Our life experience has taught us that materials around us melt or turn into vapor when we heat them, but a group of chemists at Radboud University Nijmegen managed to create a super gel which stiffens when it is warmed. Once it is cooled bellow the projected threshold, the gel melts back into the liquid… »
Collaboration between researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and the researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) resulted with the development of a special treatment for cotton fabric that allows it to absorb exceptional amounts of water from misty air. Since the coated cotton releases the collected water by itself when it… »
While roboticists efforts to develop robots able to withstand exposure to high levels of radiation are helpful for needed actions and monitoring after disasters with increased levels of radiation, researchers at Rice University and Lomonosov Moscow State University have found that graphene oxide (GO) could actually be used to quickly remove radioactive material from contaminated water…. »
While some researchers suggest that sugar beet pulp should be used as biofuel and others use it in animal feed, researchers from the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and their associates found a way to transform this leftover residue from sugar extraction into a material that could be used for biodegradable… »
Researchers from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is operated by the Stanford University, managed to set a world record for energy storage in the sulfur cathode of a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. They came up with a novel “yolk-shell” design which enables these batteries to store five times more energy compared to current commercially available… »
Micro-algal fuels might be one way to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, and they could reduce carbon dioxide emissions since they use photosynthesis. Sandia National Laboratories researcher has engineered two strains of cyanobacteria to produce free fatty acids, a precursor to liquid fuels, but she has also found that the process cuts the bacteria’s… »
While some people find them disgusting and other consider that they are a mouthwatering meal, various research groups focus on study of muscles and employing their findings in new innovations. Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) and University of Texas-Arlington (UT Arlington) researchers investigated the chemistry that allows mussels to stick to underwater surfaces in order… »
University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) researchers have found that self-moving gels can be used to enable the synthetic materials to “act alive” and mimic primitive biological communication. They managed to demonstrate that a synthetic system that can both emit and sense a chemical signal, and when the ability of chemical communication is combined with interaction with… »
