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Fish-Inspired Material Changes Color Using Nanocolumns

Inspired by the flashing colors of the neon tetra fish, researchers have developed a technique for changing the color of a material by manipulating the orientation of nanostructured columns in the material.

“Neon tetras can control their brightly colored stripes by changing the angle of tiny platelets in their skin,” says Chih-Hao Chang, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of a paper on the work.

“For this proof-of-concept study, we’ve created a material that demonstrates a similar ability,” says Zhiren Luo, a Ph.D. student at NC State and first author of the paper. “Specifically, we’ve shown that we can shift the material’s color by using a magnetic field to change the orientation of an array of nanocolumns.”

The color-changing material has four layers. A silicon substrate is coated with a polymer that has been embedded with iron oxide nanoparticles. The polymer incorporates a regular array of micron-wide pedestals, making the polymer layer resemble a LEGO® brick. The middle layer is an aqueous solution containing free-floating iron oxide nanoparticles. This solution is held in place by a transparent polymer cover.

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““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

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Meet The First-Ever 3D Printer That Can Do Construction in The Vacuum of Space

This will change how we explore space.

One manufacturing company just made history by successfully using a special 3D printer in extreme, space-like conditions.

The team printed polymer alloy parts in a super-high vacuum, and hope their new tech will allow the design and manufacture of much more ambitious spacecraft and space-based telescopes.

“This is an important milestone, because it means that we can now adaptively and on demand manufacture things in space,” Andrew Rush, CEO of Made in Space, told Scientific American.

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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

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Scientists print sensors on gummi candy

Printing microelectrode arrays on gelatin and other soft materials could pave the way for new medical diagnostics tools

Microelectrodes can be used for direct measurement of electrical signals in the brain or heart. These applications require soft materials, however. With existing methods, attaching electrodes to such materials poses significant challenges. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now succeeded in printing electrodes directly onto several soft substrates.

Researchers from TUM and Forschungszentrum Jülich have successfully teamed up to perform inkjet printing onto a gummy bear. This might initially sound like scientists at play – but it may in fact point the way forward to major changes in medical diagnostics. For one thing, it was not an image or logo that Prof. Bernhard Wolfrum’s team deposited on the chewy candy, but rather a microelectrode array. These components, comprised of a large number of electrodes, can detect voltage changes resulting from activity in neurons or muscle cells, for example.

Second, gummy bears have a property that is important when using microelectrode arrays in living cells: they are soft. Microelectrode arrays have been around for a long time. In their original form, they consist of hard materials such as silicon. This results in several disadvantages when they come into contact with living cells. In the laboratory, their hardness affects the shape and organization of the cells, for example. And inside the body, the hard materials can trigger inflammation or the loss of organ functionalities.

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A battery that eats CO2

By Khai Trung Le

A new type of battery developed by researchers at MIT could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously convert carbon dioxide into a solid mineral carbonate as it discharges.

The battery is made from lithium metal, carbon, and an electrolyte that the researchers designed. While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

Currently, power plants equipped with carbon capture systems generally use up to 30 percent of the electricity they generate just to power the capture, release, and storage of carbon dioxide. Anything that can reduce the cost of that capture process, or that can result in an end product that has value, could significantly change the economics of such systems, the researchers say.

Betar Gallant, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, said, ‘Carbon dioxide is not very reactive. Trying to find new reaction pathways is important.’Ideally, the gas would undergo reactions that produce something worthwhile, such as a useful chemical or a fuel. However, efforts at electrochemical conversion, usually conducted in water, remain hindered by high energy inputs and poor selectivity of the chemicals produced.

The team looked into whether carbon-dioxide-capture chemistry could be put to use to make carbon-dioxide-loaded electrolytes — one of the three essential parts of a battery — where the captured gas could then be used during the discharge of the battery to provide a power output.

The team developed a new approach that could potentially be used right in the power plant waste stream to make material for one of the main components of a battery. By incorporating the gas in a liquid state, however, Gallant and her co-workers found a way to achieve electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion using only a carbon electrode. The key is to preactivate the carbon dioxide by incorporating it into an amine solution.

‘What we’ve shown for the first time is that this technique activates the carbon dioxide for more facile electrochemistry,’ Gallant says. ‘These two chemistries — aqueous amines and nonaqueous battery electrolytes — are not normally used together, but we found that their combination imparts new and interesting behaviors that can increase the discharge voltage and allow for sustained conversion of carbon dioxide.’

The battery is made from lithium metal, carbon, and an electrolyte that the researchers designed. While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

Bio-Inspired Material Interacts with Surrounding Tissue to Promote Healing.

A research team from Imperial College London, led by Dr Ben Almquist, has developed a new molecule based on so-called traction force-activated payloads (TrAPs) which allow materials to talk to the body‘s natural repair systems and thereby activate healing processes. “Creatures from sea sponges to…

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“You are not worthless. Organs are extremely valuable on the black market.”

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