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UPDATE 1-Yule Catto sees H1 pretax profit up substantially

June 25, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

June 24 (Reuters) – British chemicals maker Yule Catto & Co Plc (YULC.L) said it expected first-half underlying pretax profit to be substantially ahead of a year ago, helped by its main polymer business, sending its shares up nearly 6 percent.

The company, which sees first-half operating profit in the polymers division well above year-ago levels, said the business enjoyed good volumes through the second quarter.

Yule Catto said its impact chemicals business William Blythe also saw better volumes and was trading strongly.

While the company’s pharma chemicals was expected to report a lower operating profit for the period, Yule Catto said the unit currently had a strong order book and was likely to see an improved product mix in the second half of the year.

The company also expects to lower net debt from 88 million pounds ($131.7 million) following the 11 million pounds sale of its downstream adhesives business in June.

Shares of the company were up 5.9 percent at 188 pence at 0708 GMT on Thursday on the London Stock Exchange. ($1=.6683 Pound) (Reporting by Aditi Samajpati in Bangalore; Editing by Aradhana Aravindan)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: Adhesives, ahead, Blythe, Chemicals Business, Co Plc, gmt, June 24, London Exchange, london stock exchange, operating profit, pence, pharma, Polymer, polymers, Pretax Profit, reuters, second half, second quarter, Yule, Yule Catto

Soon, operate your cellphone without touching it

March 23, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 23 (ANI): You could soon operate your cellphone just at the point of a finger, without even having to touch the display—thanks to touchless control made of printable polymer sensors.

The sensors, just like human skin, react to the tiniest fluctuations in temperature and differences in pressure and recognize the finger as it approaches.

And the feat has been achieved, owing to the efforts of the research scientists involved in the EU project 3Plast, which stands for ‘Printable pyroelectrical and piezoelectrical large area sensor technology’.

The companies and institutes involved from industry and research have set themselves the goal of mass producing pressure and temperature sensors which can be cheaply printed onto plastic film and flexibly affixed to a wide range of everyday objects, such as electronic equipment.

“The sensor consists of pyroelectrical and piezoelectrical polymers which can now be processed in high volumes by screen printing, for example. The sensor is combined with an organic transistor, which strengthens the sensor signal. It”s strongest where the finger is. The special thing about our sensor is that the transistor can also be printed,” explained Gerhard Domann, who is in charge of the project.

The production of polymer sensors still poses a number of challenges.

To produce printable transistors, the insulation materials have to be very thin.

However, the experts at the ISC have succeeded in producing an insulator, which is only 100 nanometers thick.

The first sensors have already been printed onto film.

The research scientists are currently working on optimised transistors, which can amplify rapid changes in temperature and pressure.

“By providing everyday objects with information about their environment – for example whether a person is approaching – by means of pressure and temperature sensors, we can create and market new devices that can be controlled just by pointing a finger,” said Domann. (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: cellphone, Electronic Equipment, everyday objects, fluctuations, human skin, insulation materials, insulator, ISC, plastic film, Polymer, polymers, rapid changes, research scientists, Screen Printing, Sensor Signal, sensor technology, Temperature And Pressure, Temperature Sensors, transistor, transistors

Scientists make first high-resolution 3D images of a polymer solar cell’s insides

September 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 14 (ANI): Researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology and the University of Ulm in Germany have made the first high-resolution 3D images of the inside of a polymer solar cell.

This gives them important new insights in the nanoscale structure of polymer solar cells and its effect on the performance.

The investigations shed new light on the operational principles of polymer solar cells.

These solar cells do not have the high efficiencies of their silicon counterparts yet. Polymer cells, however, can be printed in roll-to-roll processes, at very high speeds, which makes the technology potentially very cost-effective.

Added to that, polymer cells are flexible and lightweight, and therefore suitable to be used on vehicles or clothing or to be incorporated in the design of objects.

In these hybrid solar cells, a mixture of two different materials, a polymer and a metal oxide are used to create charges at their interface when the mixture is illuminated by the sun.

The degree of mixing of the two materials is essential for its efficiency.

Intimate mixing enhances the area of the interface where charges are formed but at the same time obstructs charge transport because it leads to long and winding roads for the charges to travel.

Larger domains do exactly the opposite.

The vastly different chemical nature of polymers and metal oxides generally makes it very difficult to control the nanoscale structure.

The Eindhoven researchers have been able to largely circumvent this problem by using a precursor compound that mixes with the polymer and is only converted into the metal oxide after it is incorporated in the photoactive layer.

This allows better mixing and enables extracting up to 50 percent of the absorbed photons as charges in an external circuit.

The importance of the degree of mixing was clearly demonstrated by visualization of the structure of these blends in three dimensions.

Traditionally such visualization has been extremely challenging, but by using 3D electron tomography, the team has been able to resolve the mixing with unprecedented detail on a nanoscale.

From these images, the researchers at the Institute of Stochastics in Ulm have been able to extract typical distances between the two components, relating to the efficiency of charge generation, and analyze the percolation pathways, that is, how much of each component is connected to the electrode.

These quantitative analyses of the structure matched perfectly with the observed performance of the solar cells in sunlight. (ANI)

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Scientists create platinum nanocatalyst for industrial use by drug makers

September 1, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 1 (ANI): Rice University chemists have created a polymer-coated version of gold-platinum nanorods that can be used in the organic solvents favoured by chemical and drug manufacturers.

This work attains significance because, to date, chemists have struggled to create nanoparticles combining platinum and gold-which act as super-efficient catalysts-in an industrially useful form.

Catalysts are compounds that speed up or slow down chemical reactions without being consumed by them. The chemical and drug industries spend billions of dollars each year for catalysts that are needed to process drugs and other high-value chemicals.

“There are some industrial reactions where drugmakers have no choice but to use platinum and palladium catalysts, but the majority of these are homogenous, which means they mix readily with reactants and are very difficult to remove,” said lead researcher Eugene Zubarev, associate professor in chemistry at Rice.

“Because these heavy metals are toxic, they must be completely removed from the drug after its synthesis is completed. However, the removal of homogeneous catalysts is very time-consuming and expensive, which creates a big problem for pharmaceutical companies,” Zubarev added.

Zubarev and Rice graduate student Bishnu Khanal revealed that they wanted to make a heterogeneous platinum catalyst that was soluble enough for industrial use, but that could also be easily removed.

They already knew from previous studies that combining platinum with gold in tiny nanoparticles could enhance the platinum’s catalytic effect. Thus, they started with tiny rods of pure gold. and coated them with a layer of platinum so thin that it left the gold exposed in some places.

Having confirmed the structure of the gold-platinum nanorods, the researchers then set out to find a way to make them soluble in organic solvents that are favoured by industry.

Building on Zubarev’s previous work in making soluble gold nanorods, they found a way to attach hair-like molecules of polystyrene to the surface of the gold-platinum rods.

Zubarev and Khanal found the coated particles were easy to remove from solution with a conventional centrifuge, and that the polystyrene shells made them completely soluble in organic solvents and dramatically enhanced their catalytic selectivity.

“The selectivity of the coated gold and platinum nanorods will be very attractive to industry. For example, we found they had nearly 100 percent catalytic selectivity for the hydrogenation of terminal olefins,” Zubarev said.

The researchers are using similar methods to produce gold-palladium catalysts in a follow-up study. Palladium is another high-demand catalyst.

“The early indications are very promising,” he said.

A research article on this work has been published in the German scientific journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition. (ANI)

Filed Under: Health News Tagged With: associate professor, billions of dollars, chemical reactions, chemists, compounds, dollars each year, drug manufacturers, gold platinum, graduate student, heavy metals, homogeneous catalysts, organic solvents, palladium, pharmaceutical companies, platinum catalyst, Polymer, Pure gold, reactants, researcher, rice university

How plant tissues know which end is their growing tip

August 30, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 30 (ANI): A team of scientists has silenced nine genes in a multicellular organism, which allowed them to discover molecular secrets of how certain plant tissues know which end is their growing tip, also referred to as polarized growth.

The research was carried out by biologist Magdalena Bezanilla and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, US.

The biologists conducted these experiments in a moss, but the findings illuminate processes in two tissues-root hairs and pollen tubes-found in all seed plants.

Root hairs are extremely fine individual cells that grow out of a plant’s root, greatly increasing its surface area to collect water, essential minerals and nutrients.

Pollen tubes travel down the flower to fertilize the plant’s egg.

Scientists have “a very limited knowledge” at the molecular level of how such cells determine the direction they’re growing, according to Bezanilla.

Knowing how to interrupt pollen tube formation in plants such as corn and soybeans, for example, could help prevent genetically engineered crops from interbreeding with wild populations.

Aiding root hair growth could boost drought-resistance to other economically important plants.he researchers focused on two proteins, actin and formin.

Actin, in this case a kind of scaffold-builder needed to form root hairs and pollen tubes, forms filamentous polymers and is important for many cellular processes in species ranging from yeast to man. ormins, like actin, are found in many species and help to control actin polymer formation. Formins are critical for actin-based cellular processes.

Tools in a biologist’s kit can now remove the function of specific proteins-usually one or two at a time-to silence a gene, but in this study, the researchers succeeded in silencing a remarkable nine genes at one time.

Bezanilla and colleagues systematically silenced the many actin-regulating formins and determined which members of this protein family are needed to generate cells for proper tip growth.ther tools in the researchers’ kit are methods for re-introducing the silenced genes, either normal or modified versions.

By “swapping parts” from closely related formin proteins and measuring tip growing activity for each combination, her research group eventually concluded that only one intact subclass of formins drives normal growth and controls how the plant recognizes its growing tip.

“If you take away any part of the formin, tip growth stops,” said Bezanilla.

Interestingly, the researchers also discovered that this particular subclass of formins is the fastest yet known in any organism. (ANI)

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Organic electronics that allows transport of both positive and negative charges developed

August 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 18 (ANI): A new research from the University of Washington scientists has described an approach to organic electronics that allows transport of both positive and negative charges.

Until now, however, circuits built with organic materials have allowed only one type of charge to move through them.

Now, new research from the University of Washington makes charges flow both ways.

“The organic semiconductors developed over the past 20 years have one important drawback. It’s very difficult to get electrons to move through,” said lead author Samson Jenekhe, a UW professor of chemical engineering.

“By now having polymer semiconductors that can transmit both positive and negative charges, it broadens the available approaches. This would certainly change the way we do things,” he added.

A major drawback with existing organic semiconductors is most transmit only positive charges.

In the last decade, a few organic materials have been developed that can transport only electrons.

But, making a working organic circuit has meant carefully layering two complicated patterns on top of one another, one that transports electrons and another one that transports holes.

“Because current organic semiconductors have this limitation, the way they’re currently used has to compensate for that, which has led to all kinds of complex processes and complications,” Jenekhe said.

Over the past few years, Jenekhe’s lab has created polymers with a donor and an acceptor part, and carefully adjusted the strength of each one.

In collaboration with Watson’s lab, they have now developed an organic molecule that works to transport both positive and negative charges.

“What we have shown in this paper is that you don’t have to use two separate organic semiconductors. You can use one material to create electronic circuits,” Jenekhe said.

The material would allow organic transistors and other information-processing devices to be built more simply, in a way that is more similar to how inorganic circuits are now made.

The group used the new material to build a transistor designed in the same way as a silicon model and the results show that both electrons and holes move through the device quickly.

The results represent the best performance ever seen in a single-component organic polymer semiconductor, according to Jenekhe.

Electrons moved five to eight times faster through the UW device than in any other such polymer transistor.

A circuit, which consists of two or more integrated devices, generated a voltage gain two to five times greater than previously seen in a polymer circuit.

“We expect people to use this approach. We’ve opened the way for people to know how to do it,” Jenekhe said. (ANI)

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Scientists use camera flash to turn insulating material into conductor

August 13, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Aug 13 (ANI): Can camera flash actually turn an insulating material into a conductor? Yes, if Northwestern University researchers are to be believed.

Lead researcher Jiaxing Huang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science have found a novel way of turning graphite oxide – a low-cost insulator made by oxidizing graphite powder-into graphene, a material that conducts electricity.

Materials scientists previously have used high-temperature heating or chemical reduction to produce graphene from graphite oxide.

However, these techniques could be problematic when graphite oxide is mixed with something else, such as a polymer, because the polymer component may not survive the high-temperature treatment or could block the reducing chemical from reacting with graphite oxide.

During the study researchers simply held a consumer camera flash over the graphite oxide and, a flash later, the material became piece of fluffy graphene.

“The light pulse offers very efficient heating through the photothermal process, which is rapid, energy efficient and chemical-free,” said Huang.

When using a light pulse, photothermal heating not only reduces the graphite oxide, it also fuses the insulating polymer with the graphene sheets, resulting in a welded conducting composite.

Using patterns printed on a simple overhead transparency film as a photo-mask, flash reduction creates patterned graphene films. This process creates electronically conducting patterns on the insulating graphite oxide film-essentially a flexible circuit.

The research group hopes to next create smaller circuits on a single graphite-oxide sheet at the single-atom layer level.

“If we can make a nano circuit on a single piece of graphite oxide. It will hold great promise for patterning electronic devices,” said Huang.

The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. (ANI)

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Limited-colour screens may improve your mobile phones’ battery life

July 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, July 8 (ANI): Scientists have come up with a way to make limited-coloured screens for mobile phones, which can improve batter life.

Johnson Chuang of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, has shown that OLEDs can be made frugal by carefully choosing the balance of colours used to make up an image.

The researcher says that each pixel in an OLED screen is made from a spot of polymer that emits coloured light when supplied with power, and each uses different amounts of energy depending on the colour being displayed.

According to him, yellow colour uses less energy than magenta at the same brightness.

“Colours with equal perceived brightness don’t necessarily use the same amount of energy,” New Scientist magazine quoted the researcher as saying.

The researcher further said that LCD panels use the same amount of energy no matter what hue the screen, as the backlights in the display always remain switched on.

Chuang and his colleagues have now successfully designed sets of colours that slash the power consumption of an OLED panel by up to 40 per cent, with minimal effect on how people perceive an image.

They have revealed that their colour choice resulted in energy savings of between 37 and 41 per cent over a traditional colour palette, depending on the scene being shown.

The new colour palette could help the designers of mobile devices like cellphones extend their battery life.

Presently, about 50 per cent of the stored power of a mobile device, such as a cellular phone, is typically used to run its LCD display.

“Say you’re running low on battery and you want to use Google maps to get home. Switching to an energy-aware colour set could make your battery last longer,” says Chuang.

Chuang now plans to start testing how much energy the new colour palettes can save on physical devices.

He says that the energy savings will depend on the specific display, the content, and user preference, but should be significant over OLED displays that use a full colour set.

“It depends on how much the user wants to sacrifice,” he says. (ANI)

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Cleaning agent may help in superbug battle

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 27 (ANI): A cleaning agent, developed to stop mould growth in bakeries and fish factories, has been found effective in killing hospital superbugs, say researchers.

The research team from Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI) have found that agent Byotrol has cut levels of MRSA on wards by one third.

Byotrol, an antimicrobial technology developed by a Manchester-based paint firm, has a polymer-based structure, which enables it to kill bacteria, like MSRA, days after being first applied.

The polymer is said to create a surface tension effect, which operates like a flytrap that literally tears apart the bacteria when they come into contact.

“These are very impressive results. Our study has shown a reduction of one third in levels of MRSA in the ward when the new disinfectant was compared with the gold-standard NHS bleach-based cleaning agent,” the Telegraph quoted Dr Andy Dodgson, consultant microbiologist at the MRI who led the trial as saying.

“The new disinfectant has a clear role to play in helping hospitals in the battle to control HCASIs. Cutting the level of pathogens on the wards rescues the risk to patients of picking up an infection.

“The demonstration of a residual antibacterial effect is a major new discovery which will be an additional weapon for the NHS in the fight against superbugs,” he added.

Stephen Falder, the scientist who invented Byotrol, said: “I suppose you could say this is a prevention for superbugs that almost never happened. I began developing it as a protection to stop mould on paints. It grew from there.”

The study will be published in British Journal of Infection Control. (ANI)

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Mechanism behind carbohydrate synthesis may pave way for new TB drugs

June 23, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 23 (ANI): The mechanism behind how carbohydrates are synthesised from small sugar units has shed new light on a promising way to target new medicines against tuberculosis, revealed a new study.

While working with components of the tuberculosis bacterium, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison identified an unusual process by which the pathogen builds an important structural carbohydrate.

The mechanism also offers insight into a widespread but poorly understood basic biological function – controlling the length of carbohydrate polymers.

“Carbohydrate polymers are the most abundant organic molecules on the planet, and it’s amazing that we don’t know more about these are made. There’s not much known about how length is controlled in these carbohydrate polymers,” said Laura Kiessling, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UW-Madison.

Most carbohydrates exist as many sugar molecules linked into long chains, or polymers, but the right number of sugars in the chain is vital for them to work properly.

However, Kiessling has said that not much is known about how carbohydrate length is determined.

Unlike some biological chains – such as DNA and proteins – that are built off a template that guides the length of the final product, carbohydrate-synthesizing enzymes work without templates.

The research team focused on an enzyme called GlfT2 that is responsible for building a critical carbohydrate component of the TB bacterial cell wall, and found that a small fatty component at the starting end binds to the enzyme and helps it track the length of the growing polymer.

As the enzyme adds more and more sugar units to the opposite end, the chain becomes increasingly unmanageable.

Kiessling said that “if the chain gets too long, it gets hard to hold on to both of the ends, so the chain falls off” the synthesizing enzyme, forming a completed carbohydrate polymer.

The researchers believe that the enzymes responsible for building different types of carbohydrates exceed their comfort level at different points, leading to molecules of different prescribed lengths.

He said that the report was the first description of this “tethering” mechanism – named for the fatty lipid that tethers the start of the polymer to the enzyme – in carbohydrate synthesis, though it may prove to be common among other organisms as well.

The work gives significant insight into developing new therapeutics against TB.

The GlfT2 enzyme has two binding sites – one for each end of the growing carbohydrate – that make it an especially appealing candidate.

“Our mechanism provides a blueprint for strategies to block a new anti-mycobacterial target,” said Kiessling.

The new study has appeared in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)

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‘Chemical nose’ can sniff out cancer

June 23, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington. June 23 (ANI): Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a ‘chemical nose’ that can sniff out cancer.

The revolutionary tool contains an array of nanoparticles and polymers that differentiate not only between healthy and cancerous cells but also between metastatic and non-metastatic cancer cells.

Currently, detecting cancer via cell surface biomarkers has taken what’s known as the “lock and key” approach.

However, this method includes foreknowledge of the biomarker.

“Our new method uses an array of sensors to recognize not only known cancer types, but it signals that abnormal cells are present,” said chemist Vincent Rotello, who conducted the research with cancer specialist Joseph Jerry.

“That is, the chemical nose can simply tell us something isn’t right, like a ‘check engine light,’ though it may never have encountered that type before,” he added.

Further, the chemical nose can be designed to alert doctors of the most invasive cancer types, those for which early treatment is crucial.

The study conducted using four human cancer cell lines (cervical, liver, testis and breast), as well as in three metastatic breast cell lines, and in normal cells showed that the new detection technique correctly indicated not only the presence of cancer cells in a sample but also identified primary cancer vs. metastatic disease.

Rotello’s research team, with colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology, designed the new detection system by combining three gold nanoparticles that have special affinity for the surface of chemically abnormal cells, plus a polymer known as PPE, or para-phenyleneethynylene.

As the ‘check engine light,’ PPE fluoresces or glows when displaced from the nanoparticle surface.

The study appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online. (ANI)

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Soon, eco-friendly washing machines that use just 1 cup of water

June 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 22 (ANI): Water conservation usually takes a backseat while doing laundry, but not anymore, for now a new environmentally friendly washing machine, which uses use only one cup of water and leaves clothes virtually dry, is all set to hit showrooms next year.

Developed at the University of Leeds, the technologyaims save up to 90 per cent of water used by conventional machines, use 30 per cent less energy, and thus can have the environmental impact of taking two million cars off the road.

The washing machine works by replacing most of the water with thousands of tiny, reusable nylon polymer beads, which attract and absorb dirt under humid conditions.

Only a small amount of water and detergent is needed to dampen the clothes, loosen stains and create the water vapour that allows the beads to work.

And after the cycle is finished, the beads fall through a mesh in the machine’s drum, and can be re-used up to a hundred times.

The company behind the technology, Xeros, is initially aiming at the commercial washing market, including hotels and dry cleaners.

Bill Westwater, Xeros chief executive, said that growing pressure on companies and consumers to cut water usage and carbon emissions might boost demand for the system.

“We’ve got an eye on the consumer but it will take time and we hope commercial success could act as a springboard to move into the consumer market,” Times Online quoted Westwater as saying.

Stephen Burkinshaw from Leeds developed the technology over the past 30 years. (ANI)

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Inexpensive plastic used in CDs could improve aircraft, computer electronics

May 16, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 16 (ANI): An inexpensive plastic used to manufacture CDs and DVDs will one day soon be put to use in improving the integrity of electronics in aircraft, computers and iPhones.

Thanks to a pair of grants from the US Air Force, Shay Curran, associate professor of physics at UH, and his research team have demonstrated ultra-high electrical conductive properties in plastics, called polycarbonates, by mixing them with just the right amount and type of carbon nanotubes.

Curran, who initially began this form of research a decade ago at Trinity College Dublin, started to look at high-conductive plastics in a slightly different manner.

Curran’s team has come up with a strategy to achieve higher conductivities using carbon nanotubes in plastic hosts than what has been currently achieved.

By combining nanotubes with polycarbonates, Curran’s group was able to reach a milestone of creating nanocomposites with ultra-high conductive properties.

“While its mechanical and optical properties are very good, polycarbonate is a non-conductive plastic. That means its ability to carry an electrical charge is as good as a tree, which is pretty awful,” Curran said.

“Imagine that this remarkable plastic can now not only have good optical and mechanical properties, but also good electrical characteristics. By being able to tailor the amount of nanotubes we can add to the composite, we also can change it from the conductivity of silicon to a few orders below that achieved by metals,” he added.

Making this very inexpensive plastic highly conductive could benefit electronics in everything from military aircraft to personal computers.

Computer failure, for instance, results from the build up of thermal and electrical charges, so developing these polymer nanotube composites into an antistatic coating or to provide a shield against electromagnetic interference would increase the lifespan of computing devices, ranging from PCs to PDAs.

The next step of this research is to develop ink formulations to paint these polycarbonate nanocomposites onto various electrical components. (ANI)

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Graphene-carbon nanotubes promise cheaper, more powerful electronic devices

May 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 14 (ANI): Scientists at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) say that they have devised a novel way to make a hybrid graphene-carbon nanotube (G-CNT), which can be used as a transparent conductor in solar cells and consumer electronic devices.

Lead researchers Yang Yang and Richard Kaner reckon that G-CNTs may provide a cheaper and much more flexible alternative to materials currently used in these and similar applications.

Presently, the creation of transparent conductors depends upon indium tin oxide (ITO), which is expensive because of its production costs and a relative scarcity of indium.

The researchers say that the G-CNT hybrid provides an ideal high-performance alternative to ITO in electronics with moving parts.

They point out that graphene is an excellent electrical conductor, and carbon nanotubes are good candidates for transparent conductors because they provide conduction of electricity using very little material.

Yang and Kaner say that their single-step technique to combine the two is easy, inexpensive, scalable and compatible with flexible applications.

According to them, G-CNTs produced this way already provide comparable performance to current ITOs used in flexible applications.

The researchers have revealed that their method builds on one of their previous studies, which introduced a method for producing graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms, by soaking graphite oxide in a hydrazine solution.

They have now found that placing both graphite oxide and carbon nanotubes in a hydrazine solution produces not only graphene but a hybrid layer of graphene and carbon nanotubes.

“To our knowledge this is the first report of dispersing CNTs in anhydrous hydrazine. This is important because our method does not require the use of surfactants, which have traditionally been used in these solution processes and can degrade intrinsic electronic and mechanical properties,” Yang said.

G-CNTs are also ideal candidates for use as electrodes in polymer solar cells because they retain efficiency when flexed and also are compatible with plastics.

The researcher envision the use of such flexible solar cells in a variety of materials, including the drapes of homes.

“The potential of this material (G-CNT) is not limited to improvements in the physical arrangements of the components. With further work, G-CNTs have the potential to provide the building blocks of tomorrow’s optical electronics,” said Vincent Tung, a doctoral student working jointly in Yang’s and Kaner’s labs and the first author of the study.

The novel processing method has been described in a research paper published in the journal Nano Letters. (ANI)

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New “smart” polymer reduces radioactive waste at nuclear power plants

May 11, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 11 (ANI): Scientists in Germany and India are reporting development of a new “smart” polymer that reduces the amount of radioactive waste produced during routine operation of nuclear reactors.

Their study, which details a first-of-its-kind discovery, has been published in the ACS’ Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, a bi-weekly journal.

Borje Sellergren and colleagues note that structural materials such as carbon steel in power plants’ water cooling systems form deposits of metal oxides when they interact with coolants.

In nuclear power plants, these oxides trap radioactive ions, leading to buildups of radioactivity that require costly cleanups of reactor surfaces.
obalt, present in some alloys used in the reactors’ water systems, is a major contributor toward this problem because of its long half-life.

In the study, the researchers created an adsorbent material that – unlike conventional ion-exchange resins that are frequently used in reactors – is selective for cobalt but has the unique ability of disregarding iron-based ions.

According to the researchers, the polymer’s high selectivity increases its appeal, for use in decontamination processes in reactors that utilize a variety of structural materials. (ANI)

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Bill and Melinda Gates pour thousands into unconventional health research

May 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, May 5 (ANI): Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has thrown a lifeline to number of projects like creating an anti-viral tomato, a flu-resistant chicken and a magnet that can detect malaria, awarding 81 grants of one lakh dollar each in a bid to support innovative, unconventional global health research.

The five-year health research grants are designed to encourage scientists to pursue bold ideas that could lead to breakthroughs, focusing on ways to prevent and treat infectious diseases, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrhoeal diseases.
Among the grant recipients is Eric Lam at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who is exploring tomatoes as an antiviral drug delivery system, The Telegraph reported.

Three British scientific teams, pursuing novel approaches to preventing and treating infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and pneumonia, have been chosen.

One team, led by researchers at the University of Exeter in Devon, England, will seek to build an inexpensive instrument to diagnose malaria by using magnets to detect the waste products of the malaria parasite in human blood.

Scientists from Royal Holloway University, London, are attempting to compile a library of all possible mutations of HIV with the ultimate goal of a vaccine that can protect against many variant forms of the virus.

Each grant recipient will also get the chance of follow-on grants of one million dollar if their projects show success.

Applicants were selected from more than 3,000 proposals, with all levels of scientists represented – from veteran researchers to postgraduates – and a range of disciplines, such as neurobiology, immunology and polymer science. (ANI)

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Snails’ natural glue can be used to develop better surgical adhesives

May 4, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 3 (ANI): Researchers at Ithaca College, US, have shed new light on the nature of the adhesive mechanism that snails use to attach themselves onto slippery surfaces, which could lead to developing surgical adhesives that would bind to wet surfaces and be less invasive than suturing mechanisms.

This research follows up on an earlier study that identified the key characteristics controlling this transition from a water-based gel into a powerful yet flexible adhesive.The strength of the natural adhesive comes from the way long, rope-like polymers chemically tie together, or cross link, at certain points,” said Andrew Smith, associate professor of biology.

“In our previous studies, we had shown that metals were essential to the formation of cross-links. This is unusual, as some combination of electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions are commonly responsible for the formation of cross-links in other gels,” he added.lectrostatic interactions occur when a negatively charged group on one polymer is attracted to a positively charged group on another.

Hydrophobic interactions take place when regions of a polymer don’t interact with water, so they stick together to avoid contacting water.

“We used several approaches to break these interactions, and the treatments that normally disrupt them had no impact on the glue’s mechanical integrity or ability to set,” Smith said. Our study conclusively showed that electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions do not play any detectable role. Removing metals alone caused the glue to fall apart. This was exciting and unexpected,” he added.

Removing the metals, however, didn’t completely break down the gel.

The researchers discovered that a specific protein was responsible for forming strong cross-links that were unaffected when the metals were removed after the glue set. ut, when metals were removed before the glue set, the cross-links didn’t form.This is a very unusual material we’re looking at,” Smith said. “By discovering that metals are central to forming cross-links, we know there are several intriguing mechanisms that could hold the glue together,” he added.

For example, zinc, calcium and iron ions can bind very strongly to several molecules at the same time, thereby effectively joining them together. Iron and copper can also catalyze reactions that trigger strong cross-link formation.

“The significance of this is that we are much farther along the path to our goal of identifying how the glue works so that synthetic mimics can be made,” Smith said. (ANI)

Filed Under: Science News Tagged With: andrew smith, associate professor, biology, gels, glue, hydrophobic interactions, ithaca college, mechanical integrity, mechanisms, metals, Polymer, polymers, protein, rope, slippery surfaces, Snails, surgical adhesives, suturing, water based gel, wet surfaces

Brighter, full-colour electronic readers coming your way

May 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Apr 30 (ANI): Buying an e-reader but not sure if you’d like reading the dim screen? Well, then get ready for e-book reading experience that will be as close to printed media as possible.

Scientists have announced, what is known as Electrofluidic Display Technology (EFD)- the first technology to electrically switch the appearance of pigments in a manner that provides visual brilliance equal to conventional printed media.

The work by an international collaboration of the University of Cincinnati, Sun Chemical, Polymer Vision and Gamma Dynamics, could offer better than 85 percent “white-state reflectance.”

White-state reflectance is a performance level required for consumers to accept reflective display applications such as e-books, cell-phones and signage.

“If you compare this technology to what’s been developed previously, there’s no comparison. We’re ahead by a wide margin in critical categories such as brightness, colour saturation and video speed,” Nature quoted developer Jason Heikenfeld, assistant professor of electrical engineering in UC’s College of Engineering, as saying.

The work on this technology has been underway for several years.

Heikenfeld said: “The ultimate reflective display would simply place the best colorants used by the printing industry directly beneath the front viewing substrate of a display.

“In our EFD pixels, we are able to hide or reveal colored pigment in a manner that is optically superior to the techniques used in electrowetting, electrophoretic and electrochromic displays.”

Project partners at PolymerVision see strong potential for rollable displays, because the optically active layer can be less than 15 microns thick.

And it could be used in a wide range of products, including electronic windows and tuneable colour casings on portable electronics.

“This takes the Amazon Kindle, for example, which is black and white, and could make it full colour. So now you could take it from a niche product to a mainstream product,” said Heikenfeld.

The details of the displays have been published in the paper ‘Electrofluidic displays using Young-Laplace transposition of brilliant pigment dispersions’. (ANI)

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Now, gecko-inspired supersticky robots that scale walls, ceilings

May 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Apr 28 (ANI): If you thought it was only Spiderman who could glide on any surface with no apparent gravitational pull, then it’s time to get out of fiction and look closer to reality – scientists have created robots that can scale walls and hang off the ceiling just like geckos.

Metin Sitti and Ozgur Unver of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have claimed that their new robots – a sticky-tracked wall climber and a 16-legged ceiling walker – could tackle many jobs in the home including painting ceilings and clearing cobwebs.

The researchers said that the robots could also play a part in exploration, inspection, repair and even search and rescue.

Moving ahead of using suction for locomotion in previous wall and ceiling climbers, scientists have resorted to a “sticky” elastic polymer, or elastomer, that can adhere to a variety of surfaces, including wood, metal, glass and brick.

By using the elastomers, scientists are hoping to mimic the mechanism, which geckos use to climb walls and walk upside down- the millions of tiny hairs called setae on their toe pads, reports New Scientist.

The researchers showed that the geckos’ setae do this by harnessing van der Waals forces- a weak electrostatic attraction which operates only at an intermolecular level.

Thus, Sitti has been experimenting with squishy elastomers to mimic the forces that geckos’ setae use.

Both robots made by Sitti use sticky elastomers, though not in the form of hairs, to grip surfaces using van der Waals forces.

Their wall-climbing robot, called Tankbot, is a palm-sized, 60-gram machine with a tacky elastomer tank track on either side of it, and its trick is to keep its tracks in close contact with the surface whilst continuously “unpeeling” itself.

Tests showed that Tankbot could deftly scale walls and even carry small payloads. However, Sitti said that its “adhesion falls short for upside-down ceiling climbing.”

So for scampering on ceilings, the researchers are working on another design with stronger adhesion- the FourBar robot- which has a four tough plastic bars that move parallel to one another driven by a motor.

Each bar has four tacky elastomer footpads, mounted in pairs on rockers. When the eight footpads on the interior bars are stuck to a surface, the outer bars unpeel their footpads and move forwards. When they are safely restuck, the inner bars unpeel and move forwards.

Although the robot moved 30 metres upside down in tests, the researchers observed one problem with both robots-their elastomers can clog with dirt and dust and lose their crucial tackiness.

Sitti hopes to overcome this on future bots by using his hairy gecko-like elastomers-ultrafine nanoscale hairs do not provide micro-scale dirt particles with enough contact – so they simply roll off.

The details on the robots will be presented at the annual International Robotics and Automation Conference (ICRA) in Kobe, Japan, in mid-May. (ANI)

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“Self- healing” plastic may facilitate recycling of e-waste

April 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 27 (ANI): Scientists in The Netherlands are reporting development of a new plastic with a “self-healing polymer” that has potential for use in the first easy-to-recycle computer circuit boards, electrical insulation, and other electronics products that now wind up on society’s growing heaps of electronic waste.

Antonius Broekhuis and colleagues note in the new study that so-called thermoset plastics are widely used in consumer electronics due to their hardness and heat resistance.

These plastics, however, contain additives and reinforcement materials that make them almost impossible to recycle.

So-called thermoplastics, in contrast, are softer and can be remelted easily.

As a result, thermoset plastics often end up in landfills or incinerators, where they can contribute to pollution.

Scientists have long-sought a simple, inexpensive process to make these plastics recyclable, but they have been largely unsuccessful until now.

Broekhuis and colleagues describe development of a new type of thermosetting plastic that can be melted and remolded without losing its original heat-resistance and strength.

The scientists showed in laboratory tests that they could melt granules of what they term a “self-healing” polymer and reform them into uniform, rigid plastic bars.

They also showed that the plastic could be remolded multiple times, setting the stage for a new generation of recyclable plastics. (ANI)

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