New approaches to filtration and extracting moisture from air promise to alleviate the world’s looming water scarcity crisis.
Filtration is being transformed by thin sheets of graphene, a carbon-based material invented in 2004 at Manchester University. Rahul Raveendran Nair, the university’s professor of materials physics, says graphene has the potential to deliver large quantities of clean water via desalination and the removal of pollutants.
Researchers from Rice University have discovered that nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes or modified graphene nanoribbons could potentially replace platinum, one of the most expensive facets in fuel cells, for performing fast oxygen reduction—a crucial reaction that transforms chemical energy into electricity.
A team of physicists from Cornell University in the US has developed electricity-conducting, environment-sensing, shape-changing robots the size of a human cell.
The robots – described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – are made from atomically thin layers of graphene and glass. Known as biomorphs, the tiny machines bend when exposed to stimuli including heat, chemical reactions or electricity. They can transform in a fraction of a second from two dimensional planes into complex three-dimensional forms such as tetrahedra and cubes.