Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products. Continue reading »
The global search for a sustainable energy supply is making significant strides at Wake Forest University as researchers at the university’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials have announced that they have pushed the efficiency of plastic solar cells to more than 6 percent.
In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Wake Forest researchers describe how they have achieved record efficiency for organic or flexible, plastic solar cells by creating “nano-filaments†within light absorbing plastic, similar to the veins in tree leaves. This allows for the use of thicker absorbing layers in the devices, which capture more of the sun’s light.
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An electric propulsion technology for miniature satellites aims to give them more mobility — and may eventually allow them to take on deep-space missions. Right now, 10 to 15 Rubik’s Cube-sized satellites are orbiting high above Earth. Known as cube satellites, or “CubeSats,†the devices help researchers conduct simple space observations and measure characteristics of Earth’s atmosphere. Continue reading »
Japanese scientists from the Tokyo University have invented a new material, which consists of water by 95 percent, Russian news agency Itar-Tass reports Thursday. Continue reading »
If anyone has been pulled along by a kite as a child, they will have had firsthand experience of the true power of the wind. Therefore, it make perfect sense for us to use this perfect tool for capturing the wind’s energy and use it to power our homes or to run our cars.
Some experts estimate that the total energy contained in wind is 100 times the amount needed by everyone on the planet. However, most of this energy is at high altitude, far beyond the reaches of any wind turbine.
So it’s little wonder that researchers across the world have been working on generating electrical power from kites that can catch these high winds
A long-elusive goal of physics has been reached – producing a pulse of light so short that it contains just a single oscillation of a light wave.
The flashes are almost as short as a light pulse can be, according to the laws of physics. The new super-short pulses could used as flashguns to sense very small, very fast events such as a single photon interacting with a single electron, says Alfred Leitenstorfer of the University of Konstanz in Germany. A single-cycle pulse packs in energy more densely than a pulse containing more wave peaks and troughs.
Researchers from the University of Groningen have clarified the structure of an enzyme that disturbs the communication processes between bacteria. By doing so they have laid the foundations for a new method of tackling bacterial infections such as cystic fibrosis. An article on the structure and function of the so-called quorum-quenching acylase was published on 21 December 2009 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
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Could a mixture of water and clay replace plastics? The desire to wean the world off oil has sparked all manner of research into novel transportation fuels, but manufacturing plastics uses large amounts of oil too. Researchers at the University of Tokyo, Japan, think their material could be up to the task.
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