Coconuts and lemons enable a thermal wood for indoor heating and cooling

Peter Olsén and Céline Montanari, researchers in the Department of Biocomposites at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, say the new wood composite uses components of lemon and coconuts to both heat and cool homes.
Photo Credit: David Callahan

A building material that combines coconuts, lemons and modified wood could one day be enough to heat and cool your home. The three renewable sources provide the key components of a wood composite thermal battery, which was developed by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Researchers reported the development in the scientific journal Small. Peter Olsén, researcher in the Department of Biocomposites at KTH, says the material is capable of storing both heat and cold. If used in housing construction, the researchers say that 100 kilos of the material can save about 2.5 kWh per day in heating or cooling—given an ambient temperature of 24C.

KTH researcher Céline Montanari says that besides sunlight, any heat source can charge the battery. “The key is that the temperature fluctuates around the transition temperature, 24C, which can of course be tailored depending on the application and location,” she says.

New wood-based technology removes 80 percent of dye pollutants in wastewater

Researchers at Chalmers have developed a new biobased material, a form of powder based on cellulose nanocrystals to purify water from pollutants, including textile dyes. When the polluted water passes through the filter with cellulose powder, the pollutants are absorbed, and the sunlight entering the treatment system causes them to break down quickly and efficiently. Laboratory tests have shown that at least 80 percent of the dye pollutants are removed with the new method and material, and the researchers see good opportunities to further increase the degree of purification.
Illustration Credit: David Ljungberg | Chalmers University of Technology

Clean water is a prerequisite for our health and living environment, but far from a given for everyone. According to the WHO, there are currently over two billion people living with limited or no access to clean water.

This global challenge is at the center of a research group at Chalmers University of Technology, which has developed a method to easily remove pollutants from water. The group, led by Gunnar Westman, Associate Professor of Organic Chemistry, focuses on new uses for cellulose and wood-based products and is part of the Wallenberg Wood Science Center.

The researchers have built up solid knowledge about cellulose nanocrystals* – and this is where the key to water purification lies. These tiny nanoparticles have an outstanding adsorption capacity, which the researchers have now found a way to utilize.

“We have taken a unique holistic approach to these cellulose nanocrystals, examining their properties and potential applications. We have now created a biobased material, a form of cellulose powder with excellent purification properties that we can adapt and modify depending on the types of pollutants to be removed,” says Gunnar Westman.

Pressure-Based Control Enables Tunable Singlet Fission Materials for Efficient Photoconversion

Applying hydrostatic pressure as an external stimulus, Tokyo Tech and Keio University researchers demonstrate a new way to regulate singlet fission (SF), a process in which two electrons are generated from a single photon, in chromophores, opening doors to the design of SF-based materials with enhanced (photo)energy conversion. Their method overrides the strict requirements that limit the molecular design of such materials by realizing an alternative control strategy.

Singlet fission (SF) is a process in which an organic chromophore (a molecule that absorbs light) in an excited singlet state transfers energy to a neighboring chromophore, resulting in two correlated triplet exciton pairs (pairs of bound electron-hole states, a "hole" signifying the absence of an electron) that decay to low energy triplet excitons. These excitons have long lifetimes and show efficient light emission, making SF promising for efficient light energy conversion.

However, the molecular design of SF-based materials is limited by the requirement that the energy of the excited singlet state must be at least equal to the energy of the two triplet states. One way to overcome this limit is by applying external stimuli, such as temperature or pressure, to manipulate the SF process.

Breakthrough on the way to the biological solar cell

Marc Nowaczyk which everted from the Ruhr University to the University of Rostock. The current works were partly made in Bochum.
Photo Credit: ITMZ University of Rostock

Researchers question the way photosynthesis works.

A research team from the University of Cambridge, the University of Rostock and the Ruhr University Bochum succeeded for the first time in obtaining electrons directly from the early stages of photosynthesis. This breakthrough questions the previous model for the basic functioning of photosynthesis and has the potential to revolutionize the development of solar cells based on biological catalysts. The research work was published in the renowned journal Nature from 22. Published March 2023.

Manufacture hydrogen with sunlight

Biological catalysts, so-called enzymes, have long since determined our everyday life. For example, they are used as additives in detergents, they refine food or are used in large-scale processes to produce medicines or raw materials for the chemical industry. Compared to chemical catalysts, they have the advantage that they only react with very specific raw materials and therefore produce very specific products. In addition, biological catalysts are never based on precious metals or other rare raw materials. "In nature, solutions have always been established that are not limited by the availability of raw materials," says Prof. Dr. Marc Nowaczyk, head of the chair for biochemistry at the University of Rostock and co-author of the study, who did part of the work at the Ruhr University Bochum as part of the graduate school Microbial Substrate Conversion, MiCon for short.

Volcanic Spring Water Will Help Researchers Make Plastic Electronics

Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Tsukuba

Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have made electrically conductive polyaniline composites in mineral water. This work will increase the sustainability of manufacturing many consumer and industrial products

When you think of how to make electronic components, water probably doesn't top your list of raw materials. Nevertheless, in a study recently published in Journal of Water Chemistry and Technology, researchers from the University of Tsukuba have used volcanic spring water to help make the plastic that's an essential part of many modern technologies.

Plastic holds together the electronic components in many modern technologies. Polyaniline (PANI) is one of these plastics. Because millions of square meters of PANI are used every year for this and other purposes, there are clear benefits to making it in the most environmentally sustainable solvent possible. Many solvents can be used to make PANI—but most are rather toxic and incompatible with common mass-production device fabrication processes, such as inkjet printing.

Tackling counterfeit seeds with “unclonable” labels

As a way to reduce seed counterfeiting, MIT researchers developed a silk-based tag that, when applied to seeds, provides a unique code that cannot be duplicated.
Photo Credit: Photograph courtesy of the researchers. Edited by Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT
(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Average crop yields in Africa are consistently far below those expected, and one significant reason is the prevalence of counterfeit seeds whose germination rates are far lower than those of the genuine ones. The World Bank estimates that as much as half of all seeds sold in some African countries are fake, which could help to account for crop production that is far below potential.

There have been many attempts to prevent this counterfeiting through tracking labels, but none have proved effective; among other issues, such labels have been vulnerable to hacking because of the deterministic nature of their encoding systems. But now, a team of MIT researchers has come up with a kind of tiny, biodegradable tag that can be applied directly to the seeds themselves, and that provides a unique randomly created code that cannot be duplicated.

The new system, which uses minuscule dots of silk-based material, each containing a unique combination of different chemical signatures, is described today in the journal Science Advances in a paper by MIT’s dean of engineering Anantha Chandrakasan, professor of civil and environmental engineering Benedetto Marelli, postdoc Hui Sun, and graduate student Saurav Maji.

The oxygen-ion battery

Prof. Jürgen Fleig, Tobias Huber, Alexander Schmid (left to right)
Photo Credit: Courtesy of TU Wien

A new type of battery has been invented at TU Wien (Vienna): The oxygen-ion battery can be extremely durable, does not require rare elements and solves the problem of fire hazards.

Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous today - from electric cars to smartphones. But that does not mean that they are the best solution for all areas of application. TU Wien has now succeeded in developing an oxygen-ion battery that has some important advantages. Although it does not allow for quite as high energy densities as the lithium-ion battery, its storage capacity does not decrease irrevocably over time: it can be regenerated and thus may enable an extremely long service life.

In addition, oxygen-ion batteries can be produced without rare elements and are made of incombustible materials. A patent application for the new battery idea has already been filed together with cooperation partners from Spain. The oxygen-ion battery could be an excellent solution for large energy storage systems, for example to store electrical energy from renewable sources. 

Researchers create breakthrough spintronics manufacturing process that could revolutionize the electronics industry

University of Minnesota researchers, along with a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), developed a breakthrough process for making spintronic devices that has the potential to become the new industry standard for semiconductors chips that are essential to computers, smartphones and many other electronics. The new process will allow for faster, more efficient spintronics devices that can be scaled down smaller than ever before. ​​

The paper is published in Advanced Functional Materials.

“We believe we’ve found a material and a device that will allow the semiconducting industry to move forward with more opportunities in spintronics that weren’t there before for memory and computing applications,” said Jian-Ping Wang, senior author of the paper and professor in the College of Science and Engineering. 

The semiconductor industry is constantly trying to develop smaller and smaller chips that can maximize energy efficiency, computing speed and data storage capacity in electronic devices. Spintronic devices, which leverage the spin of electrons rather than the electrical charge to store data, provide a promising and more efficient alternative to traditional transistor-based chips. These materials also have the potential to be non-volatile, meaning they require less power and can store memory and perform computing even after you remove their power source.

Low-cost device can measure air pollution anywhere

MIT researchers have made an open-source version of the “City Scanner” mobile pollution detector that lets people check air quality anywhere, cheaply. Pictured are some examples of the latest version of the device, called Flatburn, as well as a researcher attaching a prototype to a car.
Image Credits: Courtesy of the researchers. Edited by MIT News
(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Air pollution is a major public health problem: The World Health Organization has estimated that it leads to over 4 million premature deaths worldwide annually. Still, it is not always extensively measured. But now an MIT research team is rolling out an open-source version of a low-cost, mobile pollution detector that could enable people to track air quality more widely.

The detector, called Flatburn, can be made by 3D printing or by ordering inexpensive parts. The researchers have now tested and calibrated it in relation to existing state-of-the-art machines, and are publicly releasing all the information about it — how to build it, use it, and interpret the data.

“The goal is for community groups or individual citizens anywhere to be able to measure local air pollution, identify its sources, and, ideally, create feedback loops with officials and stakeholders to create cleaner conditions,” says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. 

“We’ve been doing several pilots around the world, and we have refined a set of prototypes, with hardware, software, and protocols, to make sure the data we collect are robust from an environmental science point of view,” says Simone Mora, a research scientist at Senseable City Lab and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the scanner’s testing process. The Flatburn device is part of a larger project, known as City Scanner, using mobile devices to better understand urban life.

Game-changing high-performance semiconductor material could help slash heat emissions

WVU researchers Sergio Andres Paredes Navia, Cesar Octavio Romo de la Cruz, Liang Liang and Ellena Gemmen use an electron microscope to study the nanostructure of a new oxide ceramic material with the potential to make thermoelectric generators efficient enough to capture a significant portion of the waste heat that industrial systems like power plants emit.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of West Virginia University

Researchers at West Virginia University have engineered a material with the potential to dramatically cut the amount of heat power plants release into the atmosphere.

A team led by Xueyan Song, professor and George B. Berry Chair of Engineering at the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, has created an oxide ceramic material that solves a longstanding efficiency problem plaguing thermoelectric generators. Those devices can generate electricity from heat, including power plant heat emissions, which contribute to global warming.

The breakthrough oxide ceramic Song’s team produced “achieved a record-high performance that had been deemed impossible,” she said. “We demonstrated the best thermoelectric oxide ceramics reported in the field worldwide over the past 20 years, and the results open up new research directions that could further increase performance.”

Oxide ceramics are from the same family as materials like pottery, porcelain, clay bricks, cement and silicon, but contain various metallic elements. They’re hard, resistant to heat and corrosion, and well-suited for high-temperature applications in air. They can serve as the material for thermoelectric generator components.

World’s first completely roll-to-roll printable perovskite solar cell

Dr David Beynon (Left) and Dr Ershad Parvazian (Right) hold a sample of the new fully roll-to-roll (R2R) coated device.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Swansea University

Swansea University has established a low-cost and scalable carbon ink formulation capable of unlocking, for the first time, the potential for perovskite solar cells to be manufactured at scale.

Using slot die coating in a roll-to-roll (R2R) process, academics from the SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre at Swansea University have established a way to create “fully printable” perovskite photovoltaics (PV), a term often used but, until now, incorrect.

The team searched for an alternative to the gold electrode that is typically applied using an expensive and slow evaporation process after the device has been printed.

Dr David Beynon, Senior Research Officer at SPECIFIC, said: “The key was identifying the right solvent mix, one which dries as a film without dissolving the underlying layer.

“X-ray diffraction analysis showed carbon electrode ink is capable of this when formulated with an orthogonal solvent system.

“This innovative layer can be applied continuously and compatibly with the underlying layers at a low temperature and high speed.”

Cow dung possible sustainable material of the future, study finds

Photo Credit: Jonas Koel

Livestock dung could be used to create the next generation of cellulosic materials, according to a new report.

Livestock dung is typically used as a fertilizer or as a source of biogas for green energy applications, but the study, led by scientists at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) in collaboration with the universities of Bristol and Edinburgh, reviewed recent research into the development of high-value manure-derived materials from ruminant animals such as cattle.

They found that dung has been largely overlooked despite the variety of different applications for recycled ruminant waste biomass (RWB).

The most common applications use manure in combination with other components to create composite materials such as plastic, recycled card and paper or concrete. However, it could also be used for the extraction of nanocellulose - a prospective bio-based and biodegradable material of the future.

Currently, there is a trade-off between the performance of the material and the amount of processing required to achieve this – limiting the capacity of RWB to replace conventional materials on a commercial level.

World’s fastest burst-mode X-ray camera hits the road

Sandia National Laboratories’ Quinn Looker inspects sensors used in the ultrafast X-ray imaging camera.
Photo Credit: Craig Fritz

Nuclear reactions are fast. Really fast. Faster than billionths of a second. Your best shot at catching one is with a high-speed X-ray camera that can only be obtained from the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories. But these cameras could soon become more widely available.

Sandia has partnered with Albuquerque-based startup Advanced hCMOS Systems (pronounced “H C moss”) to commercialize ultrafast imaging technology invented at the Labs and used extensively in fusion research. If successful, the collaboration could move the world more quickly to limitless clean energy by accelerating such research, while potentially impacting many other research and development areas.

“A perfect example is glass research,” said Liam Claus, cofounder of Advanced hCMOS Systems. “The Gorilla Glass that’s in your iPhone so it doesn’t shatter every time it slips out of your hand — there’s a ton of materials science that’s gone into that. They need to understand how it fractures, and glass fractures can propagate at extremely high speeds.”

New “traffic cop” algorithm helps a drone swarm stay on task

MIT engineers have developed a method to tailor any wireless network to handle a high load of time-sensitive data coming from multiple sources.
Illustration Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT
(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

How fresh is your data? For drones searching a disaster zone or robots inspecting a building, working with the freshest data is key to locating a survivor or reporting a potential hazard. But when multiple robots simultaneously relay time-sensitive information over a wireless network, a traffic jam of data can ensue. Any information that gets through is too stale to consider as a useful, real-time report.

Now, MIT engineers may have a solution. They’ve developed a method to tailor any wireless network to handle a high load of time-sensitive data coming from multiple sources. Their new approach, called WiSwarm, configures a wireless network to control the flow of information from multiple sources while ensuring the network is relaying the freshest data.

The team used their method to tweak a conventional Wi-Fi router, and showed that the tailored network could act like an efficient traffic cop, able to prioritize and relay the freshest data to keep multiple vehicle-tracking drones on task.

The team’s method, which they will present in May at IEEE’s International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), offers a practical way for multiple robots to communicate over available Wi-Fi networks so they don’t have to carry bulky and expensive communications and processing hardware onboard.

New Tool for Understanding Disease

Lina Pradham (left), a post-doctoral researcher in the Kloxin Group points out dormant breast cancer cells in 3D cultures imaged using confocal microscopy to UD engineer April Kloxin, Thomas and Kipp Gutshall Development Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. In the image, the dormant cells (shown in green) are viable, not proliferating, and remain capable of proliferating upon stimulation.
Photo Credit: Evan Krape / University of Delaware

UD model illuminates environmental cues that may contribute to breast cancer recurrence

Nearly 270,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. 

According to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, about 70-80% of these individuals experience estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer, where cancer cells need estrogen to grow. In terms of treatment, this presence of hormone receptors provides a nice handle for targeting tumors, say with therapies that knock out the tumor cell’s ability to bind to estrogen and prevent remaining breast cancer cells from growing.

However, even if treated successfully, on average, one in five individuals with ER+ breast cancer experiences a late recurrence when dormant tumor cells in distant parts of the body, such as the bone marrow, reactivate anywhere from 5 to over 20 years after initial treatment.

Deeper insights into bacteria

Image Credit: NCI

RNA sequencing technologies provide valuable insights into how individual cells work. A research team at the University of Würzburg has now developed a technique that provides an even more detailed view.

How do cells work in a normal state? How do they change when they cause disease? Do they react as desired to new drugs? Nowadays, anyone seeking answers to these – and other related – questions in the laboratory can hardly do without a special technique: single-cell RNA sequencing, or "scRNA-seq" for short. This technique provides an accurate picture of gene expression in a single cell at a specific point of time, as well as the associated regulatory networks, allowing conclusions to be drawn about the molecular basis of cell activity.

A research team at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) has now further improved a single-cell RNA sequencing technique it previously developed for use in bacteria. This means that the work in the laboratory is even faster than before and provides much more precise information. The team presents its development in the journal mBio.

Boeing Successfully Demonstrates Anti-Jam Capability for U.S. Department of Defense Satellites

U.S. Air Force Capt. Yousuke Matsui from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command and several members of Boeing’s PTES team work with the key management system initialization interface during the operational capability demonstration at the Joint SATCOM Engineering Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Photo Credit: James K. Lee

Boeing engineers successfully demonstrated the company’s Protected Enterprise Tactical Service (PTES) over an on-orbit operational satellite, validating the design for the U.S. Space Force’s ground-based anti-jamming satellite communications (SATCOM) capability. The demonstration was the first time the PTES program integrated all of the end-to-end capabilities and tested them over the air using a commercial satellite.

The event, which took place at the Joint Satellite Engineering Center, closely represented scenarios of users accessing field-deployed equipment via a Protected Tactical Waveform (PTW) user terminal interface. The demonstration validated integration of software and hardware with the current U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) SATCOM architecture and exercised PTW anti-jam capability. Actual initial deployment of this capability for operational use will be over the government’s Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) fleet, taking advantage of its military features for high levels of jamming resistance and connectivity assurance.

Producing extreme ultraviolet laser pulses efficiently through wakesurfing behind electron beams

A 3D simulation of the wake behind the electron beam (purple) and how a light pulse (blue and red stripe) might surf behind it. The plasma wake is shown in alternating yellow for the absence of electrons and green for peaks in the electron density. When a light pulse sits on that boundary, it can continuously gain energy—the trick is keeping it there.
Image Credit: Ryan Sandberg, High Field Science Group

Simulations suggest this mechanism could provide a tenfold increase in frequency—likely hitting a peak power of 100 trillion watts in XUV

A laser pulse surfing in the wake of an electron beam pulse could get upshifted from visible to extreme ultraviolet light, simulations done at the University of Michigan have shown.

The approach could enable more efficient generation of high-energy laser light, perhaps even to X-rays. The 3D simulation showed up to a tenfold increase in the frequency of the light, while the 1D simulation went up to a 50-fold increase. In principle, the researchers say it is possible to continue amping up the energy of the laser pulse by extending the period of time that it can ride in the wake of the electron beam.

“Future lasers, potentially including those used to pattern semiconductor chips for computers, could take advantage of this effect to produce higher energy pulses more efficiently,” said Alec Thomas, U-M professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences and corresponding author of the study in Physical Review Letters.

Improving the Performance of Satellites in Low Earth Orbit

On-chip distributed radiation sensors and current-sharing techniques can be used to reduce the impact of radiation on the radio and power consumption of small satellites, respectively, as shown by scientists from Tokyo Tech. Their findings can be used to make small satellites more robust, which can increase the connectivity of networks across the globe.

A database updated in 2022 reported around 4,852 active satellites orbiting the earth. These satellites serve many different purposes in space, from GPS and weather tracking to military reconnaissance and early warning systems. Given the wide array of uses for satellites, especially in low Earth orbit (LEO), researchers are constantly trying to develop better ones. In this regard, small satellites have a lot of potential. They can reduce launch costs and increase the number of satellites in orbit, providing a better network with wider coverage. However, due to their smaller size, these satellites have lesser radiation shield. They also have a deployable membrane attached to the main body for a large phased-array transceiver, which causes non-uniform radiation degradation across the transceiver. This affects the performance of the satellite’s radio due to the variation in the strength of signal they can sense—also known as gain variation. Thus, there is a need to mitigate radiation degradation to make small satellites more viable.

Stealth surveillance system uses radio astronomy technology to detect artificial objects in space

Photo Credit: ICRAR Curtin

Researchers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have developed a low cost, portable sensor system which can be used to detect space junk, satellites, and aircraft.

The portable Space Domain Awareness (SDA) project is part of a Collaborative Research Grant funded by the Government of Western Australia’s Defense Science Centre.   Developed by researchers from ICRAR’s Curtin University node, the SDA project translates the technologies used in radio astronomy to create an inexpensive, flexible, and portable passive radar system.

Unlike conventional radar systems, which deliberately transmit a known signal, a passive radar system makes use of third-party transmissions such as broadcast radio and TV signals to detect objects without revealing its own existence.

Associate Professor Randall Wayth from ICRAR-Curtin is the project’s lead researcher and says the 32-antenna system could be configured for several different applications.

“Our system is highly portable, sensitive, and invisible to many typical or commercial detection systems, making it ideal for deployment in remote environments and Defense scenarios,” said Associate Professor Wayth.