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A research team from Caltech and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has demonstrated a promising way to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into ethylene — an important chemical used to produce plastics, solvents, cosmetics and other important products globally. The scientists developed nanoscale copper wires with specially shaped surfaces to catalyze a chemical reaction that reduces greenhouse gas emissions while generating ethylene — a valuable chemical simultaneously. Computational studies of the reaction show the shaped catalyst favors the production of ethylene over hydrogen or methane. A study detailing the advance was published in Nature Catalysis. Currently, ethylene has a global...

Container's material properties affect the viscosity of water at the nanoscale Sep 19, 2013 Enlarge Georgia Tech associate professor Elisa Riedo poses with a glass water bottle and a plastic water bottle. While container materials don't significantly affect the rate at which water pours from bottles of this size, a new study shows that the properties of containers at the nanoscale dramatically affect the viscosity of water. Credit: Rob Felt Water pours into a cup at about the same rate regardless of whether the water bottle is made of glass or plastic. But at nanometer-size scales for water and potentially...

Members of the research team that conducted the experiment, standing in front of the high-energy X-ray photoemission spectroscopy setup at the PETRA III synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany. Left to right: Andrei Gloskovskii, Yury Matveyev, Dmitry Negrov, Vitalii Mikheev, and Andrei Zenkevich. Credit: Andrei Zenkevich/MIPT ==================================================================== Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, along with their colleagues from Germany and the U.S., have achieved a breakthrough in nonvolatile memory devices. The team came up with a unique method for measuring the electric potential distribution across a ferroelectric capacitor, which could lead to the creation of memory orders of magnitude...

Buckybomb shows potential power of nanoscale explosives Mar 05, 2015 by Lisa Zyga Enlarge Molecular configuration of an exploding buckybomb. Credit: ACS (Phys.org)—Scientists have simulated the explosion of a modified buckminsterfullerene molecule (C60), better known as a buckyball, and shown that the reaction produces a tremendous increase in temperature and pressure within a fraction of a second. The nanoscale explosive, which the scientists nickname a "buckybomb," belongs to the emerging field of high-energy nanomaterials that could have a variety of military and industrial applications. The researchers, Vitaly V. Chaban, Eudes Eterno Fileti, and Oleg V. Prezhdo at the University of...

Vincenzo Amendola and Moreno Meneghetti, at the University of Padova, Italy, take inspiration from nature to design materials that can repair themselves.Nature uses self-healing in all living systems to repair damage caused by environmental interactions. A simple case is repairing a skin wound - without this mechanism, we could not live. DNA repair, which must occur routinely in every living organism, is another example. But at what level do repairing mechanisms occur? Looking at the components of a living system, we find cells, which typically have micrometre dimensions. But we have to zoom in further, namely to the nanoscale, to...

The velvet background on a painting of Elvis looks black because it reflects so little light. But getting a surface to reflect no light at all is surprisingly difficult. Now, researchers have created a virtually reflectionfree surface by coating it with filaments only a few billionths of a meter thick. REFLECTIONFREE. Aluminum nitride coated with antireflection filaments appears nearly black (top left), while samples of aluminum nitride, silicon, and aluminum (from second left to right) reflect much more light. An electron micrograph of the coating (bottom) shows the layers of filaments that make the coating nonreflective.Schubert/Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. Improved antireflective...

The tantalising prospect of DVDs capable of holding almost a terabyte of data - or several hundred movies - has been presented in a patent issued to US storage company Iomega. The US patent describes a disc that could store 40 to 100 times more information that a conventional DVD, using more nanometre-scale sloped ridges to diffract light. US patent number 6879556 - entitled "Method and Apparatus for Optical Data Storage" - was issued to Iomega on April 12 2005. Conventional DVDs store information in the form of ridges and depressions, each several hundred nanometres wide. These correspond to bits...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- The first practical fountain pen was invented in 1884 by Lewis Waterman. Although pens with self-contained ink reservoirs had existed for more than a hundred years before his invention, they suffered from ink leaks and other troubles. Waterman solved these problems by inventing the capillary feed which produced even ink flow. Now fountain pen history is repeating itself in the tiny world of nanoscale writing. Researchers at Northwestern University have demonstrated writing at the sub-100 nanometer molecular scale in fountain-pen fashion. They developed a novel atomic force microscope (AFM) probe chip with an integrated microfluidic system for...