Ruthenium and copper catalyze a more environmentally friendly way to produce essential chemical. A dash of ruthenium atoms on a mesh of copper nanowires could be one step toward a revolution in the global ammonia industry that also helps the environment. Collaborators at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, Arizona State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory developed the high-performance catalyst that can, with near 100% efficiency, pull ammonia and solid ammonia — aka fertilizer — from low levels of nitrates that are widespread…
The Sun emitted a strong solar flare on April 30, 2022, peaking at 9:47 a.m. EDT. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy. Flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts. This flare is classified as an X-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its…
To date, entrepreneurs have not put a lot of trust in artificial intelligence – many processes are still performed manually. An example of how artificial intelligence and control technology can be combined to create a completely trustworthy system is RoboGrinder: A grinding machine developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechatronic Systems Design IEM, which eliminates up to 40 percent of grinding processes. It can be seen at the joint Fraunhofer booth at the Hannover Messe 2022 from May 30 to…
New High-Brightness Versions Launched. In addition to an energy-saving design, microdisplays for wearables must also display information in a way that they are sufficiently bright under daylight conditions, at best in colored versions and recognizable with the naked eye. The OLED microdisplay family of the Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology FEP has now been extended: Microdisplays in a new design for ultra-high brightness. The new versions will be presented for the first time at the…
When it comes to fixing carbon, plants have nothing on soil bacteria that can do it 20 times faster. The secret is an enzyme that “juggles” reaction ingredients. Plants rely on a process called carbon fixation – turning carbon dioxide from the air into carbon-rich biomolecules – for their very existence. That’s the whole point of photosynthesis, and a cornerstone of the vast interlocking system that cycles carbon through plants, animals, microbes and the atmosphere to sustain life on Earth….
Chirality, while not a rarity in the world of molecules, is nevertheless a special property. If a molecule is chiral (from the Greek word chiros = hand), it exists in two mirrored versions that are very similar but not identical – like two hands that can be folded together, but cannot be placed congruently on top of each other. This is why we speak of right-handed and left-handed molecules, or enantiomers, which means “opposite shape” in Greek. An international team…
Devised by Scripps Research scientists, the new method could speed the development of many new drugs. Scientists at Scripps Research have invented a way to image, across different tissues and with higher precision than ever before, where drugs bind to their targets in the body. The new method could become a routine tool in drug development. Described in a paper in Cell on April 27, 2022, the new method, called CATCH, attaches fluorescent tags to drug molecules and uses chemical…
Fewer complications with device implanted under the skin. High-risk patients who need defibrillators to prevent cardiac arrest can experience fewer complications with a type of device implanted under the skin, a Canadian study has found. Traditional defibrillators, while highly effective, involve placing a wire through a vein, into the chest and into the heart itself. The wires, known as ‘leads,’ in the traditional defibrillator – called a tranvenous ICD (TV-ICD) – can cause complications including perforations in the heart muscle…
The quality of industrial production processes is ensured by a large number of sensor-based individual inspections. This generates large amounts of data. However, until now, the information from the individual sensors has generally only been looked at in isolation. The AutoInspect solution from the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB overcomes this issue by linking all of the data to create a consolidated overview. Now, for the first time, linking the measured values is facilitating intelligent…
Screw connections on critical infrastructures are exposed to major stresses and must therefore be checked on a regular basis. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Internet Technologies CCIT have now developed a technology that allows the stability of the screw connections to be checked at any time by remote monitoring. This increases safety and reduces the time and effort spent on inspections. We come across screws almost everywhere. For instance, on cranes, scaffolding, high-rise buildings, bridges, wind turbines…
Fagron, a leading global company active in pharmaceutical compounding, announced on April 14th the acquisition of HiperScan, the German market leader for reliable raw material identification in pharmacies. HiperScan is a spin-off of Fraunhofer IPMS and the German market leader for reliable and secure identification of starting materials in pharmacies. HiperScan, a Dresden-based technology company, is a specialist in near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and emerged in 2006 as a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS, developing innovative analysis…
Today, public cloud systems can be used for outsourcing computationally intensive applications and storing large amounts of data. However, these systems are not designed for millisecond-accurate control of machines in production environments. They are not freely configurable and are difficult to connect to real-time-capable networks. The Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT has developed the Fraunhofer Edge Cloud in collaboration with other institutes and its partner German Edge Cloud to show companies how they can use local cloud systems to…
In the past decade, advances in synthetic biology paved the way toward the sustainable synthesis of complex natural products. The baking yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been widely used in food industry and has become one of the main platforms for building cell factories due to its robustness, convenient cellular engineering, and reliable safety. Recently, a research group led by Prof. ZHOU Yongjin from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with…
The findings in mice could lead to new insights and treatments for a wide range of brain and neurological diseases, from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s. Researchers at Tufts University School of Medicine have discovered a previously unknown function performed by a type of cell that comprises nearly half of all cells in the brain. The scientists say this discovery in mice of a new function by cells known as astrocytes opens a whole new direction for neuroscience research that might one day lead…
New materials with exotic magnetic features could enable the next generation of tiny, fast, energy-efficient electronic devices. Two-dimensional magnetic materials have been hailed as building blocks for the next generation of small, fast electronic devices. These materials, made of layers of crystalline sheets just a few atoms thick, gain their unique magnetic properties from the intrinsic compass-needle-like spins of their electrons. The sheets’ atomic-scale thinness means that these spins can be manipulated on the finest scales using external electric fields,…
Study identifies the physics that enables rapid magnetic explosions in space. When magnetic field lines of opposite directions merge, they create explosions that can release massive amounts of energy. On the sun, the merging of opposing field lines causes solar flares and coronal mass ejections, giant bursts of energy that can travel to Earth within a day. While the general mechanics of magnetic reconnection are known, researchers have struggled for over a half-century to explain the precise physics behind the…
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