Graphene Converts Heat into Electrical Energy

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Graphene Converts Heat into Electrical Energy

Graphene, an allotrope of carbon, was first isolated at the University of Manchester in 2004 by Sir Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov. In 2010, they had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery. Graphene’s most unique property is that it is just 1 atom thick, making it the first 2-dimensional material. At present, the university remains the home of graphene research, with over forty industrial partners working on graphene-related projects.

Graphene, a miracle
Graphene, a ‘miracle material’ – Source: CNN

Not too long ago, its scientists, working with European Thermodynamics Ltd, created low-cost thermoelectric materials that could be used to capture warmth from vehicles and convert it into electrical energy. That electricity can then be used to recharge the batteries in hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electrical cars to provide them extra range.

The group—led by Prof Ian Kinloch, Prof Robert Freer, and Yue Lin—added a small quantity of graphene to strontium titanium oxide. The resulting composite was able to convert heat that would otherwise be wasted into an electrical current over a broad temperature range, starting at room temperature. Previously, thermo-electric materials only functioned at extremely high temperatures of around 700 degrees Centigrade.

“Our findings show that by introducing a small amount of graphene to the base material can cut back the thermal operating window to room temperature which offers an enormous range of potential for applications,” said Prof Freer. “This brand new material will convert 3-5% of the heat into electrical energy. That’s not a lot but, given that the average automobile loses roughly 70% of the energy supplied to it by its fuel to waste heat and friction, recovering even a small proportion of this with thermo-electric technology would be worthwhile.”

The numbers get a bit complicated, but if a standard internal combustion engine only converts 30% of its fuel into forward movement, recapturing only 3% of its wasted heat may translate into a 10% improvement in fuel economy. Car manufacturers today would be thrilled to make their vehicles 10% more fuel efficient as they battle to comply with tough new laws set to begin shortly in the US and Europe.

The quest to enhance fuel efficiency while retaining performance is of huge interest to automobile manufacturers. Not only could graphene boost fuel economy, it may also improve safety when used as a composite material in the chassis to reduce overall car weight.

Recapturing waste energy for tomorrow’s vehicles has led to proposals for tires that produce a small electrical voltage while driving as well as shock absorbers that do the same thing. Range is the new “Holy Grail” for makers of cars with batteries. Anything that helps add range to tomorrow’s automobiles will probably be gladly exploited by the auto industry.

Watch this helpful if somewhat light hearted video to learn more about graphene.

 

Buildings to be powered by Solar Windows

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Buildings to be powered by Solar Windows

Manhattan has roughly forty seven thousand buildings with around 10.7 million windows, based on a 2013 estimate from The New York Times.

Now think about if just 1%, that’s 100,700, of these windows could generate electricity via transparent solar cells.
That is the concept behind solar power windows, and at least two firms are hoping to sell the technology to windows manufacturers, saying once put in in a building the technology pays for itself in about an year.

“If you look at the glass that’s manufactured worldwide today, 2% of it’s used for solar panels; 80% of it is used in buildings. That is the opportunity,” stated Suvi Sharma, CEO of solar panel maker Solaria.

Solaria uses existing photo voltaic (PV) cells and slices them into 2.5mm strips. It then sandwiches these thin PV strips between glass layers in a window. “The way human eye works, you don’t even notice them,” Sharma mentioned.

Solaria Solar window
Solaria
Solaria uses photo-voltaic cells cut into 2.5mm strips and embedded in window glass to generate electricity. That’s what a typical system would look like.

Another benefit? Because the PV strips absorb light striking a window, they cut back the “solar heat gain coefficient”; in other words, the windows reduce the sunlight’s impact on a building’s internal air temperature and thereby decrease air conditioning costs.

Solaria is focusing on its technology for windows that will likely be installed in newly constructed buildings.

Another firm, SolarWindow Technologies, is pitching a different type of transparent PV cell technology for new construction, replacement windows and retrofits to existing windows.

SolarWindow is utilizing what it calls organic photovoltaics, which can vary in coloration and transparency. The company is planning to announce its product in a few weeks.

SolarWindow CEO John Conklin stated what sets his firm’s technology apart is its ease of integration. Because it is based on a PV film, it may be adhered to existing windows or integrated into manufactured products relatively easily.

 

SolarWindow Tech
SolarWindow Technologies
Electricity generating SolarWindow module that is being developed in architecturally neutral colors.

Depending on the number of south-facing windows, which get a majority of the sun’s light, and the construction’s location in the U.S., Solaria’s technology may provide from 20% to 30% of a skyscraper’s power needs, Conklin stated.

Conklin wouldn’t disclose precisely which organic materials SolarWindow makes use of.

In 2013, however, Oxford University researchers released the results of a study on how neutral-colored, semi-transparent photo voltaic cells made of perovskite could be utilized in building and car windows to generate electrical energy. Perovskite is an oxide used in ceramic superconductors.

Man holding solar window
Oxford Energy
Oxford University professor Henry Snaith holds up a clear piece of glass that has a transparent perovskite solar cell film on it.

The Oxford researchers said they could create transparent solar cells with comparatively high efficiencies. For example, the researchers were able to drive PV efficiencies up to 20% in a “remarkably short period of time” using a simple cell architecture.

The university’s work is being commercialized by Oxford Photovoltaics (a spin-out company), which is planning to produce attractively colored and semi-transparent glass, which works as a solar cell and could be integrated into the facades of buildings and windows.

Similarly, a team of researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) has developed a new type of transparent solar concentrator that when placed over a window creates solar energy.

Called a transparent luminescent solar concentrator (TLSC), MSU’s technology can not only be used on building windows but also on cell phones and any other device that has a clear, uncolored surface.

Clear solar cell
Yimu Zhao
A team of researchers at Michigan State University has developed a new type of transparent solar concentrator that when placed over a window creates solar energy.

Richard Lunt of MSU’s College of Engineering said the key to the TLSC technology is that it’s completely transparent.

“No one wants to sit behind colored glass,” Lunt, an assistant professor of chemical engineering and materials science, said in a statement. “It makes for a very colorful environment, like working in a disco. We take an approach where we actually make the luminescent active layer itself transparent.”

MSU’s solar harvesting technology uses small organic molecules developed by Lunt and his team to absorb specific non-visible wavelengths of sunlight.

One problem with MSU’s technology is that more work is needed to improve its energy efficiency. Currently it is able to produce a solar conversion efficiency close to 1%, but the researchers hope to achieve efficiencies beyond 5% when fully optimized.

Today, traditional solar power panels that reside in solar farms or on building rooftops can achieve a PV efficiency of about 15% to 20%. The efficiency rating refers to how much of the photons striking a solar cell are converted into energy.

Solaria’s solar window technology can achieve a solar efficiency of about 8% to 10%. SolarWindow’s Conklin would not disclose his company’s technology efficiency rating, but did say it was less than standard PV panels.

“Obviously when you’re looking at absorbing visible light and it’s transparent, it’s not as efficient as an opaque panel,” Conklin said.

When it comes to solar windows, however, efficiency matters less than transparency, Conklin said.

Making the solar window
Photo by G.L. Kohuth
Yimu Zhao, a doctoral student in chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University, and Richard Lunt, assistant professor of chemical engineering and materials science, run a test in Lunt’s lab. Lunt and his team have developed a new material that can be placed over windows and create solar energy.

“When you’re looking at transparent or clear photo-voltaics, it’s not necessarily a function of power conversion efficiency as it is about using the vast amount of space available for that tech,” Conklin said. “We’re making use of the space that right now is not available for solar energy production. Passive windows are turned into active energy generating windows.”

In other words, transparent solar PV is about not wasting perfectly good real estate in order to supplement a building’s energy requirements.

The solar window technologies make the most of varying strategies of transmitting the energy that the PVs produce to a building’s internal power infrastructure.

Solaria, for instance, hides its wiring within the window’s frame, and the connectors are wired into a newly constructed building’s electrical conduits. These conduits lead to a central power inverter, which converts the solar windows direct current to alternating current that’s used in the electrical grid.

SolarWindow’s technology can come with micro DC-to-AC power inverters, allowing the electricity to be used only in one room with a solar window. Alternately, it can be connected to a distributed micro grid inverter to power a single floor of a building or to a central inverter from which the entire building can draw power.

 

Solaria is already piloting its windows in “a few” buildings and it is working on the first large-scale commercial projects in California and Europe, according to Sharma. Sharma did not disclose the projects.

Solaria has also partnered with Tokyo-based Asahi Glass Co., a global glass manufacturer. Sharma said Asahi intends to sell both windows and a bamboo shade called Sudare with embedded solar cells from Solaria.

“So we’re enabling different glass and curtain wall providers in North America, Europe and Asia to provide products,” Sharma said.

Solar windows will cost about 40% more than conventional windows, but the ROI is achievable in under a year and there’s big demand even though products have yet to ship, the manufacturers say.

“It’s actually very viable and will be even more viable as we approach our product launch,” Conklin said. “It’s in very high demand because right now skyscrapers… don’t have a good way of offsetting energy through renewable energy generation.”

Sensitive stuff that goes boom, even if touched by a mosquito

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Sensitive stuff that goes boom, even if touched by a mosquito

When a feather drops on it, or a mosquito lands on top of nitrogen triiodide – Booom! – an instantaneous dark purple or violet explosion occurs. It’s because nitrogen triiodide is so unstable that it detonates even when it’s barely disturbed.

Three iodine atoms cluster around one side of a nitrogen atom. Being crowded around one end causes something known as bond strain as the atoms repel each other in a small space. Hence that the molecule is susceptible to falling apart, lets say, quite explosively.

NO3 in 3d
NO3 visualized in 3D – Source: Wikipedia

You should definitely take a look at the awesome slow-mo video of triiodide blasting off, created by the blokes over at the Royal Institution.

 Dailymotion:

YouTube:

 Enjoy, and don’t forget to like and share 🙂

Student faces 10 years for Android Malware

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Student faces 10 years for Android Malware

Morgan C. Culbertson, a student from Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday admitted in federal court to designing and attempting to promote malware that allowed users to take control of other people’s Android smartphones/tablets.

“I’m sorry to the people to whom my software may have compromised their privacy,” Mr. Culbertson stated in pleading guilty to conspiracy to damage protected computer systems.

He informed U.S. District Judge Maurice Cohill Jr. that he was pleading guilty because “I committed the crime” and promised that in the future he would use his expertise to protect computer users.

Assistant U.S. Attorney James Kitchen mentioned that in 2013 Mr. Culbertson, who called  himself “Android” online, conspired with another man, “Mike” from the Netherlands, to design a product known as Dendroid and sell it on Darkode, an underground web-based market for criminals and hackers.

Mr. Culbertson, 20, of Churchill, faces up to 10 years in jail when Judge Cohill sentences him in December, though he’s unlikely to get anywhere close to the maximum. He had no comment following the hearing, nor did his lawyer, Emily McNally, or his family.

Dendroid infected victims’ android systems, permitting a customer who had purchased the malware to spy on texts, pilfer files, take images, view browser history & record conversations, all with out the owners’ consent or knowledge.

Mr. Culbertson later bought out Mike’s share of the partnership and began working with another man identified as “Elzig,” Mr. Kitchen stated, in an attempt to market Dendroid on Darkode.

Mr. Culbertson advertised the malware on Darkode for $300, saying he had spent “1.3 years” designing it, and in addition tried to auction the source code that might allow consumers to create their very own version of Dendroid.

Ms. McNally said he didn’t get any offers on his auction attempt.

Following the plea, Judge Cohill allowed Mr. Culbertson to stay free on a $10,000 bond. An engineering student who has completed his sophomore year in the College of Engineering, he told the judge he has taken a leave of absence from the CMU.

CMU spokesman Ken Walters stated that the university had no comment on the matter. Asked if the university had a policy against permitting a pupil to remain enrolled after being convicted of a felony, Mr. Walters said he didn’t know and he has forwarded the query to the administrators.

The Carnegie Mellon Code of Conduct, which is available on the university’s web site, states that college students “are expected to satisfy the highest standards of personal, ethical and moral conduct possible. … Students who can’t meet them should voluntarily withdraw from the university.”

A graduate of Winchester Thurston, a private school in Shadyside, Mr. Culbertson was described by those that know him as an clever, respectful and level-headed student who worked hard and excelled on the tennis team. He was said to have many friends and his parents had been very involved in his life, never missing one of his tennis matches.

darkode fbi notice
FBI has taken down the Darkode forum

Mr. Culbertson was among some 70 individuals targeted in an international investigation based in Pittsburgh that targeted Darkode, which has since been shut down by the FBI. Of those, seven are being prosecuted in Pittsburgh, including Mr. Culbertson.

Three others involved with Darkode have entered guilty pleas in a spam scheme unrelated to Mr. Culbertson’s crime.

Dewayne Watts, 28, and Naveed Ahmed, 27, both of Florida, and Phillip Fleitz, 31, of Indianapolis, admitted to their roles in maintaining a spam botnet that used servers in China to infect routers in other nations and send millions of e-mail messages designed to defeat spam filters of cellphone providers.

Peer-to-Peer Predictions: The Greatest Gambling Platform in History?

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Peer-to-Peer Predictions: The Greatest Gambling Platform in History?

An online gambling platform could do to the neighborhood bookie what electric refrigerators did to the ice delivery man.

Coming this fall, Augur will allow participants to wager money on any future event of their choosing. Software will set the odds, collect the bets, and disperse the winnings. The price alone should give Nevada sports book operators pause; an estimated one percent of every pot will go to keep the system running. The average vig today is about 10 times that.

Augur isn’t a full-fledged casino. You can’t play roulette or poker, and running lotto on the platform would be tricky. But it’ll be great for sports betting.

Here’s what’s truly novel about Augur: It won’t be controlled by any person or entity, nor will it operate off of any one computer network. All the money in the system will be in Bitcoin, or other types of peer-to-peer crypto-currency, so no credit card companies or banks need to be involved. If the system runs afoul of regulators—and if it’s successful, it most certainly will—they’ll find that there’s no company to sue, no computer hardware to pull out of the wall, and no CEO to lockup in a cage.

This is new legal territory. If Augur catches on as a tool for betting on everything from basketball games to stock prices, is there anything the government can do to stop it?

Augur is a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace, a new kind of entity made possible by recent breakthroughs in computer science. The purpose of these platforms is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services among perfect strangers on a platform that nobody administers or controls. Augur’s software will run on what’s known as a “blockchain”—a concept introduced in 2008 with the invention of Bitcoin—that’s essentially a shared database for executing trades that’s powered and maintained by its users.

Bitcoin’s blockchain was designed as a banking ledger of sorts—kind of like a distributed Microsoft Excel file—but Augur will utilize a groundbreaking new project called Ethereum that expands on this concept. Ethereum allows Augur’s entire system to live on the blockchain. That means the software and processing power that makes Augur function will be distributed among hundreds or thousands of computers. Destroying Augur would involve unplugging the computers of everyone in the world participating in the Ethereum blockchain.

If Augur is destined to become the cypherpunks answer to gambling prohibition—the betting man’s version of the online drug market Silk Road if you will—you’d never know it from talking with its developers. They work for a San Francisco-based nonprofit, attend conferences, have legal representation, and talk openly about what they’re up to with reporters. Augur even commissioned one of those cheesy motion graphics promotional videos favored by new tech startups.

About half of the roughly $600,000 raised by Augur’s development team comes from Joe Costello, the successful tech entrepreneur who was once Steve Jobs’ top pick to become the CEO of Apple.

Joey Krug, a twenty-year-old Pomona college dropout and Augur’s lead developer, never uses the world “gambling” to describe his venture. He and his team of five employees call Augur a “prediction market,” a term that emphasizes the information generated when a bunch of people have a financial incentive to feed their expertise into a sophisticated algorithm.

With Augur, as bettors move money in and out of the pot, the odds adjust. This yields publicly available statistics that should carry weight because they’re derived from the opinions of a crowd of people with a stake in the results. InTrade, for example, the best-known prediction market until federal regulators forced it to stop serving U.S. customers in 2012, beat the pollsters and pundits by foreseeing the outcome of the 2008 presidential elections in 48 out of 50 states.

augurYouTube Augur’s developers hope that their platform will make it possible to do a Google search to look up the likelihood of some future event. This could usher in a better world, with more informed policy decisions and less mal-investment.

But Augur also serves the less high-minded—though no less noble—purpose of providing cost savings and convenience to gamblers. Restrictions on gambling serve to protect government revenue at the betting man’s expense. State-sanctioned casino operators pay high taxes, and state-run lotteries fleece their customers. But there’s no logical or moral case for government restrictions on gambling, since no third party is harmed when consenting adults wager money on the future. Augur actually has the potential to make the world safer by taking away market share in the gambling industry from criminals.

And yet sports betting is illegal in most states, and prediction markets are tightly regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC). The agency sued Ireland-based InTrade in 2012 to prevent it from accepting bets from U.S. customers. (The company folded shortly after.) In 2013, the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) jointly sued the prediction market Banc de Binary for allowing U.S. customers to make bets on commodity prices.

The CFTC has approved other prediction markets, such as the New Zealand-based PredictIt, but only after it agreed to abide by the agency’s restrictions.

Krug says the Augur team is planning to meet with CFTC staff go over how their system works before it’s launched, but says he’s not overly concerned. “Our friends in Washington, D.C. say the CFTC will probably just dismiss Augur and say it’s not a big deal,” Krug told me in a phone interview.

That doesn’t sound like much of a legal strategy, but how do you have a legal strategy when you’re building something unlike anything that’s ever existed? Federal anti-gambling laws, such as the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, target the companies that facilitate online betting— website operators, credit card companies, banks—not individual gamblers.

Augur’s biggest legal vulnerability is the community of human “reporters” who are needed to settle bets on the platform, says Cardozo Law School’s Aaron Wright, who is writing a book about the legal implications of blockchain technology. Let’s say a group of people wager money on Augur over the outcome of a boxing match. Once the bout is over, human participants (who receive a portion of the trading fees as compensation) must report the outcome to the system before Augur’s software will disperse the money to the winners. “There’s at least an argument that the people doing that reporting are aiding or abetting unlicensed options and could be prosecuted,” says Wright.

But Augur doesn’t collect personal information on any of its users, so identifying these people could be difficult. And Augur is a borderless technology, so U.S. gamblers could simply rely on foreigners to report on the outcomes of their bets.

One attorney I spoke with suggested that the team that’s building Augur could be brought up on charges for aiding and abetting a criminal conspiracy. Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thinks that’s far-fetched but says he can’t rule it out. Cardozo emphasizes that writing open source software doesn’t necessarily protect the team from prosecution.

“We’ve taken the steps that we need to take in order to bracket the individual’s risk and the organization’s risk,” says Augur’s attorney, Marco Santori, who declined to comment further on exactly what those steps might entail.

Even if Krug and his colleagues were to face criminal prosecution, the technology would live on. After Augur is born into the world, the development team could release a software update that would cripple the system. But in that case, Augur’s users could band together to block any changes to the underlying code, or another developer could copy the open source code and simply re-launch the platform.

The big question with Augur—and with blockchain platforms more generally—is whether they can outrun our regulatory state long enough to grow so large and popular that they’re truly unstoppable. My money’s on Augur in that race.

This post first appeared at Reason’s brilliant and award-winning Hit & Run blog

Subatomic Particles that Appear to defy Standard Model Particle Physics

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Subatomic Particles that Appear to defy Standard Model Particle Physics

Subatomic particles have been discovered that seem to defy the Standard Model of particle physics. The team working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have discovered proof of leptons decaying at completely different rates, which could possibly point to some undiscovered forces.

Publishing their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group from the University of Maryland had been searching for conditions and behaviors that don’t fit with the Standard Model. The model explains most known behaviors and interactions of fundamental subatomic particles, however it’s incomplete – for instance it doesn’t adequately explain gravity, dark matter and neutrino masses.

Researchers say the discovery of the non-conforming leptons might provide an enormous lead in the quest for non-standard phenomenon. The Standard Model concept of lepton universality assumes leptons are treated equally by fundamental forces.

The team looked at B meson decays including two kinds of leptons – the tau lepton and the muon, both of which are extremely unstable and decay within just a fraction of a second. The tau lepton and muon should decay at the same rate after mass differences are corrected. However the researchers discovered small but important variations in the predicted rates of decay.

This suggests there are undiscovered forces or particles interfering in the process. Study co-author Hassan Jawahery stated: “The Standard Model says the world interacts with all leptons in the same method. There is a democracy there. But there is no guarantee that this will hold true if we discover new particles or new forces. Lepton universality is truly enshrined in the Standard Model. If this universality is broken, we can say that we have found evidence for non-standard physics.”

cern1
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – Proton-proton collisions at the interaction point (far left) result in a shower of leptons and other charged particles. The yellow and green lines are computer-generated reconstructions of the particles’ trajectories through the layers of the LHCb detector.(CERN/LHCb Collaboration)

He said they’re now planning a range of different measurements in the hope of confirming their findings: “If this phenomenon is corroborated, we will have many years of work ahead. It could point theoretical physicists towards new ways to take a look at standard and non-standard physics.”

Researchers also noted their research add to previous findings about lepton decay – BaBar experiment – with both experiments (carried out in very different environments) showing the identical physical model: This replication provides an important independent check on the observations,” co-author Brian Hamilton mentioned. “The added weight of two experiments is the key here. This suggests that it isn’t just an instrumental effect–it’s pointing to real physics.”

Gregory Ciezarek, another co-author, added: “While these two results taken together are very promising, the observed phenomena will not be considered a true violation of the Standard Model with out further experiments to verify our observations.”

Jawahery stated that future work in this area will turn out to be ever more exciting, with specialists improving our understanding of how the universe evolved: “For example, we know that dark matter and dark energy exist, but we do not yet know what they’re or how to explain them. Our result could be a part of that puzzle. If we can demonstrate that there are missing particles and interactions beyond the Standard Model, it could help complete the picture.”

Flash ads will stop working in Chrome from Sept 1st, 2015

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Flash ads will stop working in Chrome from Sept 1st, 2015

In case your advertisements are not on the search giant’s network (Adsense), they better be in HTML5 – or they’re lifeless to Chrome. If they are already on the Adsense, then worry not, it probably has been converted to HTML5.

Google is making good on its promise to strangle Adobe Flash’s capability to auto-play in Chrome.

The online giant has set September 1, 2015 as the date from which non-essential Flash files might be click-to-play in the browser by default – effectively freezing out “many” Flash adverts in the process.

click to play
No more autorun

Users will have to right-click over the security-challenged plugin and select “Run this” if they wish to unfreeze a flash animation. Otherwise, the Flash files will stay suspended in a gray box, unable to trigger any malicious code on auto run.

Recently, back in June, Google warned that, in cooperation with Adobe, it will change the way in which Flash material is shown on web sites.

Mainly, “essential” Flash content (such as embedded video players) are allowed to automatically run, whereas unimportant Flash content, most of which are ads, shall be automatically paused.

As we explained a couple of months ago, it is effectively taking Chrome’s “Detect and run important plugin content” feature, and making it the default: only the “main plugin content on web sites” will be run automatically. That should put a stop to the irritating ads flashing all over the pages.

Most pundits believed that it was due to security reasons, however, Google’s reasoning for this move is largely performance-based, apparently. The second largest American company worries that with too many pieces of Flash content running at once, Chrome’s efficiency is hamstrung, and, more critically, battery life is drained in notebooks and tablets running the Flash plugin.

flash dead
Apparently, Flash is slow, inefficient and about to die. Is that hTml5 walking over Flash?

In June, on a blog post, Google’s software engineer Tommy Li put the blame squarely on Adobe’s shoulders and wrote that “Adobe Flash allows web pages to display rich content – but sometimes that can put a squeeze on your laptop’s battery”

Specifically, the culprit is the Adobe Flash plugin that comes built into Chrome and which automatically shows any Flash content it finds on web sites.

Crucially, the move will also help kill the spread of malware via malicious Flash files, particularly dodgy adverts which have popped up on sites used by millions and millions of individuals (hint: like Yahoo!)

Google mentioned that advertisers who’re apprehensive about having their adverts switched off should contemplate converting their Flash art work to HTML5. According to the cyber-Goliath, “most Flash adverts uploaded to [Google] AdWords are automatically converted to HTML5.”

Basically, in other words, if you’re not on Google’s ad network, you are locked out of Chrome – unless you also switch to HTML5.

Interestingly, Google’s security engineers have been helping Adobe’s programmers to shore up Flash with anti-hacker defenses. Google’s Project Zero team revealed that the version 18.0.0.209 of Flash – which was released to patch vulnerabilities exploited by spyware maker Hacking Team – employs three mitigations developed by Google and Adobe.

Carbon nano fibres made from thin air

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Carbon nano fibres made from thin air

Scientists in the US have discovered a method to take carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and make carbon nano fibres, a useful manufacturing material.

Their solar-powered system runs a small current via a tank full of a hot, molten salt; the fluid absorbs atmospheric CO2 and tiny carbon fibres slowly form at one of the electrodes.

It presently produces 10 grams per hour.

The team says it can be “scaled up” and will have an effect on CO2 emissions, however other researchers are uncertain.

Nonetheless, the method provides a much cheaper approach of creating carbon nano fibres than present strategies, according to Prof Stuart Licht of George Washington University.

“Till now, carbon nano fibres have been too expensive for many applications,” he informed journalists at the autumn meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.

Carbon nano fibres are already utilized in high-end applications such as electronic parts and batteries, and if prices came down they could possibly be used more extensively – enhancing the strong, light-weight carbon composites used in aircraft and automotive parts, for example.

The question is whether or not the “one-pot” reaction demonstrated by Prof Licht and his group could help to drop that price.

carbon collected from air
At the moment 10 grams of nano fibres – like this sample Dr Licht brought to the convention – could be made per hour

The thought of turning CO2 from the air into useful products is a popular one, and the field is strewn with many more unfulfilled promises than success stories.

However Prof Licht is confident his design can succeed. “It scales up very easily, the entire process is quite low energy.”

Daring vision

He additionally suggested that the system could provide “a reasonable path to bring down CO2 levels within the environment”.

This would involve adopting the reactors on a colossal scale and the concept has raised some eyebrows.

Dr Katy Armstrong, a chemical engineer at the University of Sheffield, stated the method was “promising and very fascinating on a lab scale” however that Prof Licht’s bigger vision could be problematic.

“As they’re capturing CO2 from the air, the method will need to cope with large volumes of gas to collect the required quantity of carbon, which could increase process costs when scaled up”

process of creation
The carbon nanofibres gradually build up on one of the device’s electrodes

Dr Paul Fennell, a chemical engineer and clean energy researcher at Imperial College London, stated: “If they can make carbon nano fibres, that is a laudable aim and its a worthwhile product to have.

“But if your idea is to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and produce so many carbon nano fibres that you make a difference to climate change – I might be extremely surprised if you may do this.”

Prof Licht insists it’s worth attempting.

“There are no catches; there is a necessity to work collectively, to test this on a bigger scale, to use some societal resources to do that,” he said.

In the meantime, other chemists were impressed by fact that Prof Licht’s crew had produced nano fibres from atmospheric carbon.

 

A small mistake helped scientists to quadruple battery lifespan

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A small mistake helped scientists to quadruple battery lifespan

Until somebody figures out a alternative for lithium-ion in rechargeable batteries, research will continue into find out how to cram extra power inside as well as extending their useful lifespan. Two scientists believe they’ve managed to increase the life of such batteries significantly, and all due to an accident within the lab.

In the present day, lithium-ion batteries usually rely on graphite anodes to offer a long lifespan. Rechargeable battery performance declines and ultimately falls off a cliff (becomes unusable) because of these anodes repeatedly expanding and contracting as lithium ions migrate during the cycle of charging and discharge. Lithium compounds build up on the electrodes throughout this process then break off during the expansion and contraction. This exposes the surface of the electrode and over time decomposes it to the point of failure.

A better alternative to utilizing graphite for the anodes would be aluminum, however aluminum expands and contracts too much during each cycle. If scientists could stop that happening, we’d have much better performing batteries.

Dr Li Ju of MIT, USA and Dr Wang Changan of Tsinghua University, China and have been working collectively to stop the oxide coating that forms on the surface of aluminum nanoparticles when it’s exposed to air. Their idea was to soak the nanoparticles in a sulfuric acid and titanium oxysuplphate mix, which would dissolve the aluminum oxide and replace it with titanium oxide.

Achieving the new outer coating required a set time of soaking. The accident occurred when Wang and Li forgot to remove one batch of the nanoparticles from the soaking process. That batch ended up soaking for several hours longer than intended with the end result being the sulfuric acid and titanium oxysulfate mix leaked into the 50nm nano particles and dissolved some of the aluminum inside. What this left was a nano particle with a 4nm outer shell of titanium hydroxide and an inner 30nm “yolk” of aluminum.

The yolk and shell
A new “yolk-and-shell” nano particle could boost the capacity and power of lithium-ion batteries. The grey sphere at center represents an aluminum nanoparticle, forming the “yolk.” The outer light-blue layer represents a solid shell of titanium dioxide, and the space in between the yolk and shell permits the yolk to expand and contract with out damaging the shell. In the background is an actual scanning electron microscope image of a collection of these yolk-shell nano particles.
Credits: Christine Daniloff/MIT

Rather than discarding this forgotten batch, they decided to test it by constructing batteries using these particles. It turns out they’ve potentially solved the problem of using aluminum for the anodes in the battery. The extra long soak meant the anodes didn’t expand and contract, in fact they created a battery that over 500 charge/discharge cycles retained as much as 4-times the capacity of the equivalent graphite anode batteries. These batteries last significantly longer in terms of usable lifespan and, according to MIT, can hold up to three-times the energy.

Clearly, sometimes being a forgetful scientist can lead to a breakthrough. The discovery is expected to be an easy one to scale up to mass manufacturing, which means the next-generation of rechargeable batteries may use aluminum anodes, bringing with it longer battery life per charge and batteries which have a much improved lifespan.

“These yolk-shell particles show very impressive performance in lab-scale testing,” says David Lou, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who was not involved in this work.

“To me, the most attractive point of this work is that the process appears simple and scalable.”

The research team included Sa Li, Yu Cheng Zhao, and Chang An Wang of Tsinghua University in Beijing and Junjie Niu, Kangpyo So, and Chao Wang of MIT. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation & the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

 

Students want to make it to orbit, and they are close!

Amna
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Students want to make it to orbit, and they are close!

 

Last month, the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), a student venture at Portland State College, launched a rocket out in the Oregon desert, on 19th July 2015 to be exact. The rocket soared almost five kilometers into the sky—an impressive feat, however that is just the start for PSAS. The group has its eyes set much higher.

In the video, you see the ground rapidly zoom away as the rocket, dubbed “LV2.3”, shoots into the sky. It is a beautiful sight—and one that was captured unintentionally.

“The digital camera falling out of the rocket was accidental,” chuckles Andrew Greenberg, an adjunct professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at PSU who’s involved in the club. “In this case, the plastic cracked and the camera came out at Mach 1.” The Raspberry Pi-based camera was supposed to record from the side of the rocket’s payload module. “3D-printing plastic isn’t necessarily great for rockets, it turns out.”

The membership’s targets are loftier than just getting just a few kilometers above the Earth. When asked about the objective of the club, Greenberg is direct. They want to put a nano-satellite into orbit.

The PSAS in 2011
The PSAS in 2011

“We try to build as much as we can,” says Greenberg. When you’re trying to construct a space-bound rocket, the to-do list is spectacular. “We’re building our own avionics system. We are making our own software-defined radio GPS system. We’re building our own Ethernet-based systems. We’re using WiFi as a long distance telemetry on the amateur radio band.”

The plan to construct a nano satellite (particularly a CubeSat) came to the group during all of this tinkering. After an inspired burst of DIYing, they realized their computer for getting the rocket to space was fairly close to functioning as a tiny satellite. Now they had to figure out how to give it a second life in orbit.

Usually CubeSats function as small satellites that do their business only after they’re in orbit. They’re deployed out into space as a ten centimeter cube that then conducts scientific research within some particularly outlined parameters. It doesn’t usually deal with avionics for a rocket. However PSAS’s CubeSat does both the work. “Our CubeSat has an Ethernet peripheral called ‘a rocket,’ and it flies up and drops itself off and throws itself into space and then it becomes a satellite,” Greenberg says. “All that is, is a change of software, right?”

“WHEN YOU’RE TALKING ORBITAL-CLASS ROCKET, THERE ARE A BILLION THINGS TO DO TO PROVE IT’S SAFE.”

The technological hurdles are one thing. The bigger impediment keeping Portland State Aerospace Society from reaching orbit? “Think ‘cash and lawyers,'” says Greenberg. Including the Portland State Aerospace Society, there are other amateur teams that might potentially put something into orbit​ like the Boston University Rocket Propulsion Group and Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering in the Netherlands. Actually, the Civilian Space eXploration Team (CSXT) made it a hundred and fifteen kilometers into the sky (which is, by all definitions, space) in 2004. However there’s no amateur group putting stuff in orbit just yet.

history of rockets
History of PSAS launches

All of them face the same issues of international law, regulatory compliance, safety evaluation, and a litany of different hurdles. “As soon as you begin talking orbital-class rocket, there are a billion issues you need to do to prove that your rocket is safe,” Greenberg says. “Minneapolis-St. Paul does not like it when you drop your first stage on them.”

These are complex issues even for massive corporations like SpaceX. It is even harder for a small group of hobbyists. “If someone drops out of the sky and says, ‘Here is $10 million, and here is a cadre of attorneys for you to use,’ we would happily do it,” says Greenberg. “But we do not expect that to happen.” They currently make do on between $3,000 and $10,000 a year in fundraising, however sooner or later these hurdles will become an issue that will require serious cash to solve. For now, the group chooses to focus on better rockets & avionics.

Then again, Greenberg and the Portland State Aerospace Society have a history of overcoming setbacks. In 2005, they had been at the cutting edge of amateur rocketry. “We had the world’s most superior avionics system,” Greenberg says. “It was a Linux-based computer that used the controller area network that is used in automobiles. It had every thing our current rocket has, but it was way ahead of its time.” He is fairly sure it was the first time, for example, people had used WiFi in rockets.

“We launched it, and it worked beautifully. Everything we thought would fail, like the software and the radios, worked perfectly.” The one piece that did fail? The parachute. “We lawn darted that thing at close to Mach 1 into the ground,” he laughs.

The loss of the rocket set the group back badly—they did not launch another rocket for 4 years—but they learned from their mistakes. “We construct three of every thing, so if we lose one thing that is okay.” If the group can recover from smashing up one of their best rockets, who’s to say they could not figure out the attorneys and regulatory angle as well?

In the meantime, the group has their hands full with a brand new “LV3” airframe they’re hoping could eventually attain a hundred kilometers (or about sixty two miles). “100 kilometers is the magic number,” Greenberg says giddily. “You get to say you are in space if you have gone 100 kilometers.”

They’ve already made it 5 kilometers. What’s one other ninety five?

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