I love the opening line (lede). From a June 29, 2020 news item on Nanowerk, Researchers dipped their new, printed sensors into tuna broth and watched the readings.It turned out the sensors – printed with high-resolution aerosol jet printers on a flexible polymer film and tuned to test for histamine, an allergen and indicator of spoiled fish and meat – can detect histamine down to 3.41 parts per million.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has…

Continue reading

Both of these news bits are concerned with light for one reason or another. Rice University (Texas, US) and breaking fluorocarbon bonds The secret to breaking fluorocarbon bonds is light according to a June 22, 2020 news item on Nanowerk, Rice University engineers have created a light-powered catalyst that can break the strong chemical bonds in fluorocarbons, a group of synthetic materials that includes persistent environmental pollutants.… A June 22, 2020 Rice University news release…

Continue reading

Supercapacitors are a predictable source of scientific interest and excitement. The latest entry in the ‘supercapacitor stakes’ is from a Russian/Finnish/US team according to a June 11, 2020 Skoltech (Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology) press release (also on EurekAlert), Researchers from Skoltech [Russia], Aalto University [Finland] and Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT; US] have designed a high-performance, low-cost, environmentally friendly, and stretchable supercapacitor that can potentially be used in wearable electronics. The paper was…

Continue reading

First, there was the story about art masterpieces turning into soap (my June 22, 2017 posting) and now, it seems that microbes may also constitute a problem. Before getting to the latest research, here’s are some images the researchers are using to illustrate their work, Caption: Leonardo da Vinci noted that the fore and hind wings of a dragonfly are out of phase — verified centuries later by slow motion photography. Thaler suggests further study…

Continue reading

The new artificial liquid retina is biomimetic and consists of an aqueous component in which photoactive polymeric nanoparticles (whose size is of 350 nanometres, thus about 1/100 of the diameter of a hair) are suspended, going to replace the damaged photoreceptors. Credit: IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia [image downloaded from https://www.medgadget.com/2020/06/injectable-liquid-prosthesis-to-treat-retinal-diseases-developed.html] A June 29, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces the world’s first liquid retina prosthesis, Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology)…

Continue reading

Carbon nanotubes, buckminsterfullerenes (also known as, buckyballs), and/or graphene are names for different carbon nanoscale structures and, as far as I’m aware,carbon is the only element that merits some distinct names at the nanoscale. By comparison, gold can be gold nanorods, gold nanostars, gold nanoparticles, and so on. In short, nanostructures made of gold (and most other elements) are always prefaced with the word ‘gold’ followed by a word with ‘nano’ in it. Scientists naming…

Continue reading

This is the second neuromorphic computing chip story from MIT this summer in what has turned out to be a bumper crop of research announcements in this field. The first MIT synapse story was featured in a June 16, 2020 posting. Now, there’s a second and completely different team announcing results for their artificial brain synapse work in a June 19, 2020 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed), Teams around the…

Continue reading

Vortex Fluidic Device (VFD) is the technical name for the more familiarly known ‘unboil an egg machine’ and, these days, it’s being used in research to improve bacteria detection. A June 23, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces the research (Note: A link has been removed), The versatility of the Vortex Fluidic Device (VFD), a device that famously unboiled an egg, continues to impress, with the innovative green chemistry device created at Flinders University having…

Continue reading

The 1979 book, Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar immediately came to mind on reading about a new book (The New Architecture of Science: Learning from Graphene) linking architecture to the practice of science (research on graphene). It turns out that one of the authors studied with Latour. (For more about laboratory Life see: Bruno Latour’s Wikipedia entry; scroll down to Main Works) A June 19, 2020…

Continue reading

A June 17, 2020 news item on Nanowerk trumpets research into how robots might be able to sport chameleon-like skin one day, A new film made of gold nanoparticles changes color in response to any type of movement. Its unprecedented qualities could allow robots to mimic chameleons and octopi — among other futuristic applications.Unlike other materials that try to emulate nature’s color changers, this one can respond to any type of movement, like bending or…

Continue reading