Nanotubes help to solve desalination problem

A team of researchers from The Australian National University have discovered a way to remove salt from seawater using nanotubes made from boron and nitrogen atoms that will make the process up to five times faster.

Source: http://news.anu.edu.au/?p=1558

Gel that moves

A chemical gel that can walk like an inchworm, or looper caterpillar has been demonstrated in a Japanese robotics lab. The video shows the material in action. It was created in the Shuji Hashimoto applied physics laboratory at Waseda University, Tokyo.



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Claytronics

Intel and Carnegie Mellon University's goal is to give tangible, interactive forms to information so that a user's senses will experience digital environments as though they are indistinguishable from reality.

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Engineers use 'nano-origami' to build tiny electronic devices

MIT researchers have developed a way to fold nano- and microscale polymer sheets into simple 3D structures.

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OLED Wallpaper turns into a TV

Toshiba is working on an ultra-thin OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) display that could be used to wallpaper your home, turning any wall into a huge TV.

From Toshiba:

"The wallpaper uses light that has been redirected by an ultra-fine grating that is fabricated by self-assembled nano particles." Also according to Toshiba, it's several years from commercial production.

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The nanotube radio

The nanotube radio was developed in 2007 by physicist Alex Zettl and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. It is a fully functional, fully integrated radio receiver, orders-of-magnitude smaller than any previous radio. If you’re in disbelief, you can actually listen to the song “Layla” played on the nanotube radio. (Note there’s a significant amount of static noise since it uses none of the external circuitry to filter or process the signal typically found in typical radios).

Listen to the song “Layla” played on the nanotube radio

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Super Battery Technology Locks Up Energy "Behind Bars"

New battery breakthrough leverages nanotechnology and microstructures. The nanotubes are a hybrid consisting of a carbon nanotube core and a metal oxide outer coating.

Pulickel Ajayan, the Rice University Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and leader of the team, states, "It's a nice bit of nanoscale engineering. Although the combination of these materials has been studied as a composite electrode by several research groups, it's the coaxial cable design of these materials that offers improved performance as electrodes for lithium batteries."

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New material may make Space Elevator possible

Spurred on by a $4m (£2.7m) research prize from Nasa, a team at Cambridge University has created the world’s strongest ribbon: a cylindrical strand of carbon that combines lightweight flexibility with incredible strength and has the potential to stretch vast distances.

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New method to make Graphene

Could Lead to Transparent, Bendable Electronics.

Thin, translucent sheets of graphene may one day allow electronic displays that can be folded and rolled up like a newspaper. South Korean researchers have found a way to deposit graphene using CVD, which involves evaporating a mixture of large carbon-containing molecules and firing it over a heated metal surface. The molecules break down, releasing carbon that re-organises on the surface in neat graphene sheets. The precise conditions of the experiment determine how many sheets are produced [BBC News]. The researchers used extremely thin pieces of nickel as the metal surface on which to grow the graphene, the molecules of which forms a regular hexagonal pattern similar to chicken wire. Afterward, the nickel can be chemically dissolved away, leaving behind pure graphene.

Levitation

U.S. scientists have found a way to levitate the very smallest objects using the strange forces of quantum mechanics.

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Thermal Memory

Most computers today store memory electronically, by maintaining a certain voltage. In contrast, a new kind of memory that stores data thermally, by maintaining temperature, is being investigated by researchers Lei Wang of the National University of Singapore and the Renmin University of China, and Baowen Li of the National University of Singapore and the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering.

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