Science

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Penn Researchers Make First All-optical Nanowire Switch

Computers may be getting faster every year, but those advances in computer speed could be dwarfed if their 1's and 0's were represented by bursts of light, instead of electricity.

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Laser light is emitted from the end of a cadmium sulfide nanowire.

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Measuring mercury levels: Nano-velcro detects water-borne toxic metals

A strip of glass covered in hairy nanoparticles can cheaply and conveniently measure mercury, which attacks the nervous system, and other toxic metals in fluids.

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Coal plants like this one in West Chicago release mercury into the atmosphere which can end up in the water supply. This plant, the Crawford Generating Station, is among the last coal-fired plants to shut down in the city, and this move could help bring the already low mercury content in nearby Lake Michigan down even further.

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Use of Nanotechnology Growing among Iranian Industrialists

Different Iranian industries, including the country's auto-manufacturing companies, are making an increasing use of nanotechnology in their products, Secretary-General of Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council (INIC) Dr. Saeed Sarkar announced on Sunday.

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Different Iranian industries, including the country's auto-manufacturing companies, are making an increasing use of nanotechnology in their products.

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New Media Revolutionize DNC

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New Media Explosion Makes DNC Most Open Convention.

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Needle beam could eliminate signal loss in on-chip optics: Harvard researchers create a light wave that propagates without spreading

An international, Harvard-led team of researchers have demonstrated a new type of light beam that propagates without spreading outwards, remaining very narrow and controlled along an unprecedented distance. This "needle beam," as the team calls it, could greatly reduce signal loss for on-chip optical systems and may eventually assist the development of a more powerful class of microprocessors.

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Top: A micrograph and diagram of the metallic gratings that produce the needle beam. Bottom: An approximation of the experimental setup. A laser is focused from the glass substrate side onto the device. Once the non-diffractive surface wave is created, detailed information on its intensity distribution is gathered using an ultrahigh-spatial-resolution near-field scanning optical microscope.

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Rust Never Sleeps: Berkeley Lab-led Observations of Electron Hopping in Iron Oxide Hold Consequences for Environment and Energy

Rust - iron oxide - is a poor conductor of electricity, which is why an electronic device with a rusted battery usually won't work. Despite this poor conductivity, an electron transferred to a particle of rust will use thermal energy to continually move or "hop" from one atom of iron to the next. Electron mobility in iron oxide can hold huge significance for a broad range of environment- and energy-related reactions, including reactions pertaining to uranium in groundwater and reactions pertaining to low-cost solar energy devices. Predicting the impact of electron-hopping on iron oxide reactions has been problematic in the past, but now, for the first time, a multi-institutional team of researchers, led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have directly observed what happens to electrons after they have been transferred to an iron oxide particle.

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Iron oxide (rust) is a poor electrical conductor, but electrons in iron oxide can use thermal energy to hop from one iron atom to another. A Berkeley Lab experiment has now revealed exactly what happens to electrons after being transferred to an iron oxide particle.

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Proteins barge in to turn off unneeded genes and save energy

The sorcerer's apprentice started a water-carrying system, but couldn't stop it, and soon he was up to his neck in water, and trouble. Living cells have a better design: When they activate a gene, they have a system in reserve to turn it off. The cell does not want to waste energy making proteins it no longer needs. Cornell researchers have identified two mechanisms cells use and found they are designed to be quick.

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A few Angstroms make all the difference. The CueR protein binds to DNA at the start of a gene that protects against copper poisoning. When copper atoms bind to CueR, the protein changes shape just enough to twist the DNA - such a small distance that it can't be drawn in two dimensions - to turn on transcription of the gene. When the gene is no longer needed, the original form of CueR unceremoniously kicks the copper-bound form away, turning off transcription quickly to save energy.

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$18.5 million NSF grant to develop self-monitoring health devices

Penn State, North Carolina State University, the University of Virginia and Florida International University will collaborate on a national nanotechnology research effort to create self-powered devices to help people monitor their health and understand how the surrounding environment affects it.

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A schematic for an unobtrusive, wearable electronic health monitoring system. Penn State is part of a collaborative research effort to create self-powered devices to help people monitor their health.

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Dawn has Departed the Giant Asteroid Vesta

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This image is from the last sequence of images NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained of the giant asteroid Vesta, looking down at Vesta's north pole as it was departing.

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New Method for Rapid Separation of Uranyl Ions from Aqueous Solutions

Iranian researchers from Birjand University managed to provide an efficient means for rapid and selective adsorption of uranyl ions from aqueous samples with the help of an external magnetic field.

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The mentioned research group has set its main goal on preparing selective and environmentally friendly adsorbents for fast separation and concentration of uranyl and thorium from aqueous solutions, for quite a while.