Imagine Intelligent Materials and Swinburne University have announced a collaborative six-month project aiming to develop graphene-reinforced smart composites. The composite will be able to report on the condition of large structures, and will have major commercial potential in the transport sector, including automotive and aerospace.
Dotz Nano has announced the successful development of a process to tag fuel derivatives with graphene quantum dots (GQDs). The technology allows GQDs to be optimally added to fuel derivatives via a patent pending method so that the GQDs cannot be easily “laundered” or “washed out” from the fuel.
The European Commission recently awarded nearly €3.7 million ($4.4 million USD) to an international initiative in the field of early diagnosis of brain cancer. The four-year program, which will be led by Plymouth University, is called An Integrated Platform for Developing Brain Cancer Diagnostic Techniques, or AiPBAND. It will focus on gliomas with specific objectives to identify new blood biomarkers for the disease, design plasmonic-based, graphene-based, and digital ELISA assay-based multiplex biosensors; and to develop a big data-empowered intelligent data management infrastructure and cloud-based diagnostic systems.
In-depth Report was produced for the European Commission, DG Environment and is written and edited by the Science Communication Unit, University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol.
The aim of this In-Depth Report is to present the most promising strategies and most significant challenges of nanomaterial characterisation, exposure, fate and behaviour, ecotoxicological hazard and risk assessment. It presents examples and case studies of both the scientific developments and the knowledge gaps.
ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies (ISO member bodies). The work of preparing International Standards is normally carried out through ISO technical committees. Each member body interested in a subject for which a technical committee has been established has the right to be represented on that committee. International organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO, also take part in the work. ISO collaborates closely with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) on all matters of electrotechnical standardization.
Graphene Flagship researches from CNR-Istituto Nanoscienze, Italy and the University of Cambridge, UK have shown that it is possible to create a terahertz saturable absorber using graphene produced by liquid phase exfoliation and deposited by transfer coating and ink jet printing. The paper, published in Nature Communications, reports a terahertz saturable absorber with an order of magnitude higher absorption modulation than other devices produced to date.
An international team of researchers, including scientists from Shinshu University (Japan) and the director of Penn State’s ATOMIC Center, has developed a graphene-based coating for desalination membranes that is more robust and scalable than current nanofiltration membrane technologies. The result could be a sturdy and practical membrane for clean water solutions as well as protein separation, wastewater treatment and pharmaceutical and food industry applications.
One of the most interesting predictions resulting from quantum physics, is the violation of classical symmetries, collectively referred to as anomalies. A remarkable class of anomalies occurs when the continuous scale symmetry of a scale-free quantum system is broken into a discrete scale symmetry for a critical value of a control parameter. This is an example of a (zero temperature) quantum phase transition. Such an anomaly takes place for the quantum inverse square potential known to describe ‘Efimov physics’. Broken continuous scale symmetry into discrete scale symmetry also appears for a charged and massless Dirac fermion in an attractive 1/r Coulomb potential. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the universality of this quantum phase transition and to present convincing experimental evidence of its existence for a charged and massless fermion in an attractive Coulomb potential as realized in graphene.
Melik Demirel and Mauricio Terrones and their colleagues at The Pennsylvania State University recently published a study in the journal Carbon (doi:10.1016/j.carbon.2017.03.053) detailing a novel method for creating a layered graphene-based molecular composite that achieves bulk microstructural order, thus overcoming one of the main obstacles facing two-dimensional (2D) materials utilization. At the heart of their strategy was the ability to tune the spacing between the stacked layers with atomic-level precision, where the resulting composite could be integrated into a highly flexible and efficient thermal actuator.
When I was little, my cousin introduced me to Star Wars. I loved how Jedi’s could move things without touching them and had lightsabers. In this project, we try to move things without touching them using lasers, that’s good enough for me!
On a more serious note, I saw this project as a great chance to be involved first hand in all the steps required to take a scientific experiment from just an idea to a real experiment. Having the support and contribution of ESA and the team has made this an ideal situation to test some of the skills that are required in a scientist but are usually a prerogative of professors and principal investigators.