Material Science and Tech and Wild Speculation

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Move aside carbon: Boron nitride-reinforced materials are even stronger

Lightweight polymers mixed with tough boron nitride nanotubes could one day strengthen planes, spaceships, racecars and tennis rackets.

Original paper: Mechanical strength of boron nitride nanotube-polymer interfaces

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UCLA researchers create exceptionally strong and lightweight new metal

Magnesium infused with dense silicon carbide nanoparticles could be used for airplanes, cars, mobile electronics and more

[Anders]

Graphene light bulb created

Amazingly efficient, apparently. I wonder if this will replace the replacement for the replacement for lightbulbs.

[starnado]

 

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Okay, Quirks and Quarks has put together a special podcast episode with Eight Technologies That Will Change Medicine and it's pretty cool. They have an infographic summing up the technologies. The anti-bleeding gel (#4) seems like the most dramatically wonderful to me. I knew it was coming, but didn't realize it will be here in the next couple of years.

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Yeah, so I've been banking these but haven't had time to post them. Now you get a deluge.

New type of nanowires, built with natural gas heating
Source: New type of nanowires, built with natural gas heating

A team of Korean researchers, affiliated with UNIST has recently pioneered in developing a new simple nanowire manufacturing technique that uses self-catalytic growth process assisted by thermal decomposition of natural gas. According to the research team, this method is simple, reproducible, size-controllable, and cost-effective in that lithium-ion batteries could also benefit from it.

New flow battery offers lower-cost energy storage: Organic battery will be cheaper than standard vanadium flow battery
Source: DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151221133840.htm)

Renewable energy can be stored for less with a new organic aqueous flow battery, which uses inexpensive and readily available materials. The new battery is expected to cost about 60 percent less than today's standard flow batteries.

Newly Developed Liquid Crystal Elastomer Material Could Enable Advanced Sensors
http://www.kent.edu/kent/news/newly-developed-liquid-crystal-elastomer-material-could-enable-advanced-sensors-kent-state

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), essentially rubbers with liquid crystal properties, can do a number of fascinating things, especially in the fields of optics, photonics, telecommunications and medicine. They can curl up, bend, twist, wrinkle and stretch when exposed to light, heat, gases and other stimuli. Because they are so responsive, they are ideal for applications like artificial muscles and blood vessels, actuators, sensors, plastic motors and drug delivery systems. They can even be used as a mechanically tunable mirrorless “rubber” laser.

New lens ready for its close-up
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/uou-nlr021116.php

Imagine digital cameras or smartphones without the bulky lenses or eyeglasses with lenses that are paper thin.

Researchers have always thought that flat, ultrathin optical lenses for cameras or other devices were impossible because of the way all the colors of light must bend through them. Consequently, photographers have had to put up with more cumbersome and heavier curved lenses. But University of Utah electrical and computer engineering professor Rajesh Menon and his team have developed a new method of creating optics that are flat and thin yet can still perform the function of bending light to a single point, the basic step in producing an image.

A metal that behaves like water
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/hjap-amt021116.php

In a new paper published in Science, researchers at the Harvard and Raytheon BBN Technology have advanced our understanding of graphene's basic properties, observing for the first time electrons in a metal behaving like a fluid.

Instant Dry Umbrella
http://www.betterlivingthroughdesign.com/personal/personal-accessories/instant-dry-umbrella/

An instantly dry umbrella? Really? Yes, in fact, this umbrella is made with water-repellant fabric that allows you to simply shake water off in one flutter.

Breakthrough in dynamically variable negative stiffness structures
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/hl-bid021916.php

HRL Laboratories, LLC, today announced that researchers in its Sensors and Materials Laboratory have developed an active variable stiffness vibration isolator capable of 100x stiffness changes and millisecond actuation times, independent of the static load. According to Principal Investigator Christopher Churchill, "This performance surpasses existing mechanisms by at least 20 times in either speed or useful stiffness change."

Graphene slides smoothly across gold
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/uob-gss022316.php

Graphene, a modified form of carbon, offers versatile potential for use in coating machine components and in the field of electronic switches. An international team of researchers led by physicists at the University of Basel have been studying the lubricity of this material on the nanometer scale. Since it produces almost no friction at all, it could drastically reduce energy loss in machines when used as a coating, as the researchers report in the journal Science.

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OMFSM. I had no idea.

[Mr. Beagle]

I want one of these mirrors.

I am reminded of a study where the subjects were shown several snaps of themselves in quick succession, taken by the researchers, and asked to pick their favorite.  Unbeknown to the subject, one of the photos had been mirror-imaged. To a very high correlation, this was the "best" shot taken.

The mirror image is the person we "know" and everyone else knows us as a different person.

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I have this huge queue of articles to post here and decided to just etch-a-sketch it and start fresh.

This is really cool: https://www.wired.com/2016/06/tiny-engine-one-step-closer-powering-drones-electric-cars/

I always loved the Wankel Rotary engine. When I was 15 I came up with the idea of a rotary engine independently, while messing around with geometric shapes. I didn't think it the whole way through - just enough to be convinced it could work, and that it would need something to get it spinning before the engine would work. Years later I connected the dots to the Monty Pyhon skit about words that sound dirty but aren't and did some library digging. It was nice to know I was on the right track. This engine looks like it could have some really effective uses, especially if it can be run on carbon neutral fuels.

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Hm. It think this fits this old thread: Discovery of a bottleneck relief in photosynthesis may have a major impact on food crops.

I imagine with hundreds of millions of years to work with, gaining 10% growth through over-expression of a single protein would be a relatively likely mutation. This makes me think there will likely be a fairly catastrophic impact on reproductive fitness that shows up as research continues. Even if that's the case and the plants with the edit can't reproduce in the wild I can see massive business potential for something like farmed wood instead of clear-cutting.