (LIBs) have many advantages but there are much more abundant metallic elements available such as sodium, potassium, zinc and aluminum.
These elements have similar chemistries to lithium and have recently been extensively investigated, including sodium-ion batteries (SIBs), potassium-ion batteries (PIBs), zinc-ion batteries (ZIBs), and aluminum-ion batteries (AIBs). Despite promising aspects relating to redox potential and energy density the development of these beyond-LIBs has been impeded by the lack of suitable electrode materials.
