Science

Although wave power is attracting a lot of attention as a renewable energy source, it is possible to generate power from still water. All you need is an electrolyzer, which separates water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen, then feeds them into a fuel cell. Electrolyzers, however, require catalysts to get the process rolling. While hydrogen production catalysts aren’t much of a problem, the platinum catalysts used for oxygen production are expensive, don’t last very long, and the creation of them incorporates toxic chemicals. This Monday, however, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the development of a new oxygen production catalyst that is 200 times more efficient than platinum. The nickel-borate-based catalyst has been licensed to Sun Catalytix, which is hoping to be producing safe, super-efficient electrolyzers within two years.  Read More

Deserts are the obvious locations for solar power plants. The land is cheap and the sunshine is plentiful. Unfortunately so too is the dust, dirt and wind that leads to dirty solar panels that can take a big hit in efficiency. Sending a guy around with a squeegee in the sweltering heat doesn’t sound like the best job in the world and self-cleaning systems that rely on water aren’t always an option in areas where clean water is hard to come by. Another solution is self-dusting solar panels that are cleaned by an electric charge provided by the solar panels themselves. The self-dusting solar panels are based on technology developed for another dry and dusty environment – Mars.  Read More

The message is clear. Whisky and driving is not a good mix. But rules are made to be broken and researchers at Edinburgh Napier University have managed to successfully marry the two, albeit as a fuel for the vehicle and not the driver. Researchers have taken two by-products of the whisky-making process and transformed them into an energy dense biofuel that doesn't require vehicles to undergo any modification prior to use.  Read More

Recently, 29 students from Northwestern University in Illinois planned a terrorist attack. Researchers from the university were subsequently able to learn details of the attack, even though the students never admitted to anything. How was this possible? Well, essentially, the researchers read the students’ minds. More specifically, they monitored their P300 brain waves – brief electrical patterns in the cortex, which occur when meaningful information is presented to someone with “guilty knowledge.” In this case, it was a mock planned attack, but the research team believe their process could be used to prevent the real thing.  Read More

The moon is shrinking according to a team analyzing new images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The images reveal previously unknown cliffs, called lobate scarbs. These are thrust faults that occur primarily in the lunar highlands that indicate the moon shrank globally in the geologically recent past and might still be shrinking today. Although they were first recognized in photographs taken near the moon's equator by the panoramic cameras flown on the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions, the fourteen previously unknown lobate scarbs revealed by the very high resolution images taken by the LRO camera indicate that the thrust faults are globally distributed and not clustered near the moon’s equator.  Read More

If you had to sort a bunch of nanoparticles by size, what would you use? A microscope, tweezers, and a very finely-calibrated caliper? Actually, you’d probably use the nanofluidic “multi-tool” created by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US. Before you start picturing a teeny-tiny Leatherman, which would admittedly be pretty cool, you should be aware that the NIST device is more like a coin separator, that sorts your nickels, dimes and quarters. In this case, however, they would be nickels, dimes and quarters that are smaller than a bacterium.  Read More

Rocket engines are generally not thought of as being environmentally-friendly, but thanks to a newly-developed process, we may someday see them neutralizing the emissions from wastewater treatment plants. The same process would also see those plants generating their own power, thus meaning they would be both energy-neutral and emissions-free. Developed by two engineers at Stanford University, the system starts with the formation of nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane gas - something that treatment plants traditionally try to avoid.  Read More

At the nanoscale chemistry is different and nanoparticles don’t behave like normal particles. Nanoparticles tend to be more chemically reactive than ordinary-sized particles of the same material, making it hard to predict how they will act under different conditions and raising serious questions about the use of such particles – particularly inside the human body. Researchers have now developed a method for predicting the ways nanoparticles will interact with biological systems – including the human body – that could improve human and environmental safety in the handling on nanomaterials, and have applications for drug delivery.  Read More

It’s rather ironic that in order to fully appreciate the value of an archeological artefact, part of that object must first be destroyed. That’s the way it has worked, at least, since the only way of determining the chemical composition of such items has been by breaking down a physical sample from them. As more and more institutions have decided to disallow sampling of their artefacts, however, it has become increasingly important to develop non-destructive methods of analysis. Recently, an archeologist from Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations developed just such a method - Professor Yuval Goren has adapted an off-the-shelf portable x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer to reveal the soil and clay composition of objects, simply by touching their surface.  Read More