Organic Pigment Photocapacitors May Restore Sight To Blind People

Heavy metal is in our blood!

Anytime you don’t feel powerful, remember this:

Supergiant stars are beasts! Their life is a fight between gravity pushing in and heat pushing out. They fuse heavier and heavier elements in their core until they get to iron. They can’t fuse any more. Iron absorbs more energy than it returns, so gravity takes over. The star’s core collapses and the star dies in an explosive supernova that outshines its entire galaxy.

The heat of a supernova fuses new elements during the explosion, which are then spread out into space via the nebula remnant. Nebulae are the birthplaces of new stars and solar systems.

The iron in your blood came from one of the most powerful explosions in the universe.

You have something in your blood that can kill stars and build solar systems.

Cracking eggshell nanostructure: New discovery could have important implications for food safety

How is it that fertilized chicken eggs manage to resist fracture from the outside, while at the same time, are weak enough to break from the inside during chick hatching? It’s all in the eggshell’s nanostructure, according to a new study led by McGill University scientists.

The findings, reported today in Science Advances, could have important implications for food safety in the agro-industry.

Birds have benefited from millions of years of evolution to make the perfect eggshell, a thin, protective biomineralized chamber for embryonic growth that contains all the nutrients required for the growth of a baby chick. The shell, being not too strong, but also not too weak (being “just right” Goldilocks might say), is resistant to fracture until it’s time for hatching.

But what exactly gives bird eggshells these unique features?

To find out, Marc McKee’s research team in McGill’s Faculty of Dentistry, together with Richard Chromik’s group in Engineering and other colleagues, used new sample-preparation techniques to expose the interior of the eggshells to study their molecular nanostructure and mechanical properties.

Read more.

““One of the holy grails of biomaterials research has been working out a way to get skin to grow onto and attach to metals and plastics without the risk of infection. It looks like this design and technique may have solved the problem,” says Dr Stynes, who is researching his PhD at the University of Melbourne. “It could pave the way for fully implantable robotics, prosthetics, catheters, intravenous lines, and the reconstruction of surgical defects with artificial materials.” Professor Richard Page, Director of Orthopaedics and the Centre of Orthopaedic Research and Education at Barwon Health and Deakin University, said the ability of the scaffold to make the skin think it was growing on other skin is potentially a major finding.”

— Breaking the Skin Barrier Can Lead to Breakthroughs in Robotics to Human Interface

It's nap time little martian

Happy 5,000th Martian Day!

Today was Opportunity Rover’s 5,000 Martian Day! Yay! Just in case you don’t know Opportunity, here are a few little facts. 

First, The opportunity Rover was launched on July 7th of 2003. It was lauched with another rover named Spirit. They landed on Mars in Janurary of 2004. Unfortunately Spirit stopped working in 2010 , but Opportunity is still alive and helping us understand Mars. 

Initially Opportuinity was only supposed to be around for 90 Earth days, but instead it’s gotten tons of extensions and is still collecting data today. 

Opportunity is run by a solar panel and is almost 5 feet tall. The solar panels hold enough energy for 14 hours, and the batteries help store energy for use at night. All of that helps to keep our little robot running. He currently holds the record for longest distance travelled “off-world.”

As of right now Opportunity is “hibernating” through the Martian winter and will wake up again in March (yay!) to help with more scientific discoveries. 

Happy 5,000 Martian Day Opportunity! And thanks for everything you do <3

Metal Rover Model Kit

Opportunity Poster

Researchers develop ‘self-healing’ robotics material

Image: Victor Habbick Visions/Science Photo Library

Traditional electronics are made from rigid and brittle materials. However, a new ‘self-healing’ electronic material allows a soft robot to recover its circuits after it is punctured, torn or even slashed with a razor blade.

Made from liquid metal droplets suspended in a flexible silicone elastomer, it is softer than skin and can stretch about twice its length before springing back to its original size.

Soft Robotics & Biologically Inspired Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. Video: Mouser Electronics 

‘The material around the damaged area automatically creates new conductive pathways, which bypass the damage and restore connectivity in the circuit,’ explains first author Carmel Majidi at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The rubbery material could be used for wearable computing, electronic textiles, soft field robots or inflatable extra-terrestrial housing.

‘There is a sweet spot for the size of the droplets,’ says Majidi. ‘We had to get the size not so small that they never rupture and form electronic connections, but not so big they would rupture even under light pressure.’

To read the full article, by Anthony King, in C&I, the members’ magazine for SCI, click here. 

Roommate -> roomsister

November 28 2017

Afternoon study session at my university’s library with my astronaut friend @redplanet44 ☆

Carrying and releasing nanoscale cargo with ‘nanowrappers’

This holiday season, scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) – a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory – have wrapped a box of a different kind. Using a one-step chemical synthesis method, they engineered hollow metallic nanosized boxes with cube-shaped pores at the corners and demonstrated how these “nanowrappers” can be used to carry and release DNA-coated nanoparticles in a controlled way. The research is reported in a paper published on Dec. 12 in ACS Central Science, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

“Imagine you have a box but you can only use the outside and not the inside,” said co-author Oleg Gang, leader of the CFN Soft and Bio Nanomaterials Group. “This is how we’ve been dealing with nanoparticles. Most nanoparticle assembly or synthesis methods produce solid nanostructures. We need methods to engineer the internal space of these structures.”

“Compared to their solid counterparts, hollow nanostructures have different optical and chemical properties that we would like to use for biomedical, sensing, and catalytic applications,” added corresponding author Fang Lu, a scientist in Gang’s group. “In addition, we can introduce surface openings in the hollow structures where materials such as drugs, biological molecules, and even nanoparticles can enter and exit, depending on the surrounding environment.”

Read more.

Re-generatively cooled RL10 Thrust Chamber Assembly test validates 3D printing process

West Palm Beach FL (SPX) Jun 18, 2018 Aerojet Rocketdyne recently achieved a significant milestone by successfully completing a series of hot-fire tests of an advanced, next-generation RL10 engine thrust chamber design that was built almost entirely using additive manufacturing; commonly known as 3-D printing. “This recent series of hot-fire tests conducted under our RL10C-X development program demonstrated the large-scale add Full article

(via MIT researchers turn water into ‘calm’ computer interfaces)

…The Tangible Media Group demonstrated a way to precisely transport droplets of liquid across a surface back in January, which it called “programmable droplets.” The system is essentially just a printed circuit board, coated with a low-friction material, with a grid of copper wiring on top. By programmatically controlling the electric field of the grid, the team is able to change the shape of polarizable liquid droplets and move them around the surface. The precise control is such that droplets can be both merged and split.

Moving on from the underlying technology, the team is now focused on showing how we might leverage the system to create, play and communicate through natural materials…