“More solid than solid: A potential hydrogen-storage compound” PhysOrg.com—April 2, 2008
One of the key engineering challenges to building a clean, efficient, hydrogen-powered car is how to design the fuel tank. Storing enough raw hydrogen for a reasonable driving range would require either impractically high pressures for gaseous hydrogen or extremely low temperatures for liquid hydrogen. In a new paper researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for Neutron Research have demonstrated that a novel class of materials could enable a practical hydrogen fuel tank. A research team from NIST, the University of Maryland and the California Institute of Technology studied metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). One of several classes of materials that can bind and release hydrogen under the right conditions, they have some distinct advantages over competitors. In principle they could be engineered so that refueling is as easy as pumping gas at a service station is today, and MOFs don’t require the high temperatures (110 to 500 C) some other materials need to release hydrogen. (Langmuir)
“Sniff this: artificial nose scouts for bombs” Discovery News—April 1, 2008
The job market for military working dogs is about to shrink: Scientists have created an artificial "nose" that sniffs out the explosive TNT with genetically engineered viruses. "We use the similar approach and materials that nature uses for smell sensing," said Seung-Wuk Lee, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a recent paper describing the technology, which appeared in the journal Langmuir.
“Nanotech tanks could store hydrogen in microscopic soccer balls” Popular Mechanics—April 1, 2008
If engineering could keep up with the hype, we would all be driving hydrogen cars by now, whirring about in emissions-free wonderboxes like the Jetsons. But hydrogen, for all its potential, presents some serious technical challenges. As a gas, it requires gigantic, heavy tanks to store, and as a liquid, it must be kept impracticably cold—below 423 degrees Fahrenheit. Researchers at Rice University, however, recently tested a third option. “What if, instead of one big tank, you have millions and billions of tiny little nanoscale containers? Would it be safer? How much pressure would they contain?” asks Dr. Boris Yakobson, lead author of a study that recently modeled hydrogen storage inside tiny hollow carbon structures called buckyballs. “We wanted to understand the limits—how many molecules of hydrogen, in principle, you can place inside the carbon cage before it just mechanically breaks.” (Nano Letters)
“Engineers make first ‘active matrix’ display using nanowires” PhysOrg.com—March 31, 2008
Engineers have created the first "active matrix" display using a new class of transparent transistors and circuits, a step toward realizing applications such as e-paper, flexible color monitors and "heads-up" displays in car windshields. The transistors are made of "nanowires," tiny cylindrical structures that are assembled on glass or thin films of flexible plastic. The researchers used nanowires as small as 20 nanometers - a thousand times thinner than a human hair - to create a display containing organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDS. The OLEDS are devices that rival the brightness of conventional pixels in flat-panel television sets, computer monitors and displays in consumer electronics. Findings will be detailed in a research paper featured on the cover of the April issue of the journal Nano Letters.
“Yak cheese is the healthy option” The New Scientist—March 23, 2008
Fond of cheese but depressed about its high levels of saturated fats? Now there's a healthier alternative: yak cheese. Mamun Or-Rashid at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues compared the fatty-acid content of cheese made from a Nepalese yak's milk and a standard Canadian cheddar. They found the yak cheese had a lower overall fat content and, compared with cow's milk cheese, contained much higher levels of heart-healthy "good fats" such as conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and omega-3 fatty acids (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry).
“They may not use gasoline, but they sure burn through water” The New York Times—March 18, 2008
One way to reduce the world’s dependence on oil is to produce more cars that get their power from the electrical grid rather than the gas pump. In the United States, replacing a large percentage of the roughly 235 million cars, light trucks and sport utility vehicles with all-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids (which have a supplemental gasoline engine) would make a big dent in gasoline consumption, currently about 380 million gallons a day. But such a shift would have an impact on another of the world’s precious liquids — water. It takes a lot of water to produce electricity, both to mine and to process coal and other fuels and to cool power plants. Production of gasoline uses water, too, but in an analysis in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, Carey W. King and Michael E. Webber of the University of Texas found that adding more plug-in vehicles would result in a significant increase in water use because of the additional electricity that would have to be generated.
“New form of aspirin is easier on stomachs” United Press International—March 17, 2008
Italian researchers have altered the atomic makeup of aspirin to make it less harsh on users' stomach linings, experts said. Scientists from Turin and Parma Universities added atoms onto the aspirin's main molecule, preventing the common headache drug from destroying the lining of the stomach, head researcher Alberto Gasco said. Aspirin's destructive impact on stomach tissue has been found to cause ulcers and irritation in its users because of the way it is absorbed into the bloodstream, ANSA reported Monday. The new form medicine "has no side effects," Gasco said in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. The new aspirin has only gone through trials involving rats, Gasco said. “But if the results are confirmed by further tests, it should represent a safer alternative to old aspirin in very many clinical applications.”
“Electronic nose knows quality coffee” MSNBC—March 10, 2008
Ah! A bold espresso that boasts intense flowery, winey, citrus, acid — and yes, even butter toffee notes. So says an electronic nose, anyway. Behold, the coffee snob of the future. In the quest for consistently high-quality java, the coffee industry stands to benefit enormously from any nose that really knows its stuff, whether attached to a person or a machine. “We do not attempt to replace human tasters by instruments but to assist human tasters,” said Nestlé researcher and lead author Christian Lindinger, whose report was published last month in the journal Analytical Chemistry. “But in some cases we can use the approach as a pre-screening tool to eliminate those samples which would anyhow fail a sensory evaluation because of insufficient quality.”
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