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Scientists develop all-natural, wood-inspired aerogel

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Chinese scientists have developed a surface nanocrystallization method to create all-natural wood-inspired aerogel with better thermal insulation and fire retardancy.

Feb 8, 2023

Nanocarbons for sustainable hydrogen production

Nanowerk - Nanotechnology Websites

Scientists have found that a type of metal-free catalysts could contribute to the development of cost-effective and sustainable hydrogen production technologies.

Feb 8, 2023

Peptide 3D-printing inks could advance regenerative medicine

Nanowerk - Nanotechnology Websites

Researchers have figured out how to 3D-print the well-defined structures using a self-assembling peptide ink.

Feb 8, 2023

IEEE’s Medal of Honor Ebook Explores 100 Years of Innovation ",plain_text=" For more than a century, IEEE has been honoring technology pioneers with its Medal of Honor. The organization’s most prestigious award, it is given to engineers who have made exceptional contributions to or had an extraordinary career in electronics, electrical sciences, and engineering.To celebrate the award’s long history, IEEE recently released a commemorative ebook, Over 100 Years of the IEEE Medal of Honor. The volume chronicles the innovators who have received the award since its establishment in 1917. The Medal of Honor has been awarded annually since its establishment except in 1925, 1947, 1965, and 1976.“The Medal of Honor is a living testament to the lives and careers of these major contributors in our modern world,” K.J. Ray Liu, the 2022 IEEE president, wrote in the book’s forward. “The recipients featured in this book are remarkable individuals who have made enormous contributions to science, technology, the engineering profession, and IEEE.”An award for radio engineersAlthough professional medals of recognition and accomplishment for engineers and academic scientists were well established by the 1900s, there was no award specifically for electrical specialists working in communications.That changed in February 1917, when the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), a predecessor society of IEEE and the leading technical and scientific society in the communications field, established the Medal of Honor. The award was designed to recognize prominent advances made in radiotelegraphy and radiotelephony.“The Medal of Honor is a living testament to the lives and careers of these major contributors in our modern world.” Nominees for the award had to have made public their “greatest patented or unpatented advance in radio communication” within the previous two years, according to an entry about the honor on the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. The innovation or technological advancement had to have been “publicly and completely described in a scientific or engineering journal of recognized standing.” And the technology was required to be fully operational. Two years later the IRE eliminated the two-year time frame and the publication requirement.After the IRE merged in 1963 with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, IEEE’s other predecessor society, the combined organization broadened the Medal of Honor to include biomedicine, computing, transistors, and other technologies.Honoring Robert N. Noyce, Nick Holonyak Jr., and othersHere is a quick look at some of the recipients profiled in the book.Edwin H. Armstrong, the first recipient, was regarded as one of the top contributors to the field of radio electronics. In 1918 he invented the superheterodyne circuit, a selective means of receiving, converting, and amplifying weak, high-frequency electromagnetic waves, now used in virtually all broadcast radio receivers as well as televisions. His most well-known achievement, in 1933, was inventing wide-band frequency modulation, now known as FM radio. He received the award in 1917 for his work and publications dealing with the action of oscillating and non-oscillating audio.Robert Noyce, inventor of the first practical integrated circuit, received the 1978 Medal of Honor for “contributions to the silicon integrated circuit, a cornerstone of modern electronics.” Noyce also helped found Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, both of which helped spawn Silicon Valley. In 1999 IEEE established a medal in his name.Paul C. Lauterbur is the person to thank for MRIs. He received the 1987 medal for discovering “nuclear magnetic resonance imaging.” His work later was honored with a 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine.Nick Holonyak Jr. invented the first practical visible-spectrum LED while working as a consulting scientist in 1962 at General Electric’s Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory. The technology is now used in lightbulbs and lasers. IEEE honored him in 2003 for “a career of pioneering contributions to semiconductors, including the growth of semiconductor alloys and heterojunctions, and to visible light-emitting diodes and injection lasers.” In November 2022, the IEEE Nick Holonyak Jr. Medal for Semiconductor Optoelectronic Technologies was established. The award is slated to be presented for the first time in 2024 at the annual IEEE Honors Ceremony.Mildred Dresselhaus, called the “queen of carbon science,” pioneered the study of carbon nanostructures at a time when studying physical and material properties of commonplace atoms was out of favor. Her work in unraveling the electronic structure of carbon paved the way for the discovery of fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and graphene. Dresselhaus is the only female Medal of Honor recipient. She was honored in 2015 for “leadership and contributions across many fields of science and engineering.” In 2020 IEEE established an award in her honor.Chenming Hu, known as the “father of the 3D transistor,” invented the FinFET in 1999. Intel, the first company to implement FinFETs in its products, called the invention the most radical shift in semiconductor technology in more than 50 years. Hu received the award in 2020 for “a distinguished career of developing and putting into practice semiconductor models, particularly 3D device structures, that have helped keep Moore’s Law going over many decades.”Jacob Ziv received the 2021 Medal of Honor for “fundamental contributions to information theory and data compression technology, and for distinguished research leadership.” Ziv codeveloped two lossless data compression algorithms: Lempel-Ziv 77 in 1977 and LZ78 the following year. Enabling perfect reconstruction from compressed data, and more efficient than previous algorithms, they allowed for the development of GIF, PNG, and ZIP files.Asad Madni led the development of the GyroChip, which revolutionized navigation and stability in aerospace and automotive systems, making them safer. He was honored with the 2022 Medal of Honor for “pioneering contributions to the development and commercialization of innovative sensing and systems technologies, and for distinguished research leadership.”

IEEE Spectrum - Scientific and Educational Websites

For more than a century, IEEE has been honoring technology pioneers with its Medal of Honor. The organization’s most prestigious award, it is given to engineers who have made exceptional contributions to or had an extraordinary career in electron...

Feb 7, 2023

pH-activated nanocytokines based on IL-12 safely overcome cancer resistance to immunotherapy

Phys.org - Scientific News Websites

A group led by Prof. Horacio Cabral, in collaboration with a group led by Prof. Kazuhiro Kakimi, discovered a new way to improve cancer immunotherapy. Their findings are published in a paper, titled "An IL-12-Based Nanocytokine Safely Potenti...

Feb 7, 2023

Ultrathin nanosheets for better hydrogen storage

Nanowerk - Nanotechnology Websites

Researchers created 3-4 nanometer ultrathin nanosheets of a metal hydride that increase hydrogen storage capacity.

Feb 7, 2023

Chameleon Skins Slash Building Energy Use ",plain_text=" Heating and cooling buildings consumes around 15 percent of the world’s energy supply, and this use is slated to go up in coming decades. The International Energy Agency predicts that the energy demand for cooling will more than triple by 2050 if nothing is done to address energy efficiency.Now, taking inspiration from the color-changing skins of chameleons, two research groups have made dynamic, color-changing materials for building facades that could significantly reduce the energy footprint of air-conditioning and heating. One idea out of the University of Chicago is a device that, with a flip of a switch, changes how much infrared heat it emits, helping to keep indoor spaces comfortable year-round without using much energy. The other device, developed by a team at the University of Toronto, controls the amount, type, and direction of infrared and visible light entering buildings. Both technologies use electricity themselves, but the significant reduction in energy use they achieve more than makes up for that consumption.The energy efficiency of buildings has come into the spotlight recently as climate change makes extreme weather spells longer and more frequent. Technologies that reduce the load on air-conditioning include electrochromic windows, which darken when triggered by electricity or the sun’s heat to reduce the amount of sunlight entering offices, and passive radiation cooling systems that send infrared heat rays into space. Researchers have also recently reported a device that can provide either solar heating or radiative cooling based on temperature. Molecular engineer Po-Chun Hsu and colleagues at the University of Chicago wanted to make such a dual-mode device, one that could be dynamically controlled as opposed to triggered by temperature. “Instead of pumping energy into heating or cooling, we’re modulating the insulation of buildings, like people do on a human-body scale when they add or remove layers,” Hsu says.Their thin, battery-like device consists of a nonflammable, copper-containing watery electrolyte sandwiched between two electrodes. The electrode that would face the outside of a building is a plastic film coated with a grid of gold nanowires, a single layer of graphene, and some platinum. The other electrode is a copper foil. In heating mode, an applied voltage pushes copper nanoparticles out of the electrolyte to the platinum-graphene film. They form a thick metal layer that reflects infrared radiation “like the metallic thermal blankets that suppress heat loss from runners,” Hsu says. When the voltage is reversed, the metal dissolves back into the electrolyte, which emits infrared heat through the see-through plastic electrode, creating a cooling state. The material can emit up to 92 percent of infrared radiation to help cool buildings, while in heating mode it emits just 7 percent of infrared.The researchers used EnergyPlus, an open-source energy simulation software to calculate the energy use of a building in 15 different U.S. cities, with the new device used as a facade for the entire structure. On average, the device uses less than 0.2 percent of the total electricity consumption of the building, but it saves 8.4 percent of the building’s annual HVAC energy consumption, they report in the journal Nature Sustainability. Hsu says that the use of graphene and copper makes the device expensive right now, but the team is assessing the use of alternative materials to reduce cost.The “optofluidic” device reported by materials science and engineering professor Benjamin Hatton and colleagues at the University of Toronto might have an advantage when it comes to cost. The researchers put three thin plexiglass sheets together. Each layer is patterned with 2- to 3-millimeter-high channels, through which they pump different fluids: a dyed water- or alcohol-based suspension that can absorb both visible and near-infrared wavelengths; a carbon black suspension that provides shading; and a titania nanoparticle suspension that scatters and directs the light passing through it. Combining the three effects allows for “simultaneously tuning the intensity, spectrum, and dispersion of transmitted sunlight within buildings over time,” Hatton says. The liquid-filled panels could be incorporated into new windows or retrofitted in old panes. The system would affect the appearance of buildings, and it would require careful management of fluid volumes and leakage. But because it controls sunlight in both visible and infrared regimes, it can have a bigger impact on energy use compared with only a heat-management approach. Hatton and colleagues also ran an EnergyPlus simulation for buildings with the new optofluidic windows—albeit only in Toronto—and found that the devices cut energy consumption by 43 percent compared with that of electrochromic windows. “Compared with a static window, this energy savings is even higher,” he says. “It seems interesting to us that such thin, confined layers of fluids within these facades can have such a big effect on whole-building energy needs.”Their results are published on 30 January in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

IEEE Spectrum - Scientific and Educational Websites

Heating and cooling buildings consumes around 15 percent of the world’s energy supply, and this use is slated to go up in coming decades. The International Energy Agency predicts that the energy demand for cooling will more than triple by 2050 if...

Feb 7, 2023

Going small and thin for better hydrogen storage

Phys.org - Scientific News Websites

A collaboration including scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Sandia National Laboratories, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has created 3-4 nanometer ultrathin nan...

Feb 7, 2023

Coherent correlation imaging tracks fluctuations on the nanoscale – Physics World

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Imaging technique analyses spatial patterns using an advanced algorithm The post Coherent correlation imaging tracks fluctuations on the nanoscale appeared first on Physics World.

Feb 7, 2023

Norse launches strong, light Kayaks based on Haydale's graphene materials

Graphene Info - Scientific and Educational Websites

Haydale has announced that its bespoke mechanical graphene masterbatch has been used to create stronger and lighter composite sea kayaks for Norwegian paddle sport brand Norse Kayaks ("Norse"). Using the new graphene-enhanced material ...

Feb 7, 2023