All-electric Ford Focus to use liquid cooled/heated lithium-ion battery system

The all-electric Ford Focus will use liquid cooling/heating for its lithium-ion battery system

One of the downsides of the lithium-ion battery systems used in electric vehicles is that their performance, reliability, safety and durability can be negatively affected by extreme temperatures. When the all-new Ford Focus Electric debuts later this year in the U.S. it will be powered by a lithium-ion battery – no news there. What is interesting, however, is that the battery system will use cooled and heated liquid to regulate battery temperature, which should extend battery life and maximize driving range.
While air-cooling methods work well for many of today’s smaller car battery systems, Ford said it needed a more aggressive thermal management system for the larger, more complex lithium-ion battery technology that will be powering the company’s all-electric vehicles. Ford chose an active liquid system that heats or chills a coolant before pumping it through the battery cooling system. This loop regulates temperature throughout the system against external conditions.
On hot days, chilled water absorbs heat from the batteries, dispersing it through a radiator before pumping it through the chiller again. On cold days, heated water warms the batteries, gradually bringing the system’s temperature to a level that allows it to provide enough discharge power for expected vehicle performance.
Additionally, the system also plays a major role in charging the vehicle. When the Focus is plugged in to recharge, the vehicle control system will automatically precondition the battery, if needed, to the optimal temperature before accepting charge. If the battery is already at the optimal temperature, the system will automatically accept charge and maintain an optimal temperature.

“All-electric vehicles do not have a conventional engine on board, so it is critical we maximize the performance of the battery under various operating temperatures,” said Sherif Marakby, Ford director, Electrification Program and Engineering. “Active liquid systems are more effective than air systems at regulating lithium-ion battery temperature. As a result, the active liquid system on Focus Electric will play a key role in providing our customers with the best performance possible.”
The Focus Electric, which will be released in the U.S. late this year and in 2012 in Europe, is one of five electrified vehicles Ford will release over the next three years. The Ford Transit Connect Electric small commercial van arrives in late 2010, followed by two next-generation hybrid electric vehicles, as well as a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle in North America in 2012 and Europe in 2013.

Nanotube sheets could lead to stealthier submarines

One of the sound-generating carbon nanotube sheets

Two years ago, Chinese scientists coated one side of a flag with a thin sheet of nanotubes, then played a song using the flapping sheet-coated flag as a speaker. It was a demonstration of flexible speaker technology, in which nanotubes can be made to generate sound waves via a thermoacoustic effect – every time an electrical pulse is sent through the microscopic layer of nanotubes, it causes the air around them to heat up, which in turn creates a sound wave. Now, an American scientist has taken that technology underwater, where he claims it could allow submariners to detect other submarines, and to remain hidden themselves.
Research scientist Ali Aliev, of the University of Texas at Dallas, has determined that the low-frequency sound waves created by carbon nanotube sheets can be used by sonar systems to determine the location, depth, and speed of underwater objects. Aliev and his team also determined that the sheets could be tuned to transmit specific frequencies that would cancel out certain noises... noises such as those that a submarine makes while passing through the water, for instance.

One obstacle that Aliev had to overcome was the fact that the sheets do not do well in direct contact with water. The sheets can oxidize when in contact with water at high temperatures, the high surface tension and vibrational frequency of water causes the nanotubes to bundle into acoustically-poor ropes, and ocean water can cause the sheets to short circuit. On the plus side, however, the hydrophobic (water-repellent) nature of the sheets causes an air envelope to form around the nanotubes, which in turn acts as a kind of resonating chamber for the sound waves, boosting their strength.
Be that as it may, the sheets still needed to be protected from the water. In order to do so, Aliev encapsulated them in thin, flat gas-filled containers with acoustically-transparent windows. As with the air envelopes, the resonance that resulted from the sound waves being generated in such an enclosed space proved to be a benefit – the encapsulated sheets were actually ten times more effective at transmitting low-frequency sound underwater than non-encapsulated sheets.
The researchers also experimented with stacking the sheets several deep, but found that this negatively affected the desired thermoacoustics. The optimum arrangement turned out to be a layer of just two separated sheets, which received their electrical pulses alternately instead of simultaneously.
The research has just been published in the journal Nano Letters.

Localized heating could be the key to mass-producing graphene nanocircuits

Researchers have found that localized heating through a microscope tip can modify the properties of graphene, paving the way to mass-produced graphene-based electronics

Scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have documented a major breakthrough in the production of nanocircuitry on graphene, a material that many envision as the successor of silicon for our electronics needs. Using thermochemical nanolithography (TCNL), the team found that the electrical properties of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) can be easily tuned to reliably produce nanoscale circuits in a single, quick step.

As the electronics industry keeps steadily pushing toward chip miniaturization, the physical limits of silicon transistors have been exposed and will soon constitute an insurmountable barrier that scientists need to address. The next proposed step is the replacement of silicon with a different material with better characteristics, and lately researchers seem to have put their eyes on graphene, a one-atom thick layer of carbon with a couple of aces up its sleeve: a better electrical conductance that makes for more energy-efficient computation, as well as its structure and dimensions, which open up the potential for much smaller, faster and even flexible electronics.

Despite the advantages that graphene could bring to the table, technological difficulties up until now have prevented us from reliably producing graphene nanostructures in a fast and inexpensive method, which is just what the Georgia Tech team has managed to achieve.

Rather than employing graphene in its purest form, the team used reduced graphene oxide (rGO). By using a heated atomic force microscope tip in a process called thermochemical nanolithography (TCNL), they simply heated the material at the nanoscale level and found out that, starting at 130 degrees Celsius (266F), it became up to 10,000 times more conductive than before.

Using the same method, they also produced nanowires with dimensions down to just 12 nanometers, effectively creating nanocircuits on graphene simply through finely localized heating, all without wearing of the microscope tip or of the sample material.

William P. King, associate professor in the Mechanical Science and Engineering department at the University of Illinois, expanded on the significant advantages of this technique. "First, the entire process happens in one step. You go from insulating graphene oxide to a functional electronic material by simply applying a nano-heater. Second, we think that any type of graphene will behave this way. Third, the writing is an extremely fast technique. These nanostructures can be synthesized at such a high rate that the approach could be very useful for engineers who want to make nanocircuits."

With ultra-fast graphene-based transistors achieving speeds of a whopping 300GHz recently being announced, it's clear how this breakthrough promises to have concrete repercussions in the scientific community in the months and years to come.

The team's research is detailed in the paper "Nanoscale Tunable Reduction of Graphene Oxide for Graphene Electronics" published in the journal Science.

Eye-controlled earphones let you pick up phone calls with a glance

The eye-controlled earphones developed by DoCoMo could revolutionize the way we control our personal electronics

The Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo has recently developed and demonstrated a peculiar pair of headphones that can precisely detect a user's eye movements without a camera, and use those movements to control electronic devices such as mobile phones and portable music players.
DoCoMo started working on this idea back in 2008 by adapting an electrooculogram (EOG), a medical device used for measuring eye response, to their purposes. An EOG works on the principle that the human cornea has a positive electrical charge. As the user looks to the left or right, the charge shifts in the space between the user's ears – a change that can be easily detected by appropriate sensors.
When, two years back, the company first announced its work on this technology, the end product was a very bulky and unappealing pair of headphones. Now, however, DoCoMo has managed to shrink all of the necessary parts into an ordinary-looking pair of earphones, making the product much more attractive to the masses. As demonstrated in the video below, users can simply move their eyes from right to left to pause music, twice to the right to skip a song, roll their eyes clockwise to raise the volume, and so on.

Of course, the same technology could be easily adapted to control a mobile phone or, for that matter, a number of other electronic devices. But the question remains as to how users would be able to prevent regular eye movements from being interpreted as commands. There is no mention from the company of a locking command to prevent casual glances from being registered, which means you'd have to be careful where you look at any given time. It's also clear that this technology would be too dangerous as a hands-free driving solution, as it would require you to constantly take your eyes off the road.
A third, perhaps less serious concern, is that you may get a few stares from the people around you as you start shifting and rolling your eyes for no apparent reason. But at least this concern has an easy solution – according to the company, the earphones can pick up inputs even when your eyes are closed.


DoCoMo says it doesn't yet have plans to get the technology into the market, perhaps in order to get these and other minor problems sorted first. One thing's for certain, though: should the company find a solution to these issues, particularly how to intelligently sort out the commands from the normal glances without laying the burden on the user, it would make for one of the most futuristic sets of controls yet.

Stunning first images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory

A full-disk multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun taken by SDO with false colors tracing different gas temperatures - reds are relatively cool, while blues and greens are hotterAlthough we do know some things about the Sun - it's big and hot for example - in many ways it remains a great mystery to scientists. In a bid to shed some more light on our closest star, NASA launched its most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the Sun in February this year. The goal of the the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is to help us understand where the Sun's energy comes from, explore its inner workings, and learn more about how energy is stored and released in the Sun's atmosphere. A nice side benefit will also be the capture of stunning images – the first of which have just been released.
During its five-year mission, the SDO will examine the Sun's magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the Sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate. SDO will determine how the sun's magnetic field is generated, structured and converted into violent solar events such as turbulent solar wind, solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These immense clouds of material, when directed toward Earth, can cause large magnetic storms in our planet’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere.
Since launch, engineers have been conducting testing and verification of the spacecraft’s components. Now fully operational, the SDO will provide images with clarity 10 times better than high-definition television and will return more comprehensive science data faster than any other solar observing spacecraft.

SDO will send 1.5 terabytes of data back to Earth each day, which is equivalent to a daily download of half a million songs onto an MP3 player. The observatory carries three state-of the-art instruments for conducting solar research.

The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager

This maps solar magnetic fields and looks beneath the Sun’s opaque surface. The experiment will decipher the physics of the Sun’s activity, taking pictures in several very narrow bands of visible light. Scientists will be able to make ultrasound images of the Sun and study active regions in a way similar to watching sand shift in a desert dune. The instrument’s principal investigator is Phil Scherrer of Stanford University. HMI was built by a collaboration of Stanford University and the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif.

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly

This is a group of four telescopes designed to photograph the Sun’s surface and atmosphere. The instrument covers 10 different wavelength bands, or colors, selected to reveal key aspects of solar activity. These types of images will show details never seen before by scientists. The principal investigator is Alan Title of the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, which built the instrument.

The Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment

This measures fluctuations in the Sun’s radiant emissions. These emissions have a direct and powerful effect on Earth’s upper atmosphere - heating it, puffing it up, and breaking apart atoms and molecules. Researchers don’t know how fast the Sun can vary at many of these wavelengths, so they expect to make discoveries about flare events. The principal investigator is Tom Woods of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. LASP built the instrument.

First Images

Some of the first images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the Sun’s surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.
"These amazing images, which show our dynamic Sun in a new level of detail, are only the beginning of SDO's contribution to our understanding of the Sun," said SDO Project Scientist Dean Pesnell of Goddard.
SDO is the first mission of NASA's Living with a Star Program, or LWS, and the crown jewel in a fleet of NASA missions that study our Sun and space environment. The goal of LWS is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the connected Sun-Earth system that directly affect our lives and society.

Einstein's prediction finally witnessed one century later

Raizan and team used optical tweezers to suspend the bead and observe Brownian motion for the first time Credit
Einstein said it couldn't be done. But more than one hundred years later physicists at the University of Texas at Austin have finally found a way to witness “Brownian motion”; the instantaneous velocity of tiny particles as they vibrate. The “equipartition theorem” states that a particle's kinetic energy, that due to motion, is determined only by its temperature and not its size or mass, and in 1907 Einstein proposed a test to observe the velocity of Brownian motion but gave up, saying the experiment would never be possible.
More than a century later Mark Raizen and his team have finally proved this long-anticipated prediction by means of “optical tweezers”: a single laser beam was fired at a 5μm micrometer bead from below, suspending the bead in an “optical trap” mid-air using the force from the laser and the gravitational force on the bead. A plate-like transducer shook the beads to be tweezed and measured them as they were suspended, and the Brownian motion of the trapped bead was studied with ultra-high resolution.
Having noted that in this case glass beads were 3 micrometers across, Raizen and his team have proved that equipartition theorem is in fact true for Brownian particles. This is the first time in history that the equipartition theorem has been tested for Brownian particles, which forms one of the basic principles of statistical mechanics. They now intend to go further by moving the particles closer to a quantum state for observation. They also expect this to stimulate further research into cooling glass beads to a state where they could be used as oscillators or sensors.
As with much of quantum science, they don't expect the experiment to yield more answers than questions, however: “We've now observed the instantaneous velocity of a Brownian particle," says Raizen. "In some sense, we're closing a door on this problem in physics. But we are actually opening a much larger door for future tests of the equipartition theorem at the quantum level."
Mark Raizen is professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin, and the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. His co-authors are Tongcang Li, Simon Kheifets and David Medellin of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics and the Department of Physics at The University of Texas at Austin. Their paper is published in Science.

Smaller, lighter NuVinci bicycle transmission revealed

The NuVinci N360 Continuously Variable Planetary (CVP) transmission for bicycles

Three years ago, Fallbrook Technologies introduced its NuVinci Continuously Variable Planetary (CVP) N170 transmission for bicycles. The device created something of a stir in the cycling community, as it replaces traditional derailleurs with a rear hub containing metal spheres, plus it also replaces distinct gears with a continuously variable system of transmitting mechanical power – kind of like comparing a three-setting desk lamp to one with a dimmer switch. Riders can change gears even when not pedaling, they don’t need to worry about improper chainring/cog combinations, and the fiddly bits aren’t out in the open where the dirt can get at them. The N170 is heavier than a conventional derailleur system, which is why you don’t see it much on bikes other than cruisers. That could change, however, with this Wednesday’s announcement of the NuVinci N360 transmission. Fallbrook claims it has all the good points of the N170, but is 30 percent lighter and 17 percent smaller.
Without going into too much detail, the CVP incorporates rotating, tilting metal balls positioned between the input and output components of the transmission. Tilting the balls via a handlebar-mounted twist shifter changes their contact diameters and varies the speed ratio. The N360 has six balls, as opposed to the N170’s eight, which is a big part of what makes it smaller and lighter.
Fallbrook states that the N360 has an increased ratio range of 360 degrees... it’s not immediately clear what that means, technically-speaking, but the result is more ratios to choose from. It’s also said to be smoother and easier to shift, and to require 50 percent less twist rotation to go from the lowest to the highest ratios. Because the hub interface is now housed inboard from the bike’s rear dropout, the transmission should stay cleaner and be better protected. The company also claims that due to the hub’s sealed design, it should not require any maintenance or adjustments.
While Fallbrook is particularly interested in getting their product on commuter and electric bikes, one can’t help but wonder how it would do on a road or mountain bike. Well, according to the N360’s spec sheet, it weighs 2.45kg (86.4 ounces). By contrast, the combined weight of Shimano SLX front and rear derailleurs, shifters, freehub and cassette comes out to about 1.3kg (46 ounces).
So weight-wise at least, there’s still a ways to go before it usurps the derailleur. If the N360 lives up to its hype, however, those extra thousand grams could be worth it

Highly efficient light extraction from semiconductors promises better LEDs

The coupling of evanescence waves is key to obtaining higher-efficiency LEDs

One of the biggest challenges in creating a better light-emitting diode (LED) is the search for a way to efficiently extract the light generated in the semiconductor device into the surrounding air, while avoiding the internal light reflection that is cause for a considerable waste of energy. A team of Japanese researchers have recently managed to achieve just that, in what is believed to be a huge step toward significantly more energy-efficient LEDs.
All of the materials currently used for the production of LEDs are characterized by a high refractive index. Air, by contrast, has a very low refractive index. According to the laws of optics, this means that when light is extracted from the one to the other, a vast portion of the light emitted by the semiconductor will be inevitably reflected back into the semiconductor, where it usually degenerates into heat.
The portion of light that is wasted is indeed very substantial. When a light-emitting semiconductor is deposited on a flat surface, it is only possible to extract a small percentage (~2 percent with gallium arsenide, ~4 percent with gallium nitride) of the total light generated. Researchers have therefore gone out of their way to avoid this waste of energy by trying to maximize the portion of the light that is released outward, leading to higher-efficiency devices.
Some of the strategies used so far to counter the unwanted reflection include embedding the device in a hemispheric package, so that the light rays strike its surface perpendicularly; the addition of an anti-reflective coating; designing the LED so that it will reabsorb and re-emit the reflected light (a process known as photon recycling); creating random roughness in the reflective surface with so-called moth-eye patterns; and even using nano-imprint lithography to create billions of tiny holes in the device to allow more photons out.
While all these techniques have led to some improvement, the one developed by the Japanese research team is by far the most promising yet, as it allows for an astounding 50 percent of the light to be extracted. They managed to do so by fabricating narrow ridges on the semiconductor surface, and then coating them with a layer of silicon dioxide (SiO2), whose refractive index is lower than that of the semiconductor.
The improved efficiency is due to the double coupling of so-called "evanescent waves" – a special kind of light existing only in the vicinity of the reflection interface – generated at two interfaces. Two evanescent waves are generated symmetrically on the two sidewalls of a ridge upon the total reflection of light. Coupling of these two evanescent waves occurs when they meet at the flat plane at the top of the ridge, and allows the evanescent waves to be efficiently transformed into light that propagate into the air.
The results were obtained on GaAs/AlGaAs-based materials, which emit light outside the visible spectrum. The team is now working on enhancing light-extraction efficiency in materials used in visible LEDs, such as AlGaInP-based and GaN-based materials, and to develop visible LEDs capable of high-efficiency light extraction.

Dyson D26 vacuum uses the anti-static qualities of carbon fibres on the brushbar

Carbon Fiber is unquestionably a wonder substance, being used to construct the world’s fastest and most expensive race cars and bikes, not to mention a host of other items where light weight, strength and stiffness are more important than cost. So when we first saw the pics of the Dyson D26 Carbon Fibre vacuum, we figured it was a lightweight vacuum cleaner – no, the wonder substance is actually used for its anti-static qualities and is used in the fibres on the brushbar and is claimed to be a significant improvement in picking up fine dust particles and allergens.
To be fair, the Dyson DC26 doesn’t need to be any lighter – at just six kilograms, and with the footprint of an A4 sheet of paper, it’s a great tool for those who live in compact places. The DC26 Carbon Fibre will go on sale in October for a price of EUR469 and there’s a DC26 Allergy Parquet at EUR429 for cleaning delicate floor surfaces.
Both new cleaners use a soft suede bumper on the vacuum head to avoid scratching or denting delicate furniture

Solegear receives award for 100 percent biobased Polysole plastic

Pellets of Solegear's 100 percent natural, non-toxic, biodegradable Polysole plastic

The North American Frost and Sullivan Award* for New Product Innovation of the Year has been awarded to Canadian company Solegear, for its 100 percent biobased Polysole plastic. According to Solegear, although many of today’s biopolymers come from a natural feedstock, they are compounded using synthetic additives. Polysole, however, utilizes proprietary additives that are entirely natural and organic. The non-toxic plastic is claimed to have high impact and tensile strength, and can be efficiently processed using conventional techniques such as extrusion, blow molding and injection molding. Its biodegradation point can also reportedly be tweaked, so it can maintain its molecular integrity until product-specific compost conditions are met.
Polysole is said to be similar to nylon in price and performance. One application for which it’s not ideal, however, is the handling and storage of solvents and greases. In those cases, customers could try Solegear’s other plastic, Traverse.

Traverse combines natural fibers from sources such as rice husks, with traditional petroleum-based plastics such as polypropylene, polyethylene and polystyrene. According to the company, the result is a product that has the strength and other performance characteristics of regular plastics, but that incorporates less environmentally-unfriendly ingredients. One version of the plastic, Traverse Recycled, contains up to 98 percent recycled plastic and fiber content.
Solegear’s Toby Reid informed us that it can sometimes even be less expensive than these plastics in their pure forms, as the natural fibers it contains are less costly than the polymers they’re displacing. This is subject to the fiber percentage stipulated by the client, as Traverse can contain up to 60 percent natural material.
Unlike Polysole, however, Traverse is not completely non-toxic, nor is it biodegradable.
Solegear plans to initially focus on consumer goods, although it hopes to eventually expand into automotive, electronics and medical applications.
* Frost and Sullivan is a business development firm, and its awards are "presented to companies in recognition of making an outstanding contribution to their respective industries or achieving a competitive or customer-based leading position in the market."

New high-speed, low-cost water purifying nanofilter developed

SEM image of the silver nanowires in which the cotton is dipped during the process of constructing a filter – the large fibers are cotton

As their name suggests, most existing water purifying filters clean the water by physically trapping or filtering out bacteria. Stanford researchers have now developed a new kind of water purifying filter that isn’t really a filter at all. Instead of trapping bacteria, the new filter actually lets them pass right through. But, by the time they emerge from the filter they have been killed by an electrical field running through it. Not only is the new filter more than 80,000 times faster than existing filters, it is also low-cost, has no moving parts and uses very little power, which should make it particularly attractive for use in the developing world where it is needed most.
The key to the new filter is coating the filter fabric – ordinary cotton – with nanotubes and silver nanowires. When an electric field is passed through the highly conductive “nano-coated” cotton, it kills almost all the bacteria passing through it. In lab tests, over 98 percent of Escherichia coli bacteria that were exposed to 20 volts of electricity in the filter for several seconds were killed. Multiple layers of fabric were used to make the filter 2.5 inches thick.
"This really provides a new water treatment method to kill pathogens," said Yi Cui, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford whose research team is also responsible for using nanomaterials to build batteries from paper. "It can easily be used in remote areas where people don't have access to chemical treatments such as chlorine."

Speeding things up

Filters that physically trap bacteria must have pore spaces small enough to keep the pathogens from slipping through, but that restricts the filters' flow rate. Since the new filter doesn't trap bacteria, it can have much larger pores, allowing water to speed through at a faster rate – about 80,000 times faster. The larger pore spaces in Cui's filter also keep it from getting clogged, which is a problem with filters that physically pull bacteria out of the water.
Cui's research group teamed with that of Sarah Heilshorn, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, whose group brought its bioengineering expertise to bear on designing the filters.
Silver has long been known to have chemical properties that kill bacteria. "In the days before pasteurization and refrigeration, people would sometimes drop silver dollars into milk bottles to combat bacteria, or even swallow it," Heilshorn said.
Cui's group knew from previous projects that carbon nanotubes were good electrical conductors, so the researchers reasoned the two materials in concert would be effective against bacteria. "This approach really takes silver out of the folk remedy realm and into a high-tech setting, where it is much more effective," Heilshorn said.

Keeping costs down

But the scientists also wanted to design the filters to be as inexpensive as possible. The amount of silver used for the nanowires was so small the cost was negligible, Cui said. Still, they needed a foundation material that was "cheap, widely available and chemically and mechanically robust." So they went with ordinary woven cotton fabric. "We got it at Wal-mart," Cui said.
To turn their discount store cotton into a filter, they dipped it into a solution of carbon nanotubes, let it dry, then dipped it into the silver nanowire solution. They also tried mixing both nanomaterials together and doing a single dunk, which also worked. They let the cotton soak for at least a few minutes, sometimes up to 20, but that was all it took.
The big advantage of the nanomaterials is that their small size makes it easier for them to stick to the cotton, Cui said. The nanowires range from 40 to 100 billionths of a meter in diameter and up to 10 millionths of a meter in length. The nanotubes were only a few millionths of a meter long and as narrow as a single billionth of a meter. Because the nanomaterials stick so well, the nanotubes create a smooth, continuous surface on the cotton fibers. The longer nanowires generally have one end attached with the nanotubes and the other end branching off, poking into the void space between cotton fibers.
"With a continuous structure along the length, you can move the electrons very efficiently and really make the filter very conducting," he said. "That means the filter requires less voltage."

Low power

The electrical current that helps do the killing is only a few milliamperes strong – barely enough to cause a tingling sensation in a person and easily supplied by a small solar panel or a couple 12-volt car batteries. The electrical current can also be generated from a stationary bicycle or by a hand-cranked device.
The low electricity requirement of the new filter is another advantage over those that physically filter bacteria, which use electric pumps to force water through their tiny pores. Those pumps take a lot of electricity to operate, Cui said. However, the pores in the nano-filter are large enough that no pumping is needed – the force of gravity is enough to send the water speeding through.
In some of the lab tests of the nano-filter, the electricity needed to run current through the filter was only a fifth of what a filtration pump would have needed to filter a comparable amount of water.
Although the new filter is designed to let bacteria pass through, an added advantage of using the silver nanowire is that if any bacteria were to linger, the silver would likely kill it. This avoids biofouling, in which bacteria form a film on a filter. Biofouling is a common problem in filters that use small pores to filter out bacteria.
Cui said the electricity passing through the conducting filter may also be altering the pH of the water near the filter surface, which could add to its lethality toward the bacteria.
Next Cui and his team will try the filter on different types of bacteria and run tests using several successive filters.
"With one filter, we can kill 98 percent of the bacteria," Cui said. "For drinking water, you don't want any live bacteria in the water, so we will have to use multiple filter stages."

Microfluidic device aids in study of immune response

The MGH microfluidic neutrophil-capturing device

Neutrophils are the most abundant type of white blood cell, and are part of the body’s first line of defense at the sites of injuries or infections. They were originally thought to do simple things like releasing antimicrobial proteins and ingesting pathogens. Recently, however, researchers have come to realize that they play a key role in both chronic and acute inflammation, and in the activation of the immune system in response to injury. Of course, the best way to study neutrophils is to get a hold of some, but that hasn’t been particularly easy. Traditional methods have required relatively large blood samples, and take up to two hours. Because neutrophils are sensitive to handling, it is also possible to inadvertently activate them, which alters their molecular patterns. A microfluidic device developed at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), however, allows for neutrophils to be collected from a relatively small blood sample, unactivated, in just minutes.
The team from the MGH Center for Engineering in Medicine already had experience in developing silicon-chip-based cell-capturing devices, having designed ones for obtaining CD4 T cells for HIV diagnosis and isolating circulating tumor cells. For this latest device, they redesigned the geometry, the anti-body based coating, and other aspects of the cell-capture module at the heart of the technology. They were subsequently able to gather a neutrophil-rich sample from a microliter-sized blood sample in under five minutes. Because the procedure took so little time, the neutrophils remained relatively undisturbed. When analyzed, the samples revealed differences in gene and protein activity relevant to the cells' activation status.

To test the device further, six copies of it were sent to various real-world clinical environments, to study the neutrophils’ reaction to traumatic injuries. In analyzing samples from 26 patients, complex gene expression patterns were discovered, that shifted during a 28-day period after the injury. It is assumed that these shifts reflect interactions between various immune system components.
"Until now, it's been logistically impossible to study neutrophils to the extent we have in this paper,” said lead author Kenneth Kotz, of MGH. "This technology – which is much faster and gentler than current approaches to isolating cells – can be scaled and modified to capture just about any cell type, and we're working to apply it to other cell-based assays."

Stickybot mimics gecko biology to get a leg up

Paul Day and Alan Asbeck worked on adhesives for the feet of the gecko-like Stickybot

The biology of a gecko’s foot that gives the lizard its remarkable climbing ability has been used by engineers at Stanford University to create a robot that can climb smooth surfaces including a wall of slick glass. With feet modeled on the intricate design of gecko toes, the Stickybot could lead to the development of robots that can scale vertical surfaces to access dangerous or hard to reach places.
Mark Cutkosky, the lead designer of the Stickybot, a professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Center for Design Research, has been collaborating with scientists around the U.S. for the last five years to build climbing robots. Having designed a robot that could climb rough surfaces such as brick wall and concrete, he turned to the gecko for ideas on how to tackle smooth surfaces such as glass and metal.
"Unless you use suction cups, which are kind of slow and inefficient, the other solution out there is to use dry adhesion, which is the technique the gecko uses," Cutkosky said.

Gecko feet

Every square millimeter of a gecko’s footpad contains about 14,000 hair-like structures called setae. Each seta has a diameter of five micrometers and is in turn tipped with between 100 and 1,000 spatulae. These spatulae are only 0.2 micrometers long (or just below the wavelength of visible light) and interact with the molecules of the climbing surface with a molecular attraction called van der Waals force.
Because van der Waals force interactions involve no fluids the gecko is able to adhere to most surfaces without the use of liquids or surface tension. It also enables a gecko to hang and support its whole weight on one toe by placing it on the glass and then pulling it back. It only sticks you you pull in one direction – their toes are a kind of one-way adhesive, Cutkosky said.
"It's very different from Scotch tape or duct tape, where, if you press it on, you then have to peel it off. You can lightly brush a directional adhesive against the surface and then pull in a certain direction, and it sticks itself. But if you pull in a different direction, it comes right off without any effort," he said.
It is this property that makes a one-way adhesive so important for climbing because it requires little effort to attach and detach a robot’s foot.
"Other adhesives are sort of like walking around with chewing gum on your feet: You have to press it into the surface and then you have to work to pull it off. But with directional adhesion, it's almost like you can sort of hook and unhook yourself from the surface," Cutkosky said.

Headed in the right direction

Once they realized that direction matters, Cutkosky and his team were able to come up with a rubber-like material with ting polymer hairs made from a micro-scale mold. They then attached a layer of the adhesive cut to the shape of Stickybot’s four feet, which are about the size of a child’s hand, enabling it to peel and stick its feet to the surface of a wall with ease.
The newest versions of the adhesive, developed in 2009, have a two-layer system that mimics the gecko’s flap like ridges, called lamellae, and setae. At about 20 micrometers wide, the “hairs” are even smaller than the ones on the first version and support higher loads, allowing Stickybot to climb surfaces such as wood paneling, painted metal and glass. The material is also strong and reusable and leaves behind no residue or damage.
As well as working on a Stickybot successor with rotating ankles that will allow it to turn in the middle of a climb – a task made difficult because the adhesive sticks in only one direction – the Stanford University team is currently working on scaling up the adhesive material for humans. A technology called Z-Man (Spiderman was already taken), which would allow humans to climb with gecko adhesive is in the works.

NEC goes nuts to create new bioplastic

NEC has developed a new bioplastic from non-edible cellulose and cardanol that's said to be strong enough for use in electronic equipment

NEC has announced the development of a new biomass-based plastic produced by bonding non-edible cellulose with cardanol, a primary component of cashew nut shells. The new bioplastic is said to achieve a level of durability that is suitable for use in electronic equipment and boasts a high plant composition ratio of more than 70 per cent.
The main ingredient of the new bioplastic is cellulose, which is of course found in plant stems and wood. The cellulose is bonded with oil-like cardanol – extracted from the often discarded byproduct of cashew nut agriculture – to produce a durable thermoplastic which is said to be strong, heat and water resistant and non-crystalline. Unlike other cellulose-based plastics, which can contain large amounts of petrochemical-based additives such as plasticizers, the new bioplastic features a high plant component ratio of more than 70 per cent.
Whereas existing plant-based plastics may require precious crop land for their production, using non-edible plant sources as the main components of the new bioplastic will have little or no impact on the production of food crops. NEC's development is said to be twice as strong as polylactic acid resin (PLA) and can be molded in less than half the time. It also has about 1.3 times the heat resistance and three times more water resistant than cellulose acetate (CA).
Details of the new bioplastic are to be formally revealed at a meeting of The Chemical Society of Japan shortly. Meanwhile the company reports that development and improvement of the new product continues, with a goal of mass production for use in "a wide range of electronic equipment within the 2013 fiscal year."

Scientists sequence apple genome

The genome of the Golden Delicious apple has been sequenced (Photo: Glysiak
No sooner do we hear about the sequencing of the wheat genome, than word comes this week that the genome of the apple has been decoded. The feat was accomplished through a collaboration between 18 research institutions in the US, Belgium, France, New Zealand and Italy, and was coordinated by Italy’s Istituto Agrario S. Michele all'Adige (IASMA). DNA sequences of the Golden Delicious apple were produced in 2007/08, and over 82 percent of the genome was assembled into the total 17 apple chromosomes in 2009. Now, over 90 percent of the genes have been anchored to a precise position in the chromosomes. It may all sound like Greek (or Italian) to us non-geneticists, but the upshot of the whole thing is that we should now be able to selectively breed apples like never before, resulting in hardier, tastier fruits.
In the course of the study, some interesting facts were uncovered regarding the history of the humble apple. For one thing, its genome underwent duplication about 50 million years ago, bringing the total number of chromosomes up from 9 to the current 17. More recently – three to four thousand years ago – the domestic apple was cultivated from Malus sieversii, a wild apple species that can still be found in forests throughout China and Kazakhstan. Currently, at 57,000, apples have more genes than any other plant sequenced so far.
Given that the study has identified all 992 genes responsible for disease resistance, the IASMA researchers hope that crop breeders will now be able to create new types of apples that are hardier than any that have come before, and that are perhaps also better tasting and more nutritious. They would also like to see these new apples requiring less in the way of “agro-technical interventions”, be those irrigation, herbicides, pesticides or fertilizers, resulting in a lower impact on the environment.
The research has just been published in the journal Nature Genetics.

Graphite foam promises longer-lasting LEDs

ORNL's James Klett with his LED-cooling graphite foam

LED lamps may soon be able to go much longer between fixture replacements thanks to a new graphite foam cooling system developed at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. The graphite foam works by passively wicking heat away from the lamp via its lightly-packed, open skeletal structure – and given that a ten-degree decrease in operating temperature can double the lifespan of LED lighting components, the benefits of keeping them cool are clear.
The technology has just been licensed to LED North America, which plans on integrating it into street lights and other municipal, commercial and industrial applications.
Presently, LEDs are cooled through heat sinks, metal blade-like “fins” that increase the surface area (and thus the cooling capacity) of hot electronic devices. ORNL claims that its foam is superior to heat sinks, due to its high thermal conductivity, low weight and easy machinability, which allows for greater design flexibility. Because it’s full of air pockets, a little of it goes a long way, reportedly also making it very cost-efficient.
Due to the fact that lamps using the foam should last longer, LED North America should likewise be able to offer longer warranty periods than its competitors.
“While this technology will reduce temperatures and increase the life of the LED lighting systems, what it will really do is save municipalities millions of dollars every year in replacement fixture costs as well as maintenance,” said ORNL’s James Klett, who developed the foam.

Just how environmentally friendly are electric vehicles?

Just how environmentally friendly are electric vehicles like the Tesla Roadster?

Because they produce no exhaust gases in operation electric vehicles (EVs) are seen as the eco-friendly alternative to conventional gas-fueled cars. While zero-local emissions is clearly a big plus, other factors contributing to the overall environmental impact of EVs are often overlooked – namely the manufacture, usage and disposal of the batteries used to store the electrical energy and the sources of power used to charge them. Now, for the first time, a team of scientists from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (or EMPA) have made a detailed life cycle assessment or ecobalance of the type of lithium-ion batteries most frequently used in EVs, to see if they really are as environmentally friendly as their manufacturers would have us believe.

Fuel source is the key

The investigation shows that, if the power used to charge the battery is not derived from purely hydroelectric sources, then it is primarily the operation of the EV that has an environmental impact, exactly as is the case with conventionally fueled vehicles. In other words, the size of the environmental footprint depends on which sources of power are used to “fuel” the EV. Contrary to initial expectations that the manufacture of the batteries could negate the advantages of electric drive vehicles, the Li-ion battery itself was actually found to have a limited effect.
The team calculated the ecological footprints of electric cars fitted with Li-ion batteries, taking into account factors such as those associated with the production of individual parts, the operation of the vehicle during its lifetime, all the way through to the scrapping of the vehicles and the disposal of the remains. The electric vehicles evaluated were equivalent in size and performance to a VW Golf, and the power used to charge the batteries was assumed to be derived from sources representing an average European electricity mix – that is, a mixture of atomic, coal-fired and hydroelectric power stations.
For comparison the team used a new petrol-engined car, meeting the Euro 5 emission regulations. It consumes on average 5.2 liters (1.37 U.S. gallons) per 100km (62 miles) when put through the new European Driving Cycle (NEDC), a value significantly lower than the European average. In this respect, therefore, the conventional vehicle belongs to the best of its class on the market.

Results

The study shows that the electric car’s Li-ion battery drive is in fact only a moderate environmental burden. At most only 15 per cent of the total burden can be ascribed to the battery (including its manufacture, maintenance and disposal). Half of this figure, that is about 7.5 per cent of the total environmental burden, occurs during the refining and manufacture of the battery’s raw materials, copper and aluminum. The production of the lithium, in the other hand, is responsible for only 2.3 per cent of the total.
“Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries are not as bad as previously assumed,” according to Dominic Notter, coauthor of the study which has just been published in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The outlook is not as rosy when one looks at the operation of an electric vehicle over an expected lifetime of 150,000 kilometers (93,205 miles). The greatest ecological impact is caused by the regular recharging of the battery, that is, the “fuel” of the e-car. Topping-up with electricity sourced from a mixture of atomic, coal-fired and hydroelectric power stations, as is usual in Europe, results in three times as much pollution as from the Li-ion battery alone. If the electricity is generated exclusively by coal-fired power stations, the ecobalance worsens by another 13 per cent. If, on the other hand, the power is purely hydroelectric, then this figure improves by no less than 40 per cent.
The EMPA team concluded that a petrol-engined car must consume between three and four liters per 100km (or about 70mpg) in order to be as environmentally friendly as the electric car studied, powered with Li-ion batteries and charged with a typical European electricity mix.

Thanko dual USB in-car charger caters for iPad

Japanese gadget giant Thanko has joined the likes of the iLuv by offering a dual USB in car charger that lets you juice your mobile devices while on the go. Selling for US$19.99, iLuv charger certainly fills a need. Thanko's iPad compatible unit fills a need as well, at a significantly lower price point: 680 yen or about $8.
Like the iLuv, it has two USB ports to connect with. So while parents sitting up front charge a mobile phone or iPod, children in the back might use it to power their Nintendo DS or Sony PSP on long road trips.
The Thanko DC 12-24V socket adaptor measures 1.3 x 1.3 x 2.4 inches in size (or 32 x 32 x 60mm), weighs in at 0.8 ounces (or 23g).
Thanko is marketing this "Cigar Socket adaptor" as an "iPhone/iPad" compatible charger. If you look closely at the front face of the adaptor, you can see that the first USB port is labeled "For iPad" while the second is marked "others".
Like most products from Thanko this will not be immediately available for sale overseas, but it's not unlikely that specialty websites like ThinkGeek.com or GeekStuff4U.com might carry it eventually.
Scosche also has a USB charger for iPad at $24.99.

Tofu ingredient used to create formaldehyde-free plywood glue

Potentially toxic petroleum-based wood adhesives may soon give way to safer soy-based glues

Two thousand years ago Jesus may have walked on water, but soon we may be walking on food. In a bid to become more environmentally sustainable, scientists have unveiled a new "green" alternative to commonly used petroleum-based wood adhesives. Representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Products Laboratory in Wisconsin, speaking at this week's 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, talked about the development of a soy-based glue. The substance is derived from food products such as soy milk and tofu, and could mean a new generation of eco-friendly flooring, furniture, cabinets and other wood products.
This new adhesive uses soy flour, an additive commonly used to make paper water resistant. The adhesive is as effective as petroleum based glues, but without the harmful formaldehyde fumes (a potential carcinogen) released from traditional plywood, particleboard, and other composite products. Formaldehyde fumes may also cause short-term symptoms such as watery and burning sensations in the eyes, nose and throat, and skin irritation. Charles Frihart, Ph.D, who participated in the research project, said that such problems, combined with rising petrol prices and a strong movement towards sustainability, are encouraging wood manufacturers to take another look at soy. Many wood products today appear to be made of solid wood, however in reality they are often composites, comprised of wood pieces glued together with petroleum-based adhesives.
“Protein adhesives allowed the development of composite wood products such as plywood in the early 20th century,” said Frihart. “Petrochemical-based adhesives replaced proteins in most applications based upon cost, production efficiencies, and better durability. However, several technologies and environmental factors have led to a resurgence of protein, especially soy flour, as an important adhesive for interior plywood and wood flooring.”
A variety of soy based glues have been tested by academic, industrial, and government researchers in the USA. They have tested out the glues on wood samples placed under extreme conditions, including water exposure and high levels of heat. At the conclusion of the tests, a soy-based glue composed of soy flour and other modifiers yielded high results. The goal for Frihart and the team of researchers is now to formulate new soy based adhesives that are even stronger than the existing ones.
Soy-based adhesives currently make up less than five percent of the wood adhesive market. It is hoped that this study will help increase the use and presence of "green" adhesives across the world. The US Forest Service is currently developing the adhesives in partnership with Ashland Hercules and Heartland Resource Technologies.

Wheat genome sequenced – superior types of wheat could result

UK scientists have sequenced the entire wheat genome, and released the data to crop breeders

Scientists from the University of Liverpool, in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the John Innes Centre in Norfolk, have sequenced the entire wheat genome. They are now making the DNA data available to crop breeders to help them select key agricultural traits for breeding. The data is presently in a raw format, and will require further read-throughs and annotations, plus the assembly of the genetic data into chromosomes, before it can be fully applied. Using advanced genome sequencing platforms, however, the task isn’t as daunting as it might seem. While the sequencing of the human genome took 15 years to complete, the wheat genome has taken only a year. This is thanks in no small part to U Bristol’s next-generation genome analyzers, which can read DNA hundreds of times faster than the systems that were used to sequence the human genome.
“The wheat genome is five times larger than the human genome and presents a huge challenge for scientists,” said U Bristol’s Prof. Keith Edwards. “The genome sequences are an important tool for researchers and for plant breeders and by making the data publicly available we are ensuring this publicly funded research has the widest possible impact.”
The reference species used in the study was Chinese Spring wheat. The scientists hope that by understanding the genetic differences between varieties with different desirable traits, selective breeding can produce new types of wheat better able to withstand drought and salinity, and that provide higher yields. Perhaps we could even finally see the much-sought-after perennial wheat.
“It is predicted that within the next 40 years world food production will need to be increased by 50 per cent,” stated U Liverpool’s Dr. Anthony Hall. “Developing new, low input, high yielding varieties of wheat, will be fundamental to meeting these goals.”
The project is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Microneedles and quantum dots could be used to treat skin cancer

Hollow microneedles open the door to new techniques for diagnosing and treating a variety of medical conditions (Image: Roger Narayan, Faraday Discussions - Reproduced by permission of the Royal Society of Chemistry)

A research team at North Carolina State University has created incredibly small microneedles to be used in the treatment of medical conditions by inserting nanoscale dyes called quantum dots into the skin. This new procedure could advance a doctor’s ability to diagnose and treat a variety of conditions, including skin cancer.
Microneedles are very small needles, where in one dimension, such as length or width, the size is less than one millimeter (0.04-inches). Dr. Roger Narayan, professor and leading researcher at North Carlonia State University explained, "The motivation for the study was to see whether we could use microneedles to deliver quantum dots into the skin. We were able to fabricate hollow, plastic microneedles using a laser-based rapid-prototyping approach and found that we could deliver a solution containing quantum dots using these microneedles."
Narayan went on to explain how the findings were remarkable since this new technology would enable doctors to insert quantum dots (within a solution) into deeper layers of the skin, thus proving a possible treatment for serious conditions such as melanoma. Quantum dots are nanoscale crystals with unique properties in terms of light emission and greatly assist with diagnosis.
The research team carried out tests on pig skin, which closely resembles human skin. Using plastic miscroneedles and a water-based solution with quantum dots the researchers inserted the solution into the pig skin and recorded the findings using a multiphoton microscope. By being able to watch the procedure the team could analyze the effectiveness of the microneedles in delivering quantum dots.
The study also illustrated that a laser-based rapid prototyping approach provides for the manufacture of microneedles of varying lengths and shapes. This could allow surgeons to create customized microneedles specific for the treatment of a particular condition. By creating microneedles using two-photon polymerization, an approach pioneered by NC State and Laser Zentrum Hannover for use in medical device applications, allowed the researchers to create specifically purpose-designed microneedles. "Our use of this fabrication technology highlights its potential for other small-scale medical device applications," Narayan says.
A paper describing the study, "Multiphoton microscopy of transdermal quantum dot delivery using two photon polymerization-fabricated polymer microneedles

Creation of liver cells from skin cells gives hope in fight against liver disease

 

A human liver (Image: Department of Histology, Jagiellonian University Medical College)









Researching liver disorders is extremely difficult because liver cells (hepatocytes) cannot be grown in the laboratory. However, researchers at the University of Cambridge have now managed to create diseased liver cells from a small sample of human skin. The research shows that stem cells can be used to model a diverse range of inherited disorders and paves the way for new liver disease research and possible cell-based therapy.

Liver disease on the rise

In the UK, liver disease is the fifth largest cause of death after cardiovascular, cancer, stroke, and respiratory diseases. Over the past 30 years mortality from liver disease in young and middle-aged people has increased over six times, with the number of individuals dying from the disease increasing at a rate of 8-10 percent every year.
By 2012, the UK is expected to have the highest liver disease death rates in Europe and, without action to tackle the disease, it could overtake stroke and coronary heart disease as the leading cause of death within the next 10-20 years. In the United States, it accounts for approximately 25,000 deaths a year.

Cell-based therapy?

By replicating the liver cells, researchers can not only investigate exactly what is happening in a diseased cell, they can also test the effectiveness of new therapies to treat these conditions. It is hoped that their discovery will lead to tailored treatments for specific individuals and eventually cell-based therapy – when cells from patients with genetic diseases are 'cured' and transplanted back. Additionally, as the process could be used to model cells from other parts of the body, their findings could have implications for conditions affecting other organs.
For their research, the scientists took skin biopsies from seven patients who suffered from a variety of inherited liver diseases and three healthy individuals (the control group). They then reprogrammed cells from the skin samples back into stem cells. These stem cells were then used to generate liver cells which mimicked a broad range of liver diseases – the first time patient-specific liver diseases have been modeled using stem cells – and to create 'healthy' liver cells from the control group. Importantly, the three diseases the scientists modeled covered a diverse range of pathological mechanisms, thereby demonstrating the potential application of their research on a wide variety of disorders.
Dr Tamir Rashid of the Laboratory for Regenerative Medicine, University of Cambridge, lead author of the paper detailing the team’s findings, said: "We know that given the shortage of donor liver organs alternative strategies must urgently be sought. Our study improves the possibility that such alternatives will be found – either using new drugs or a cell-based therapeutic approach."

1.25 Gigawatts of Solar Thermal Power Approved in California in Past Two Days Will Double US Capacity

photo: BLM
There've been multiple gigawatts of solar thermal power plants planned for various places in the California desert for some time, but finally some more of them are getting the approvals need so that construction can start: The US Bureau of Land Management has issued a final environmental impact statement for the 1,000 MW Blythe Solar Power Project; and the 250 MW Beacon Solar Energy project has received final California state approval as well.
The smaller of the two first: Renewable Energy World reports NextEra Energy Resources has been given the green light by the California Energy Commission to begin construction on the 250 MW Beacon Solar Energy project.
The $1 billion, 2,000 acre solar thermal power plant will use parabolic troughs to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity. NextEra expects the power plant to come online within the next three years, though as yet it has no power purchase agreement in place. In other words, no electric utility has yet committed to buy the power the plant produces.
And the larger of the two: With the final BLM environmental impact statement completed, and the CEC already saying it will approve the project once public comment closes next month, Solar Millennium Inc. will soon begin construction on the 1,000 MW Blythe Solar Power Project.
The 7,025 acre project, also using parabolic trough technology, is expected to produce enough power for approximately 800,000 homes, and alone will nearly double the installed commercial solar power capacity in the United States.
The price tag and time til completion: $6 billion and six years once construction actually begins

A Modular, Expandable Compost Bin That Can Grow Plants and Store Tools, Too

Domestic compost bins come in many shapes and sizes, for indoor and outdoor use, tumbling or not, to help you turn organic waste into delicious hummus for garden and pot plants. However, if until now you haven't come across your desired shape or size, check out the Combox. This Spanish compost bin is the first of its kind that is completely modular in all directions, can be segmented, is totally expandable and can also serve as urban vegetable garden or storage for garden tools. And on top of it, this recycler is made of 100% recycled and recyclable post-consumer plastic waste.
Shape and Size, you decide!
Starting with the basic 150-litre modules (60 x 60 x 40 cm), you can build the size and shape you need; for example L-shaped or, O-shaped around that big tree in the middle of your garden. If you live in a small household with a bit of garden, start with 300 litres. If you suddenly find yourself move into a big house surrounded by a lush garden, you can easily upgrade the Combox to 2100, 2400 etc. litres. Pick one of the standard designs, or build and customise your own with the COMbox online application (only in Spanish so far).

Multifunctional: Compost Bin = Urban Vegetable Garden = Storage
The Combox serves as a compost bin with different compartments according to the stage of maturity of the compost. Let the compost mature until you decide to fertilise the plants, while you start another module with fresh organic waste. Moreover, you can also use some of the modules as pots to grow your own vegetables, or as storage space for gardening tools or kids' toys.

Usually garden compost bins sit straight on top of the soil so that the organisms can get in easily and the compost tea can seep into the earth. The Combox can be used as such, but it also comes with an optional base that allows you to place it on paved floors, such as a terrace. The base has a built-in drainage system and collects the liquid fertiliser in a dish underneath, which serves to water the plants.

Easy to Use All Year Round
Accessibility is key. The lid allows you to easily add fresh organic waste at the top and stir the mixture from time to time. Each panel at the bottom can be opened like a door by sliding one of the bars up, in order to extract the mature compost. If you have dry leaves in your garden, it is recommended that you use one compartment to store those and add them little by little over the winter.


100% Recycler, Recycled & Recyclable
Combox is made of 100% post-consumer waste and is non-toxic, fire-proof and weather-resistant. It is long-lasting (around 30 years!) and can be fully recycled at the end of its life. The fact that it is easily expandable, repairable (all pieces are sold separately) and the shape can be adapted to any garden or space, makes it last a lifetime or more. The company calculated that by making a 450-litre Combox out of recycled plastic instead of virgin plastic, it saves 38 kilos of CO2 emissions, which compares to the emissions of a car driving 211 km.
Flat-Pack in a Reusable Bag
The Combox is completely flat-pack, which reduces the impact on the environment during transportations. It comes in a cool reusable bag, as opposed to a cardboard box which would only last the journey. The recyclable bag can be used to collect leaves, store stuff or for shopping at IKEA...
Combox is a product by Compostadores, a Spanish company that specialises in domestic composting. For more information in English, read the Combox leaflet 'The Limits Are Set by You' on Issuu and visit the Compostadores web site. The Combox is available throughout Europe via the Compostadores online store, and the company is currently looking for distributors in the US. Prices range from 65,25€ for 300 L to 369,75€ for a 2100-litre one. One side panel costs 7,25€

Men: Pee And Wash In The Same Fixture!

Lenny Bruce would have had such fun with this, but this just makes so much sense, a sink built on top of a urinal! And designer Yeongwoo Kim has made it look good, too. The theoretical sequence is that you use the urinal, then wash your hands and the washwater rinses the urinal, saving water. Since of course, everybody washes their hands after peeing, right?

It makes even more sense in multiple units in mens rooms, saving both space and water. According to Yanko, it is a iF Concept Design 2010 winning entry.

The designer writes on his website:

To save water, Eco Urinal is designed to use the water that was used for washing hands to flush the urine. By this process, we don't have to use water twice after using the urinal. Moreover, it reduces the establishment expenses by optimizing the materials. Upper space of this urinal is made with glass, and it helps to secure a clear view for users. It also promotes people to keep their sanitation because people need to wash their hands to flush the urine after use.

This in some ways makes more sense than a waterless toilet and probably saves as much water. Gray water harvesting never looked so good.

Red Wine Mimics Defended

 

Bench Paradox Sirtris and its critics draw different conclusions about the company's mimics of a compound in red wine.

Drug candidates meant to emulate the antiaging effects of the red wine component resveratrol work by binding to their enzyme target at a site outside the active site, according to research presented on Aug. 22 at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Boston. The discovery adds a new twist to a debate over whether the molecules, from GlaxoSmithKline subsidiary Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, work as claimed.
Resveratrol extends life span in fruit flies and worms, and it's been suggested that the compound works by acting on enzymes called sirtuins that remove acetyl groups from proteins. Sirtris was founded with the goal of activating the sirtuin pathway, thought to have a hand in the antiaging benefits of calorie restriction, to treat diseases of aging. The company developed a series of potential drug candidates, such as SRT1720, which it said were more potent sirtuin activators than resveratrol is. In 2008, GSK acquired Sirtris for $720 million.
But as early as 2005, scientists were debating whether resveratrol was a bona fide activator of SIRT1, the most widely studied human sirtuin enzyme. By 2009, three independent teams concluded that Sirtris' method for measuring SIRT1 activation was flawed because resveratrol activated SIRT1 only in the presence of a fluorescent peptide substrate used to measure its acetyl-removing activity. In January, researchers at Pfizer further fueled controversy by reporting that Sirtris' SIRT1-targeted compounds don't actually activate SIRT1.
At the meeting, Ross L. Stein, vice president of discovery research at Sirtris, fired back at critics. He said Sirtris' compounds do activate SIRT1. He said his team's data, recently published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (DOI: 10.1074/jbc.M110.133892), suggest that the molecules act by binding to an allosteric site on the enzyme.
The Pfizer team had reported that SRT1720 and two other Sirtris compounds were binding to the fluorescent substrate, giving the illusion of SIRT1 activation. In Boston, Stein confirmed that those compounds do bind to the substrate. But he said this does not rule out an allosteric activation mechanism. He went on to describe other compounds that don't bind to the fluorescent substrate yet still activate SIRT1.
Matt R. Kaeberlein of the University of Washington, who questioned Sirtris' assay in 2005 but did not attend the presentation, says that although an allosteric mechanism is a good fit for the data in Sirtris' publication, the antiaging relevance of the company's compounds will ultimately be determined not by biochemical experiments but by animal models and clinical trials. "I don't think this study really means much for the field of aging-related science as a whole," he said.
The presentation came just more than a week after GSK asked two employees, both former Sirtris executives, to cease their association with a nonprofit group that sells resveratrol supplements online.

Carbon Credits Under Fire

 

Arkema has received carbon credits for its HCFC-22 plant in China.

The United Nations is reviewing carbon credits it awards to firms that claim to be reducing greenhouse gas emissions in China and elsewhere. Critics contend that the firms are gaming the carbon-trading system that awards credits to industrial companies that need to meet Kyoto protocol obligations for carbon emissions.
The executive board of the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the body that registers and issues carbon credits under the Kyoto protocol, says it will study six projects whose operators receive credits for destroying the fluorocarbon HFC-23, a potent greenhouse gas.
CDM has awarded credits to projects in China, India, South Korea, Mexico, and Argentina, where factories manufacture the refrigerant HCFC-22. The HFC-23 destroyed at the facilities is a by-product that could otherwise be legally released to the atmosphere. Critics claim that chemical firms are producing more HCFC-22 than the market demands to profit from the carbon credits.
The projects under review belong to five Chinese and one Indian chemical maker and are aided by investments from financial firms in Europe, one of the places in the developed world where carbon credits are sold. Thirteen similar projects registered by CDM have not been singled out for review. For example, French chemical company Arkema has a Chinese HCFC-22 joint venture for which it has earned carbon credits. And U.K.-based Ineos recently requested carbon credits from CDM for an HCFC-22 project in South Korea.
A European environmental group, CDM Watch, has demanded that the UN cut carbon credits it awarded to the projects by more than 90%. The reduction “would remove the current financial incentive that causes plants to produce gas for the sole purpose of getting paid to destroy it,” says CDM Watch Director Eva Filzmoser.
The carbon credit marketplace is likely to change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. The EU’s climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, called on the UN to put in place more stringent restrictions on credits for industrial projects after 2012. A first step toward a more advanced carbon market would be an overhaul of CDM, she said.

A Head-Shaking Sensor

 

SHAKE IT This mannequin, connected to a live-cell sensor, shakes its head when it gets a whiff of certain molecules, such as bombykol and bombykal.

Researchers in Japan have built what is arguably the most eccentric chemical sensor to date: a living cell whose membrane is embedded with insect pheromone receptors, which, when activated by a whiff of pheromone, produce a current that causes a robotic mannequin to shake its head (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1004334107). Equipped with different receptors, this biorobotic sensor prototype could one day have applications in environmental and health monitoring.
The proof-of-principle apparatus, which includes a frog oocyte (egg) containing silkworm, fruit fly, or moth receptors, was developed by a team of researchers led by Shoji Takeuchi, a bioengineer at the University of Tokyo. The sensor—which provides electrical current that is used for data readout and also, in a bit of fun, to control a mannequin—can detect a handful of molecules present in only parts per billion in a solution. It can also distinguish slight differences in double bond isomerism or in functional group composition, such as the presence of —OH, —CHO or —C(=O)—groups.
Although other researchers have built similar cell-based detectors using biological molecules as receptors, "hooking up the frog egg expressing insect odorant receptors to a robotic head that shakes when the odor is present certainly is novel," comments Leslie B. Vosshall, of Rockfeller University. "I can certainly imagine an optimized version of this technology being used as a biosensor in military, food safety, and transportation safety uses," she adds.
So far Takeuchi's group has made a sensor that can detect only insect pheromones, but "we think that our sensor can potentially be applied to detect a ketone odor that is caused by diabetes or to detect allergens [in food] such as aldehydes," he says.

Silver Bullet For Fluorinations

Ezetimibe (left), a molecule rich in functional groups, easily tolerates the new fluorination's mild conditions

 Banking on the chemistry of silver, scientists have developed a new cross-coupling reaction that allows them to tack fluorine atoms onto aromatic substituents, even in densely functionalized molecules. The reaction, which was presented today at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Boston, could be a boon to the synthesis of radiotracers for positron emission tomography (PET), for which new methods to install ¹⁸F during the final stages of synthesis are needed.
The reaction, developed by Tobias Ritter, Pingping Tang, and Takeru Furuya of Harvard University, uses silver oxide to catalyze the fluorination of aryl tin compounds with the electrophilic fluorinating reagent N-chloromethyl-N-fluorotriethylenediammonium hexafluorophosphate (J. Am. Chem. Soc., DOI: 10.1021/ja105834t). The reaction "is the first example of silver catalysis for carbon-heteroatom bond formation by cross-coupling chemistry," Ritter notes.
"One area my group is terribly interested in is developing new ways to develop tracers for PET imaging," Ritter says. Such syntheses dictate that short-lived radioactive isotopes are incorporated during the final steps of making the molecule. "PET with ¹⁸F is currently limited by the absence of general chemistry that can introduce fluorine into molecules at a late stage," he explains. He believes the new reaction could help solve that problem.
Ritter's group demonstrates the versatility of its new cross-coupling by using it to fluorinate polypeptides, polyketides, and alkaloids. They show that many functional groups, including a vinyl ether, a dienone, alcohols, an allylic alcohol, ethers, esters, and an oxetane survive the reaction unscathed. "To date, no other fluorination reaction has been shown to have a substrate scope as broad as that shown here," Ritter points out.
"Late fluorination processes for highly functionalized molecules are in high demand, and the silver-catalyzed carbon-fluorine bond formation developed by Ritter is a great advance," comments Véronique Gouverneur, a chemistry professor at Oxford University, in England, who recently developed ¹⁸F-labeled Selectfluor (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., DOI: 10.1002/anie.201002310), a fluorinating reagent that's very similar to the one Ritter's group uses. "This work is certain to find immediate application in pharmaceutical research and beyond," she says.

Making Edible Nanostructures

 

Made from γ-cyclodextrin and salt substitute (KCl), this framework compound is crystalline, porous, and edible. Gray = C, red = O, purple = K.

Common foodstuffs aren’t typical synthesis starting materials. But they’re exactly what a team of researchers used to make novel compounds that are porous, crystalline, and edible.

By starting with food-grade γ-cyclodextrin (CD), salt substitute (potassium chloride), and grain spirits (ethanol), researchers at Northwestern University and UCLA synthesized new types of metal-organic framework (MOF) compounds. The advance—which could have pharmaceutical and food science applications—was reported on Aug. 25, at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Boston (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., DOI: 10.1002/anie.201002343).

MOF compounds, which consist of metal ions or clusters connected by organic linkers, have broad commercial appeal for use in gas storage and purification, catalysis, and chemical sensing.

But as the study’s first author, Ronald A. Smaldone, a postdoc working with Northwestern chemistry professor J. Fraser Stoddart, explained, the vast majority of MOFs described to date are composed of organic units derived from nonrenewable petrochemical feedstocks and transition metals. Making the compounds from nontoxic, biorenewable starting materials would be environmentally advantageous and could offer cost savings. But that task has remained challenging due to the inherent asymmetry of many natural building units and the difficulty in using them to synthesize crystalline porous products.

To sidestep that problem, the Northwestern team, UCLA’s Omar M. Yaghi, and coworkers linked γ-CD—a symmetrical oligosaccharide composed of asymmetrical units and produced commercially from starch—with potassium ions and separately with other alkali ions to form a new family of CD-MOF compounds.

“Edible MOFs are a stunning example of the power of self-assembly from simple and readily available components,” said Leonard R. MacGillivray, a University of Iowa chemistry professor. This work will likely challenge other researchers to seek the design and construction of frameworks from renewable and benign starting materials, he said. MacGillivray added that the study suggests that merging function and issues of sustainability is a real possibility in this rapidly developing area.

Chemists Convene In Boston

At the 240th American Chemical Society national meeting in Boston, held on Aug. 22–26, the society hosted more than 14,000 chemical professionals, students, and enthusiasts who learned about the latest advances in the chemical sciences through rich programming that included roughly 8,000 papers delivered in approximately 5,000 oral presentations and 3,000 posters. More than 320 exhibitors participated in the exposition.
Even the Nor’easter that hovered relentlessly over Boston for four days couldn’t dampen the spirit of the meeting, the theme of which was “Chemistry for Preventing & Combating Disease.” ACS President Joseph S. Francisco cosponsored more than a dozen presidential sessions, from the “Impact of Science & Technology on the Future of Global Healthcare” to the “ACS Forum on Science & Consequences of Climate Change.”
The meeting also highlighted the achievements of women in chemistry through symposia such as “Women at the Forefront of Preventing & Combating Disease” and the “Women Chemists of Color Summit.”
The ACS Fellows program inducted 192 scientific leaders into its 2010 class; the Heroes of Chemistry gala celebrated outstanding scientific achievements; and the ChemLuminary Awards reception saluted exceptional ACS volunteers.
The improving job market led to a strong employer turnout at the ACS Career Fair, which welcomed more than 1,000 job seekers. Roughly 70 employers recruited for nearly 500 available positions.
During the ACS Board meeting, sister chemical societies from around the world described their planned activities for the 2011 International Year of Chemistry. In addition, ACS and the German Chemical Society signed a memorandum of understanding committing to a three-year alliance to help communicate the importance of chemistry to the general public.
At the ACS Council meeting, councilors voted to change the bylaws to allow recorded electronic votes. They also discussed whether to move the council meetings from Wednesday to Tuesday during national meetings. An informal poll revealed that 55% of the councilors opposed the change, while 31.3% supported it and 13.7% were undecided. The Council Policy Committee will make a decision on this matter at the 2011 spring national meeting in Anaheim, Calif.

Judge Halts Stem Cell Research

 

A federal court has temporarily blocked the National Institutes of Health from funding human embryonic stem cell research. In an Aug. 23 ruling that took many scientists by surprise, Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia put NIH’s current stem cell policy on hold until a lawsuit over it is settled.
The lawsuit was filed a year ago by Christian groups, which claim that NIH’s stem cell policy violates a law known as the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. That law prohibits the use of federal funds for research that destroys human embryos.
The ruling is expected to have a dramatic impact on human embryonic stem cell research. Scientists who have already received NIH funding for such research can continue to use the money. But they won’t get additional funding when their project comes up for annual review if the situation is not resolved, NIH Director Francis S. Collins explained at an Aug. 24 briefing.
Dozens of grant applications, many of which have already received high scores during peer review, have been pulled from consideration for NIH funding because of the ruling, Collins said. The agency has also called off a review of several human embryonic stem cell lines for addition to the NIH registry.
“This decision has the potential to do serious damage to one of the most promising areas of biomedical research, just at the time when we were really gaining momentum,” Collins stressed. “Researchers will likely grow discouraged and move on to other countries or other fields of research.”
Many in the research community also condemn the ruling. “The decision is a deplorable brake on all stem cell research,” says Alan Trounson, president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. “Under this decision, even research using the human embryonic stem cell lines approved by President George W. Bush will be halted.”
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), who has repeatedly introduced legislation in the House of Representatives with Michael Castle (R-Del.) that would expand federal funding for stem cell research, says the “ruling underscores why we must pass commonsense embryonic stem cell research legislation.” Such legislation was vetoed twice by Bush, who had put restrictions on federal funding for such work. Those restrictions were lifted in March 2009 when President Barack Obama signed an executive order opening federal funding in this area.
Opponents of human embryonic stem cell research, however, welcome the ruling. “The American people should not be forced to pay for experiments—prohibited by federal law—that destroy human life,” Steven H. Aden, senior legal counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), said in a statement. ADF is cocounsel for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the injunction.
The lawsuit has a complicated history. It was dismissed in October 2009 after a judge ruled that the plaintiffs had no standing. But two of the plaintiffs—James L. Sherley, a researcher at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute, and Theresa Deisher, director of research and development at AVM Biotechnology, a Seattle-based firm—appealed the case. They argued that federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research limits federal dollars for adult stem cell research. Both researchers work with adult stem cells.
The court of appeals reversed the dismissal in June and sent the case back to the district court to consider the plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction while the lawsuit proceeds.
The Department of Justice is reviewing the ruling with respect to the injunction and says the Administration plans to appeal it.