Blog

Archive for the ‘materials’ category: Page 253

Mar 9, 2016

Stem Cell Breakthrough Could Let Us Grow New Human Eyes

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, materials

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Rw1odkI0Nw8

Stem cell breakthrough grows new cornea material that restores some sight to blind rabbits in an experiment.

Read more

Mar 8, 2016

Windows Could Soon Power the Entire Building

Posted by in categories: habitats, materials, particle physics, quantum physics, solar power, sustainability

Q-Dots windows to power homes and other buildings.


Researchers at the Los Alamos National Lab may have found a way to take quantum dots and put them in your ordinary windows to turn them into solar collectors.

Continue reading “Windows Could Soon Power the Entire Building” »

Mar 8, 2016

Gates thinks quantum computing in the cloud may come in a decade

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, materials, quantum physics

I don’t believe that we’re a decade away given the advancements around Quantum infrastructure work such the Quantum Internet and Platform. Too much progress is showing me within the next 7 to 8 years is a possibility especially with the race that we’re all in.


Bill Gates did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit Tuesday and said that there’s a chance within six to ten years that “cloud computing will offer super-computation by using quantum.”

“It could help users solve some very important science problems, including materials and catalyst design,” Gates wrote.

Continue reading “Gates thinks quantum computing in the cloud may come in a decade” »

Mar 7, 2016

How cancer cells fuel their growth

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, materials

Pretty cool.


Scientists report that amino acids, not sugar, supply most building blocks for cancerous tumor cells. Cancer cells are notorious for their ability to divide uncontrollably and generate hordes of new tumor cells. Most of the fuel consumed by these rapidly proliferating cells is glucose, a type of sugar.

Scientists had believed that most of the cell mass that makes up new cells, including cancer cells, comes from that glucose. However, MIT biologists have now found, to their surprise, that the largest source for new cell material is amino acids, which cells consume in much smaller quantities.

Continue reading “How cancer cells fuel their growth” »

Mar 7, 2016

New ‘meta-skin’ to cloak objects from radars

Posted by in category: materials

New skin for keeping you under the radar.


Because the meta-skin is stretchable, it can be pulled tight to augment the range of radar frequencies trapped by the resonators.

The project set out to prove that that electromagnetic waves — “perhaps even the shorter wavelengths of visible light” — can be adequately suppressed with flexible, tunable liquid-metal technologies. The material is made up of rows of rings, with a radius of 0.1 inches (2.5mm) and gaps of 0.04 inches (1mm). They’re filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that remains liquid at room temperatures and is less toxic than metals who share this property, such as mercury. Each resonator acts like a small curved piece of liquid wire.

Continue reading “New ‘meta-skin’ to cloak objects from radars” »

Mar 5, 2016

The darkest material on Earth has become even darker

Posted by in categories: electronics, materials, transportation

New material improving stealth mode vehicles and planes.


When Surrey NanoSystems introduced the original Vantablack, the company said the carbon nanotube material is capable of absorbing 99.96 percent of light that touches it. It’s so dark, it can fool your eyes into seeing a smooth surface even when the nanotubes were actually grown on crumpled foil (seriously — watch the video below the fold). Well, the new version of Vantablack is darker than that. In fact, Surrey can’t even give us the percentage of light that gets absorbed, because its spectrometers can’t measure it.

In this video below (and the GIF above), you can see the material engulf the laser pointer in darkness when it moves across:

Continue reading “The darkest material on Earth has become even darker” »

Mar 3, 2016

Aerogel Jacket

Posted by in category: materials

A NASA material that’s 99% air lets this jacket maintain its temperature, even when it’s blasted with liquid nitrogen! Meet Oros.

Read more

Mar 1, 2016

Could protein-powered ‘biocomputers’ be the future of IT?

Posted by in categories: computing, materials, singularity

This does make it easier for the whole concept of Singularity to exist.


Scientists prove we are tantalisingly close to creating the next generation of computer components made of organic living materials, as we move beyond Moore’s Law and into exotic new devices.

Continue reading “Could protein-powered ‘biocomputers’ be the future of IT?” »

Feb 29, 2016

These bizarre organisms could represent a new branch on the tree of life

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, materials

The strangest life forms on Earth just got a lot stranger.

In 2003, Didier Raoult of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues discovered a new kind of virus lurking inside single-celled protozoans.

Like other viruses, it couldn’t grow on its own, lacking the biochemical machinery to build proteins and genes. Instead, it had to infect host cells and use their material to produce new viruses.

Continue reading “These bizarre organisms could represent a new branch on the tree of life” »

Feb 29, 2016

Graphene Patterned After Moth Eyes Could Give Us ‘Smart Wallpaper’

Posted by in category: materials

Tweaking the structure of graphene so that it matches patterns found in the eyes of moths could one day give us “smart wallpaper,” among a host of other useful technologies.

Using a novel technique called “nano texturing,” scientists at the University of Surrey in England have successfully modified ultra-thin graphene sheets to create the most efficient light-absorbent material to date, which is capable of generating electricity from both captured light and waste heat. They described their work in a new paper in Science Advances.

Continue reading “Graphene Patterned After Moth Eyes Could Give Us ‘Smart Wallpaper’” »