Actually, doctoral candidate Alexandre Ermoline, North Arlington, NJ and NJIT Assistant Research Professor Mirko Schoenitz , PhD, Princeton, NJ, took four rides over four days aboard a KC-135 aircraft operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA operates the craft at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston which advances research in microgravity.
“Moving without gravity is an unusual sensation,” recently recalled Schoenitz. “I’ve heard people describ
At the nano-level, gold acquires a new shine, a new set of properties and a host of potential new applications
All that glitters is not gold, goes the old adage.
But the shrinking frontiers of science require a qualifier: Gold itself does not always glitter.
In fact, if gold is created in small enough chunks, it turns red, blue, yellow and other colors, says Chris Kiely, who directs the new Nanocharacterization Laboratory in Lehigh’s Center for Advanced Materi
The “scanning electron microscope” (SEM) has been a basic research tool for fifty years, and for those fifty years, scientists have been looking for better ways to observe biological samples under its beam. The problem is that the viewing chamber of the SEM must contain a vacuum (in which liquid water in tissues “boils” away). To overcome this difficulty, scientists have had to resort to all sorts of complicated procedures, including coating the specimens with an ultra-fine layer of gold, quick-freez
New material could mean easier manufacture of paper-thin TVs and “smart” cloth
Researchers have developed a new plastic that conducts electricity, may be simpler to manufacture than industry counterparts and easily accommodates chemical attachments to create new materials.
Developed by TDA Research in Wheat Ridge, Colo., Oligotron polymers are made of tiny bits of material that possess a conducting center and two, non-conducting end pieces. The end pieces allow the plasti
Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference (CMMP 2004), University of Warwick 4-7th April
A new generation of materials inspired by the ancient Greeks have been developed by scientists for use in miniaturised devices. The materials are robust, flexible films with perforations on the nano scale and have nano coatings. They are environmentally safe and will enable ultra-fast optoelectronic communication. They are produced by the self-assembly of an intricate
Food packs, containers, toothpaste tubes, wheels, glue, paints … they are all made of polymers. The world of polymers is infinite and, so, there is a great variety. The majority have been designed for a specific application; given that at times the application might be for a food container and, at others, for the superstructure of a vehicle. The specifications needed in either case are quite different.
Polymers are gigantic molecules, but they are synthesised from small compounds: monomer
We’ve all sat there in a dull moment at work stretching an elastic band between our fingers and watching it return to its original shape and size as we let it go. But how many of us would have thought of combining the elasticity of rubber with the optical properties of the liquid crystals commonly used in watches, laptops and calculators? On Monday 5th April at the Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference in Warwick, Professor Mark Warner from the University of Camb
It looks like glass and feels like solidified smoke, but the most interesting features of the new silica aerogels made by UC Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers are too small to see or feel. Lighter than styrofoam, this strange material is riddled with pores just nanometers in size, leaving it 98 percent empty.
Water can soak into the material, but in the confined space the water molecules arrange themselves in unusual ways, said Subhash Risbud, professor of chemica
A stable cluster of aluminum atoms, Al13, acts as a single entity in chemical reactions, demonstrating properties similar to those of a halogen, reports a research team led by A. Welford Castleman Jr., the Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Physics and the Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in Science at Penn State, in a paper to be published in the 2 April 2004 issue of the journal Science. Experimental results and theoretical calculations indicate that the cluster chemically resembles a “superhalo
Today’s advanced materials have become extremely complex in chemistry, structure and function, which means scientists need faster, more efficient ways to model and test new designs.
J. Carson Meredith, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has pioneered combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput screening in polymer science – techniques that allow researchers to create and evaluate thousands of polymeric materials in a
Ames Laboratory researchers studying self-assembling polymers
A group of bioinspired polymers are being studied by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory to understand how they are able to form and react to stimuli similar to the way proteins, lipids and DNA react in nature. Unlocking how these soluble block polymers are able to self-assemble could potentially lead to a variety of uses such as controlled release systems for sustained and modulated delivery of d
Granular materials – which include everything from coal to coco pops – are physical substances that don’t quite fit into any of the known phases of matter: solid, liquid, or gas.
Keep the grains under pressure, vacuum-packed coffee for example, and you have solid-like behaviour; open the pack and pour it into a container and suddenly the grains flow freely like a liquid.
The changing personalities of granular materials can have devastating implications, for example the distur
Increases versatility of conducting polymers
A powerful one-step, “chain growth” method should make it easier to design and synthesize a variety of highly conductive polymers for different research and commercial applications, according to a presentation by the method’s developer, Carnegie Mellon University chemist Richard McCullough. McCullough, dean of the Mellon College of Science and professor of chemistry, is reporting his research Tuesday, March 30, at the 227th annual meet
A peptide called magainin, first found in the skin of the African clawed frog, holds the secret to creating bacteria-killing surfaces, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The Penn scientists have taken a joint experimental-computational approach to mimicking magainin. They designed, synthesized, tested, and then improved novel antibacterial compounds, using a combination of laboratory experiments and painstaking simulations on supercomputers. The resulting material could be an
Rice engineers find evidence of little-understood force in everyday emulsions
Scientists at Rice University have discovered that a little-understood tensile force, which was previously thought to be an oddity found only in the types of plastics used to make bulletproof vests, occurs in everyday emulsions like mayonnaise and salad dressing.
First identified about 25 years ago, the phenomenon known as “negative first normal stress difference” refers to an attractive force that
Hyperbranched polymers – tree-like molecules – are not particularly useful for the creation of plastic films and molded parts because they don’t entangle. So Virginia Tech researchers have created segmented hyperbranched plastics, which do entangle and result in high-performance polymers.
Virginia Tech chemistry professor Timothy E. Long of Blacksburg will describe the configuration and functionality of the new family of polymers at the 227th Annual Meeting of the American Chemical Soc
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