Spray-On Fabric: Instant Clothing That Can Be Taken Off, Even Washed
The company behind this technology is called Fabrican. Developed by clothing-designer-turned-chemist Dr. Manel Torres, who was originally looking for a faster way to produce clothes, the idea came to the self-proclaimed fashion doctor when he went to a friend’s wedding and saw someone getting sprayed by silly string…
That’s when Torres got his “aha” moment and decided to pursue an instant, nonstick fabric. The result was the creation of instant garments you can remove and even wash.
Graphene Aerogel is Seven Times Lighter Than Air
Chinese material scientists have created the world’s lightest material: A graphene aerogel that is seven times lighter than air, and 12% lighter than the previous record holder (aerographite).
A cubic centimeter of the graphene aerogel weighs just 0.16 milligrams — or, if you’re having a problem conceptualizing that, a cubic meter weighs just 160 grams (5.6 ounces). The graphene aerogel is so light that an cube inch of the stuff can be balanced on a blade of grass, the stamen of a flower, or the fluffy seed head of a dandelion.
Most aerogels are produced using a sol-gel process, where a gel is dehydrated until only the aerogel remains. Some aerogels are also produced using the template method — aerographite, for example, is created by growing carbon on a lattice (template) of zinc oxide crystals — and then the zinc oxide is removed in an oven, leaving just the carbon aerogel.
To create the graphene aerogel, however, researchers at Zhejiang University use a novel freeze-drying method. Basically, it seems like the researchers create a solution of graphene and carbon nanotubes, pour it into a mold, and then freeze dry it. Freeze drying dehydrates the solution, leaving single-atom-thick layers of graphene, supported by carbon nanotubes. The researchers say that there’s no limit to the size of the container: You could make a mini graphene aerogel using this process, or a meter-cubed aerogel if you wish.
MIT and Harvard Engineers Use “DNA-Legos” To Construct Graphene Nanostructures
This news is a follow-up to an earlier post “Harvard Researchers Create Self-Assembling Nano Bricks Made of DNA.”
Engineers are now using self-assembling DNA nanobricks as a scaffold to build nanostructures out of graphene.
The MIT and Harvard researchers are essentially taking these shapes and binding them to a graphene surface with a molecule called aminopyrine.
Once bound, the DNA is coated with a layer of silver, and then a layer of gold to stabilize it. The gold-covered DNA is then used as a mask for plasma lithography, where oxygen plasma burns away the graphene that isn’t covered. Finally, the DNA mask is washed away with sodium cyanide, leaving a piece of graphene that is an almost-perfect copy of the DNA template.
So far, the researchers have used this process — dubbed metallized DNA nanolithography — to create X and Y junctions, rings, and ribbons out of graphene.
Nanoribbons, which are simply very narrow strips of graphene, are of particular interest because they have a bandgap — a feature that graphene doesn’t normally possess. A bandgap means that these nanoribbons have semiconductive properties, which means they might one day be used in computer chips.
Graphene rings are also of interest, because they can be fashioned into quantum interference transistors — a new and not-well-understood transistor that connects three terminals to a ring, with the transistor’s gate being controlled by the flow of electrons around the ring.
(via MIT and Harvard engineers create graphene electronics with DNA-based lithography | ExtremeTech)
![“Chiplets”: Xerox Introduces New Technique to 3D Print Computer Chips
[Xerox’s] new technique, known as xerographic micro-assembly, breaks down old-fashioned silicon chip designs into thousands of tiny chiplets, and then custom assembles them with an advanced and mysterious 3D printing machine. The device apparently uses microscopic electric fields to place each mote of silicon smart dust on a template in the correct position and orientation…
Xerographic printing is an extension of a related technology known as Fluidic Self Assemby (FSA), which was previously developed by Alien technology, a company that also makes RFID tags.
In FSA, the nanoblock computing elements float in solution, and are guided into holes in an appropriate substrate. The process is reminiscent of protein subunits assembling from the cytoplasm onto a lipid membrane.
Here, chiplets would basically be the electronic version of Henry Ford’s interchangeable parts system, only in this case, each part is smaller than a grain of sand.
(via Chiplets: Xerox’s grand vision for next-generation computer assembly | ExtremeTech)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/9dba1153df0b4c1eacbb5eece6e4a35d/tumblr_ml1helciCa1qgpcs1o1_500.jpg)
“Chiplets”: Xerox Introduces New Technique to 3D Print Computer Chips
[Xerox’s] new technique, known as xerographic micro-assembly, breaks down old-fashioned silicon chip designs into thousands of tiny chiplets, and then custom assembles them with an advanced and mysterious 3D printing machine. The device apparently uses microscopic electric fields to place each mote of silicon smart dust on a template in the correct position and orientation…
Xerographic printing is an extension of a related technology known as Fluidic Self Assemby (FSA), which was previously developed by Alien technology, a company that also makes RFID tags.
In FSA, the nanoblock computing elements float in solution, and are guided into holes in an appropriate substrate. The process is reminiscent of protein subunits assembling from the cytoplasm onto a lipid membrane.
Here, chiplets would basically be the electronic version of Henry Ford’s interchangeable parts system, only in this case, each part is smaller than a grain of sand.
(via Chiplets: Xerox’s grand vision for next-generation computer assembly | ExtremeTech)
Scientists spin carbon nanotube threads on industrial scale
“We finally have a nanotube fiber with properties that don’t exist in any other material,” said lead researcher Matteo Pasquali of Rice University. “It looks like black cotton thread but behaves like both metal wires and strong carbon fibers.”
The thread has ten times the tensile strength of steel and is as conductive as copper, but is flexible enough to be wound around a spool or woven. The team envisages it being used in “smart” clothing and the aerospace industry, and says that its properties will be of particular use to electronics manufacturers.”
(via openscience)
4D Printing: Self-Assembly Brings 3D Printing to the next level
The next big thing may very well be 4D printing, a new technology from Skylar Tibbits, an architect, designer and computer scientist. The core concept behind this new technology is self assembly. It may sound strange and far out, but it’s actually quite simple. 4D printing is being billed as a process where synthetic objects can change and adapt themselves to the environment. In a recent TED interview, Tibbits compared the process of 4D printing to the process of natural adaptation:
Natural systems obviously have this built in — the ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on. This is extremely difficult to build into synthetic systems — the ability to “want” or need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms.
(via 4D Printing Is The Future Of 3D Printing And It’s Already Here | WebProNews)lf
![British Researchers Get Earthworms to Secrete Quantum Dots
The discovery came as the result of an educated guess. Green knew that placing thiols - sulphur-containing groups of atoms - on water-soluble cadmium telluride dots made them more luminescent.
When he learned that earthworms produce thiols that bind to metal atoms, he wondered whether worm-made quantum dots were a possibility.
Green [and colleagues] exposed the worms to cadmium chloride and sodium tellurite, and found that they moved the metals to their chloragogen cells - their equivalent of the liver.
After 11 days, the researchers removed the chloragogen cells, put them in water and exposed the mixture to a UV lamp. They found that it glowed green. …that characteristic behaviour meant only one thing: “…it was cadmium telluride quantum dots,” he says. …What’s more, the dots were able to light up cancer cells in an imaging experiment.
(via Earthworms roped into making quantum dots - physics-math - 02 January 2013 - New Scientist)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/fe3e15efb09b6ea8b73d8f909f923569/tumblr_mg0sc7F7Co1qgpcs1o1_400.jpg)
British Researchers Get Earthworms to Secrete Quantum Dots
The discovery came as the result of an educated guess. Green knew that placing thiols - sulphur-containing groups of atoms - on water-soluble cadmium telluride dots made them more luminescent.
When he learned that earthworms produce thiols that bind to metal atoms, he wondered whether worm-made quantum dots were a possibility.
Green [and colleagues] exposed the worms to cadmium chloride and sodium tellurite, and found that they moved the metals to their chloragogen cells - their equivalent of the liver.
After 11 days, the researchers removed the chloragogen cells, put them in water and exposed the mixture to a UV lamp. They found that it glowed green. …that characteristic behaviour meant only one thing: “…it was cadmium telluride quantum dots,” he says. …What’s more, the dots were able to light up cancer cells in an imaging experiment.
(via Earthworms roped into making quantum dots - physics-math - 02 January 2013 - New Scientist)
3D Printing With Metal: The State of the Art
Spray welding is a technique that has been used for decades to build up worn motor shafts, but it is far too crude for controlled additive printing. Spray welding uses a gravity-fed powdered metal dispenser integrated into a special oxygen-acetylene torch head which melts the powder as it is dispensed. Swapping the torch for a laser gave us the powerful construction tool we have today. A powdered metal feedstream, confined and protected against oxidation with a surrounding jet of inert shielding gas, fused by a laser piped through a central bore in the head is now the state of the art technology…
NASA recently used a technique called selective metal melting (SLM) with great success tobuild rocket motor components out of steel. NASA’s engineers have been able to produce parts with complex geometry only previously imagined, and with dimensional accuracy beyond that possible with traditional fabrication methods.
(via 3D printing with metal: The final frontier of additive manufacturing | ExtremeTech)
Superhydrophobic Nanoengineered Metamaterials Will Make Steam-Cooling More Efficient
There are two ways to create a hydrophobic material: You either coat it with some kind of wax (oil, grease, or some other special, hydrophobic substance); or you use nanoengineering to create a special, nanopatterned textured surface.
These nanopatterns, which are hydrophobic, take the form of little bumps or posts that are around 10 micrometers (10 micron, 10,000 nanometers) across. This kind of hydrophobic material is fairly well understood.
The MIT breakthrough being discussed today starts with a nanopatterned hydrophobic material — and then coats it in a very fine layer of lubricant, massively increasing its hydrophobicity. It turns out that the small gaps between the bumps/posts are capable of exerting just enough capillary force to hold an oil lubricant in place.
The scientists simply had to dunk the nanopatterned material into a vat of lubricant, pull it out, and the lubricant remains fixed in the material.
The nanopattern, plus the lubricant, results in a material that is 10,000 times more hybrophobic than the non-lubricated version. The pits are so small that it takes just half a teaspoon of lubricant to cover a square yard (0.8sqm) of the material. “Drops can glide on the surface,” Kripa Varanasi, the lead researcher, says. “These are just crazy velocities.”
“Phantom Geometry” 3D Printing Technique Allows Models To Be Altered While Printing
Conventional 3-D printing generally works by precisely depositing thin layers of heated, extruded plastic or resin one atop the other based on a 3-D digital model of the desired object. Another kind of additive manufacturing, known as stereolithography, builds objects using light-sensitive resins and some kind of light source (a laser, a UV projector, etc.) that precisely cures the liquid resin into a solid (generally creating objects from the top down rather than the bottom up). Liz and Kyle von Hasseln’s project, known as Phantom Geometry, is of the latter mode, but its also executed on a huge scale. And where most printers stick firmly to a digital 3-D model of the desired object, Phantom Geometry allows the user to print outside the specifications of a given 3-D model. As a printed product emerges, the designer can alter the design in-progress, in turn altering the downstream architecture of the printed product.
The system is comprised of a UV light projector, a special photo-sensitive resin, and precision-controlled robotic arms borrowed from SCI-Arc’s Robot House. The projector is mounted on a robotic arm just below a shallow vat of resin that hardens when exposed to UV rays, much like the stuff dentists use to create molds of patients’ teeth. The projector can beam UV rays up into the bottom of the transparent vat in any shape or form the programmer desires. Layer by layer this hardens the resin, fixing each new layer to the previous one. Leftover liquid resin continues to flood into the print area to be cured with the next burst of light .
(via A New Breed Of Robotic 3-D Printer Lets You Change Design In Mid-Print | Popular Science)
