Stanford Researchers Create Transparent Battery
Those guys at Stanford University are pretty bright, aren't they? First they come up with paper batteries, then they discover efficiency-boosting technologies for lithium-ion batteries. Well, tack on another achievement, folks, because they have just created a transparent battery!
Professor Yi Cui and masters student Yuan Yang led a team of researchers that devised a way to create nanometer-wide grids that, when assembled properly, create a working lithium-ion battery. The best way to imagine it is to think of an incredibly small grid that is held together by a transparent, rubbery, and conductive compound called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The name looks like quite strange and is certainly a mouthful, but anybody who wears contact lenses will be quite familiar with PDMS.
The individual gridlines are composed of layers of metal, a special solution that contains "nano-sized active electrode materials" (aka the positive and negative ends of the battery), and a transparent gel that acts as a separator and electrolyte (aka the stuff in the middle that electricity passes through) simultaneously. Each one of these gridlines is 35 microns in width, making it impossible to see with the naked eye. This, in conjunction with the PDMS in which the grid sits, makes it an incredibly thin and transparent lithium-ion battery.
But how effective is it? Unfortunately, these transparent batteries are only half as powerful as their opaque brothers. Yang compares their energy density to that of nickel-cadmium batteries, an older technology that is most common in toys and other small electronics.
The good news is that what it lacks in capacity, it makes up in its lower costs. Cui claims that if they were to use low-cost metals, these transparent batteries could be as cheap as the AA and AAA batteries you see at your local supermarket.
Check out the video below from Stanford University to get a glimpse at the new technology. Professor Cui talks about having a transparent phone, but I personally think that would just make it twice as impossible to find. I'm more interested in cell phone accessories like cases or skins that double as backup batteries, without adding the additional bulk that current ones do.
Sources: Stanford University News via Engadget
German Scientists Modify Fruit Fly Larvae to “Smell” Light
Researchers at Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum in Germany have managed to genetically engineer the larvae of Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly, to smell blue light. Although this doesn't have any direct consequences for what most of us do on a daily basis, it paves the way for future research and could lead to some very interesting applications.
The researchers achieved this by taking a gene for a protein that is activated when in the presence of blue light, and splicing it into the olfactory cells of the fruit fly larvae. This meant that whenever the larvae were in the presence of blue light, it would stimulate their olfactory system to pick up on a certain smell. The smell itself was something that the researchers could tweak to their pleasing, so depending on what they were tweaking, the larvae would smell things like rotting fruit, marzipan, or glue.
This is an interesting breakthrough, but how does it relate to the wider scheme of things? Well, the next step for the researchers is to try to recreate this experiment with adult fruit flies. If it should ever be successful in larger animals that are similar to human being and there were no laws to prohibit it, this sort of thing could be seen in humans, although it would be many years away.
Source: MIT Technology Review via Engadget
Gamers Have More Control Over Their Dreams
Mark a point for kids in the never-ending "too much videogames" debate.
According to a new study, people who play video games are more like to have lucid dreams (dreams in which the individual is aware that they are dreaming), have more control over what happens in their dreams, and even switch perspectives within them.
A psychologist named Jayne Gackenbach from Grant MacEwan University in Canada carried out a study that analyzed the dreams of gamers, and found that their time spent playing video games was almost like practice for their experiences within dreams. Her interest stemmed from a previous study that found that gamers are less prone to motion sickness and have better spatial skills. With this sort of context for her research, Gackenbach carried out two studies.
The first analyzed how common it was for gamers to have lucid dreams, and found that avid gamers were more likely to have lucid dreams, dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dreams where they could control their surrounding environment.
The second study was similar but slightly different, and suggested that while gamers have lucid, first/third person dreams, they actually do not have control over anything more than their dream selves.
The really interesting part of Gackenbach's work, however, was on gamers and nightmares. In it, she found that gamers have less nightmares with threatening situations. In addition, when they do have these nightmares, they often become the threatening presence in the dream. In other words, they fight back instead of cowering from whatever it is that is attacking them physically or mentally.
Gackenbach had this to say about gamers' debated tendencies to have more violent dreams than non-gamers: "If you look at the actual overall amount of aggression, gamers have less aggression in dreams... But when they're aggressive, oh boy, they go off the top."
Gackenbach hopes to carry on her research and apply it to PTSD sufferers, of which 71 to 96 percent experience nightmares. The hope would be to train them to master their fears in dreams as training for their waking hours.
Source: Live Science via Engadget
Scientists Recreate Antifreeze-like Mammoth Blood
Cloning is a very touchy subject. Some people feel like it's equivalent to playing God. Others think that it can hold the key to solving a countless number of diseases and sicknesses, and should be pursued as far as possible. Scientists at the University of Adelaide have found a middle ground between the two viewpoints with their recent discovery about mammoth blood. They haven't recreated an entire Siberian mammoth, but rather just a part of it. Using genetic information from samples that have been frozen in the Arctic for tens of thousands of years, the researchers recreated mammoth hemoglobin.
Hemoglobin is the substance in your red blood cells (the cells that make up your blood) that carries oxygen all over your body. Oxygen molecules stick to the hemoglobin and travel through veins on their way to be absorbed by tissues in your brain, extremities, and organs.
When it gets very cold, however, the hemoglobin in the human body does not function correctly. It tends to get more sticky and not flow as well as when it is warmer. When this happens, human beings risk getting frostbite and losing fingers, toes, feet, hands, and even limbs (and lives).
An animal like the mammoth, on the other hand, had evolved to the point that frostbite wasn't as big a problem. After analyzing the hemoglobin molecules that they recreated using the replicating processes of E.coli bacteria, the scientists found that mammoth hemoglobin didn't get sticky and move slower when it got cold. That means that it was more efficient at transferring oxygen at subzero temperatures. They think that this means that the mammoth didn't have to waste energy trying to keep its extremities warm, and could instead focus on maintaining correct body temperature.
This method of studying extinct animals piece by piece, rather than trying to recreate a entire, cloned one, could pave the way for learning a lot more about animals that have become extinct, but that preserved genetic material still exists.
Below is a video of one of the scientists describing what they did. Not too exciting, but very interesting and definitely worth a view.
Source: Gizmodo
Scientists Achieve Three Dimensional Cloaking
All of us, at one time or another, have put on an article of clothing and noticed a minor imperfection in it. And most of us have consequently said to ourselves "I wish that micrometer-high bump wasn't there, it's so obvious!" Well, now the prospect of using a cloaking device to hide that unsightly bump is looking much, much better!
Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have devised a way to hide a small bump in material by covering it with a "photonic metamaterial" (an artificial material that can affect the way light bounces off of it).
Basically, seeing a bump entails noticing how light rays bounce off of it in a manner that differs from what is around it. Using this metamaterial, which is actually a synthetic crystal, scientists were able to cover a small bump that was one micrometer high, and correct the distortion in light that the bump caused.
The big advancement with this technology is that it cloaks whatever is under it in three dimensions. Previous iterations of cloaking technology only worked from one perspective. That is, if you were standing in the right spot and looking at whatever was being cloaked from the right angle, it would be invisible. But move over a bit and change your perspective, and it would no longer be cloaked. This technology, however, works from any angle you from which you can observe.
The technology used to create the metamaterial is not yet at the point where it can be manufactured in mass quantities to make invisibility cloaks and stealth technology for spaceships, but this is a great advance in proving that the original concept of this technology can actually work.
Source: BBC via Gizmodo
Spanish Team Implants Microprocessors into Living Human Cells
Recently a Spanish team of scientist has injected microprocessors into live human cells, bringing us one step closer to a future rife with cyborgs (they're walking among us!). The team of researchers at Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona injected the 3-nanometer-wide chips into human cells and observed over 90% of the cells survived the procedure. What exactly does this mean?
Well, implanting microprocessors into living cells can yield an endless amount of possibilities (just imagine all the capabilities of a computer, then imagine all those capabilities, except INSIDE a living human cell) but one example could be monitoring levels of chemicals in the body, or temperature, or anything else sensors can measure. My personal favorite is the idea of smart drug delivery. Smart drug delivery is the idea that it's possible to deliver medicine only to the cells in the body that are afflicted by a sickness (say, cancer), instead of to the entire body. Basically, it's the difference between carpet bombing and laser-guided precision ordnance delivery. Why deliver toxic chemotherapy medicine to all the cells in the body if you can administer it to cancerous cells only?
Hat's off to the Catalonian scientists!
Source: Engadget