Science

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Heightened Efficiency in Purification of Wastewater Using Nanomembranes

Iranian researchers from Amirkabir University of Technology produced a nanomembrane which can purify industrial wastewater and polluted water with over 90% efficiency.

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Pens filled with high-tech inks for do-it-yourself sensors

A new simple tool developed by nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego, is opening the door to an era when anyone will be able to build sensors, anywhere, including physicians in the clinic, patients in their home and soldiers in the field. The team from the University of California, San Diego, developed high-tech bio-inks that react with several chemicals, including glucose. They filled off-the-shelf ballpoint pens with the inks and were able to draw sensors to measure glucose directly on the skin and sensors to measure pollution on leaves.

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Researchers drew sensors capable of detecting pollutants on a leaf.

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Looking Deeply into the Universe in 3D

MUSE goes beyond Hubble

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Astronomers find newborn stars at the edge of the Galaxy

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Negative WISE W1 image of the newly found cluster Camargo 438. The cluster is about 16,000 light years away, so the image is about 24 light years across. The black dots in the image are individual stars.

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Scientific breakthrough in rechargeable batteries: Researchers from Singapore and Québec Team Up to Develop Next-Generation Materials to Power Electronic Devices and Electric Vehicles

Researchers from Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) of A*STAR and Quebec's IREQ (Hydro-Québec's research institute) have synthesized silicate-based nanoboxes that could more than double the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries as compared to conventional phosphate-based cathodes. This breakthrough could hold the key to longer-lasting rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles and mobile devices.

"IBN researchers have successfully achieved simultaneous control of the phase purity and nanostructure of Li2MnSiO4 for the first time," said Professor Jackie Y. Ying, IBN Executive Director. "This novel synthetic approach would allow us to move closer to attaining the ultrahigh theoretical capacity of silicate-based cathodes for battery applications."

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First detailed microscopy evidence of bacteria at the lower size limit of life: Berkeley Lab research provides comprehensive description of ultra-small bacteria

Scientists have captured the first detailed microscopy images of ultra-small bacteria that are believed to be about as small as life can get. The research was led by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. The existence of ultra-small bacteria has been debated for two decades, but there hasn't been a comprehensive electron microscopy and DNA-based description of the microbes until now.

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This cryo-electron tomography image reveals the internal structure of an ultra-small bacteria cell like never before. The cell has a very dense interior compartment and a complex cell wall. The darker spots at each end of the cell are most likely ribosomes. The image was obtained from a 3-D reconstruction. The scale bar is 100 nanometers.

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Living on the Edge: Stars Found Far from Galaxy Center

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The newfound young star clusters lie thousands of light-years below the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, a flat spiral disk seen in this artist's conception. If alien lifeforms were to develop on planets orbiting these stars, they would have views of a portion, or all, of the galactic disk.

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New Threat Center to Integrate Cyber Intelligence

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A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency image represents DARPA’s High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems program, which seeks to create technology for constructing systems that are functionally correct and satisfy safety and security properties.

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In quest for better lithium-air batteries, chemists boost carbon's stability: Nanoparticle coatings improve stability, cyclability of '3DOm' carbon

To power a car so it can travel hundreds of miles at a time, lithium-ion batteries of the future are going to have to hold more energy without growing too big in size.

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Chemists from Boston College and UMass Amherst applied two nano-scale coatings to a unique form of carbon, known as 3DOm. The resulting boost in 3DOm's stability produced performance gains that could lead to the material's use in lithium-air batteries.

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New nanowire structure absorbs light efficiently: Dual-type nanowire arrays can be used in applications such as LEDs and solar cells

Researchers at Aalto University, Finland have developed a new method to implement different types of nanowires side-by-side into a single array on a single substrate. The new technique makes it possible to use different semiconductor materials for the different types of nanowires.

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Initially the substrate is prepared by depositing Au nanoparticles on it and covering it with a hole-patterned oxide. The first nanowires grow from these holes and after the oxide is removed, the other type of nanowires are grown via the deposited nanoparticles. The resulting dual-type array is presented on the electron micrograph on the right.