Lifeboat Foundation

Now, a team of engineers at Washington University in St. Louis has found a way to use graphene oxide sheets to transform dirty water into drinking water, and it could be a global game-changer.

“We hope that for countries where there is ample sunlight, such as India, you’ll be able to take some dirty water, evaporate it using our material, and collect fresh water,” said Srikanth Singamaneni, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

The new approach combines bacteria-produced cellulose and graphene oxide to form a bi-layered biofoam. A paper detailing the research is available online in Advanced Materials.

A team built a specialized, layered structure with tiny metallic cavities that improves the light conversion efficiency by orders of magnitude.

Artist’s rendering of an incident laser beam (top of the figure) illuminating an array of nanoscale gold resonators on the surface of a “quantum well” semiconductor (slab in figure). (A quantum well is a thin layer that can restrict the movement of electrons to that layer.) The incoming laser beam interacts with the array and the quantum wells and is converted into two new laser beams with different wavelengths. Changing the size, shape, and arrangement of the resonators can be used for beam focusing, beam steering, or control of the beam’s angular momentum. (Image: Sandia National Laboratories)

Continue reading “Getting light in shape with metamaterials” »

Circuits built from carbon nanotubes will give silicon real competition.

One area that I am researching and learning more about is synthetic diamonds/ diamondoids. I came across this white paper written on the Nanofactory and wanted to share.

A research team at the University of Washington has harnessed complex computational methods to design customized proteins that can self-assemble into 120-subunit “icosahedral” structures inside living cells—the biggest, self-booting, intracellular protein nanocages ever made. The breakthrough offers a potential solution to a pressing scientific challenge: how to safely and efficiently deliver to cells new and emerging biomedical treatments such as DNA vaccines and therapeutic interfering particles.

The work, funded by DARPA in a lead-up to the new INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, “opens the door to a new generation of genetically programmable protein-based molecular machines,” the researchers report in this week’s issue of the journal Science. The research paper is available here: http://ow.ly/LW8F302tOp3

Anyone familiar with the role-playing games Dungeons and Dragons and Munchkin need only picture the 20-sided die to understand what an organic, icosahedral cargo container looks like—symmetrical, triangle-shaped panels folded evenly on each side. Unlike a die that can be held in your hand, however, these creations are the size of small viruses and are designed to interact with cells in the same way viruses might—that is, by delivering their caged contents into a cell, albeit in this case with positive, customizable outcomes. Also, whereas dice are produced in molds on a factory assembly line, these nanocages build themselves inside cells, following with atomic precision instructions written in genetic code.

Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde has come up with an innovative plan to tackle Beijing’s air pollution problem – and in doing so, turn a health hazard into a thing of beauty.

After a pilot in Rotterdam, the Smog Free Project is coming to China. The project consists of two parts. First, a 7m tall tower sucks up polluted air, and cleans it at a nano-level. Second, the carbon from smog particles is turned into diamonds. Yes, diamonds.

Continue reading “Why turning China’s smog into diamonds isn’t as crazy as it sounds” »

Will we live longer lives in the future? According to Ray Kurzweil, it’s only a matter of time until technology begins successfully tackling age-related disease—and life expectancy grows longer and longer. At some point, technology will annually add more than a year to our life expectancy—allowing us to indefinitely increase lifespans, and perhaps eventually live as long as we want.

“We will get to a point where our longevity, our remaining life expectancy is moving on away from us. The sands of time will run in rather than run out,” Kurzweil says.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil Outlines the Coming Biomedical Revolution [Video]” »

Researchers have demonstrated how to control the “electron spin” of a nanodiamond while it is levitated with lasers in a vacuum, an advance that could find applications in quantum information processing, sensors and studies into the fundamental physics of quantum mechanics.

Electrons can be thought of as having two distinct spin states, “up” or “down.” The researchers were able to detect and control the electron spin resonance, or its change from one state to the other.

Continue reading “Precisely controlled levitation of nanodiamonds could bring advances in sensors, quantum information processing” »

I’m telling folks there is much to be learn in the usage of natural and synthetic resources especially around diamonds — Nanodiamonds Magic.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers have demonstrated how to control the “electron spin” of a nanodiamond while it is levitated with lasers in a vacuum, an advance that could find applications in quantum information processing, sensors and studies into the fundamental physics of quantum mechanics.

Electrons can be thought of as having two distinct spin states, “up” or “down.” The researchers were able to detect and control the electron spin resonance, or its change from one state to the other.

Continue reading “Electron spin control: Levitated nanodiamond is research gem” »