Archive for June, 2011

Rollerball writes electronics straight to paper

Published in Chemistry World, 27 June 2011

Electronic circuits can be fiddly to make: engineers have to snap components onto a board or etch designs onto a copper surface. Now a US group of researchers has demonstrated that all you really need is a pen and some paper.

The new method, which uses a rollerball pen to be filled with conductive ink, could enable engineers to create one-off circuits that are cheap, flexible and disposable. ‘Pen-based printing allows one to construct electronic devices “on-the-fly”,’ says group leader Jennifer Lewis, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [...]

The rest of this article is available here.

Tags:
Posted in Nanotechnology | Comments Off

Self-Healing Sensor Can Take the Strain

Published in ScienceNOW, 21 June 2011

Whether it’s monitoring the integrity of buildings during earthquakes or airplane wings during flight, so-called strain sensors are getting more and more important for our safety. But what if a sensor itself is broken? A pair of engineers claims to have developed an answer to this problem: a new type of strain sensor that heals itself as soon as it is damaged.

Strain is the amount that an object is stretched, bent, or deformed. Too much strain and a structure fractures, which is bad news if that structure happens to be keeping a building upright or people flying through the air. Some critical structures have sensors to continually record strain placed at various points, all linked up to a central hub, so that technicians can monitor it and flag areas for repair before any serious damage is done. [...]

The rest of this article is available here.

Tags:
Posted in Technology | Comments Off

Plasmon rulers measure in 3D

Published in Chemistry World, 16 June 2011

Researchers in the US and Germany have used a plasmon ruler to show in principle how to measure the three dimensional position of objects at the nano-scale. The ruler, which consists of a stack of gold nano-rods, could one day be used to improve understanding of soft matter processes, such as protein folding.

Plasmon rulers consist of metal nanoparticles that are attached to biomolecules. Like tiny antennae, the nanoparticles create plasmon resonances – waves of electrons – that absorb or scatter light at specific visible or infrared frequencies. Because the exact frequency depends on the proximity of other particles, the nanoparticles offer a way to measure inter-particle distance. [...]

The rest of this article is available here.

Tags:
Posted in Optics | Comments Off

Magnets Keep Blood Flowing

Published in ScienceNOW, 9 June 2011

Two physicists searching for a novel way to prevent heart attacks and strokes have discovered that strong magnetic fields can dramatically reduce the thickness, or viscosity, of blood flowing through a tube. The pair speculate that if this effect holds for blood in veins and arteries, scientists might someday develop a magnetic alternative to medicines designed to keep blood flowing in humans.

Strokes and heart attacks, the leading causes of death in the industrialized world, are often linked to high blood viscosity. Thicker blood damages blood vessels, and in repairing the damage, the vessels build up fatty deposits, which make strokes and heart attacks more likely. Currently, the only way to reduce blood viscosity is with drugs like aspirin, which inhibit the tendency of blood to clot. But aspirin has side effects: in high doses, it can lead to stomach bleeding, ulcers, and even tinnitus, or ringing of the ears. [...]

The rest of this article is available here.

Tags:
Posted in Medical & biophysics | Comments Off

Brightest supernovae are in a class of their own

Published in Nature, 8 June 2011

Some of the brightest stellar explosions in the Universe should be classified together as a new type of supernova, according to an international collaboration of researchers. The group has catalogued six explosions that cannot easily be explained by any process yet known.

When stars several times more massive than our Sun die, they explode, forming supernovae. The process varies, but the result is a massive radiation of energy that can outshine an entire galaxy. Sometimes the radiation is produced by the radioactive decay of freshly generated elements, whereas in other cases it comes from an explosive release of heat or from a collision between debris ejected from the star and material surrounding it. [...]

The rest of this article is available here.

Tags:
Posted in Stars | Comments Off