With new tape-based sensors attached to the plants, Iowa State University plant scientist Patrick Schnable was able to measure how long it took two kinds of corn plants to move water from roots to upper leaves.
Nanotechnology is an exciting, innovative area promising great benefits to many areas of life, industry and commerce, including construction and the built environment. However there remains concerns about the health impacts from nanotechnologies. We don’t know which materials contain nanoparticles; we don’t know which nanoparticles are present; we don’t know how easily they could become bio-available; and we don’t know what to do if they do become bio-available.
Researchers have demonstrated that a simple sheet of standalone graphene foam can act as efficient solar thermal capture and conversion device. As reported in ACS Nano (“Graphene-Based Standalone Solar Energy Converter for Water Desalination and Purification”), the 3D cross-linked polymer-like graphene material (3DG) material can be used directly in an easy and scalable manner as a clean water generator with high efficiency under normal and even weaker sunlight (down to 0.25 sun).
For the first time, researchers have experimentally observed light emission from individual graphene nanoribbons. They demonstrated that 7-atom-wide nanoribbons emit light at a high intensity that is comparable to bright light-emitting devices made from carbon nanotubes, and that the color can be tuned by adjusting the voltage. The findings may one day lead to the development of bright graphene-based light sources.
In this work, the relative dielectric permittivity of graphene oxide (GO), both its real and imaginary parts, have been measured under various humidity conditions at GHz. It is demonstrated that the relative dielectric permittivity increases with increasing humidity due to water uptake.
2017 has been a busy year for graphene and we are seeing clear indications that graphene adoption and commercialization is finally underway across many industries. Read here Graphene-Info’s top 10 graphene application of 2017…
The engineering of cooling mechanisms is a bottleneck in nanoelectronics. Thermal exchanges in diffusive graphene are mostly driven by defect-assisted acoustic phonon scattering, but the case of high-mobility graphene on hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is radically different, with a prominent contribution of remote phonons from the substrate.
Nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes or modified graphene nanoribbons could be effective, less costly replacements for expensive platinum in fuel cells, according to a new study. In fuel cells, platinum is used for fast oxygen reduction, the key reaction that transforms chemical energy into electricity.
There is an astonishing amount of work being done on graphene around the world. Nearly twenty five thousand scientific papers were published in 2016 alone, (the data for 2017 will be available soon). That’s over sixty-five papers each day, every day of the year.
Sick babies in remote parts of the world could be monitored from afar thanks to new wearable technology designed by physicists at the University of Sussex. And parents at home, concerned about the risk of cot death, could keep track of their new babies’ heart and breathing rates with automatic updates to their smart phones, using ‘fitness tracker’-style technology built into baby sleep suits.