In many industries, air travel is an unfortunate necessity, and we all know that there are just some vacation destinations that can’t be accessed any other way. People are constantly looking for simple ways to green their air travel, but thanks to one popular airline, the skies are about to more eco-friendly– fast. Read more
Imagine having clothes made out of this stuff, this should be interesting when it makes it to market. Put me down for a couple of yards.
A Tokyo-based venture called ideal Star [JP] has developed a new method that makes it possible to produce solar cells in the form of flexible and thin threads. The company is supported by a total of six Japanese universities and the government.
Researchers at Florida State University have discovered crystals that could lead to super security chips as well as contribute to the discovery of materials that expand the capacity of electronic storage devices by 1,000 to 1 million times.
The security chips could store encrypted data written two different ways — electrically and magnetically — making extraction of the data more complex and so more difficult for attackers to decrypt. Read more
Microelectromechanical devices gave us the Wii and the digital movie projector. MIT researchers have found a new way to make them.
Microelectromechanical devices — tiny machines with moving parts — are everywhere these days: they monitor air pressure in car tires, register the gestures of video game players, and reflect light onto screens in movie theaters. But they’re manufactured the same way computer chips are, in facilities that can cost billions of dollars, and their rigidity makes them hard to wrap around curved surfaces. Read more
UPTON, NY — Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have obtained the first glimpse of miniscule air bubbles that keep water from wetting a super non-stick surface. Detailed information about the size and shape of these bubbles — and the non-stick material the scientists created by “pock-marking†a smooth material with cavities measuring mere billionths of a meter — is being published online today in the journal Nano Letters. Read more
We like to think that we’ve got hydrogen, one of the most basic of elements, figured out. However, hydrogen can still surprise, especially once scientists start probing its properties on the most fundamental levels. “We ran simulations in order to provide a quantitative map of the molecular to atomic transition in liquid hydrogen,” Isaac Tamblyn tells PhysOrg.com. “Some of what we found was surprising, and could change the basic equations of state used in models involving hydrogen.” Read more