Chemical engineers at MIT have developed a hydrogel system using zwitterionic materials for efficient water treatment in just one step, with minimal impact on the environment.
Category: materials – Page 123
New Neural Implant Unlocks Deep Brain Activity
Summary: Researchers create a transparent graphene-based neural implant offering high-resolution brain activity data from the surface. The implant’s dense array of tiny graphene electrodes enables simultaneous recording of electrical and calcium activity in deep brain layers.
This innovation overcomes previous implant limitations and offers insights for neuroscientific studies. The transparent design allows optical imaging alongside electrical recording, revolutionizing neuroscience research.
Unveiling the Dance of Noble Gas Atoms: Imaging Breakthrough at the University of Vienna
Like several scientific discoveries, the researchers stumbled upon this result accidentally while conducting experiments irradiating graphene when they found that irradiated noble gases became trapped between two sheets of graphene, which results in the graphene forming small pockets where the atoms of the gases coalesce into small groups of atoms.
“We used scanning transmission electron microscopy to observe these clusters, and they are really fascinating and a lot of fun to watch,” said Manuel Längle, who is a PhD student at the University of Vienna and lead author of the study. “They rotate, jump, grow and shrink as we image them. Getting the atoms between the layers was the hardest part of the work. Now that we have achieved this, we have a simple system for studying fundamental processes related to material growth and behavior.”
Microsoft, US lab use AI to speed search for new battery materials
Jan 9 (Reuters) — Microsoft (MSFT.O) has worked with a U.S. national laboratory to use artificial intelligence to rapidly identify a material that could mean producing batteries that require 70% less lithium than now, the company said on Tuesday.
The replacement of much of the lithium with sodium, a common element found in table salt, still needs extensive evaluation by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington to determine whether it will be suitable for mass production.
“Something that could have taken years, we did in two weeks,” Jason Zander, an executive vice president at Microsoft, told Reuters. “That’s the part we’re most excited about. … We just picked one problem. There are thousands of problems to go solve, and it’s applicable to all of them.”
