Touched By The Sun

Earlier this year, The Lutetium Project explored how microfluidic circuits are made, and now they are back with the conclusion of their microfluidic adventures. This video explores how microfluidic chips are used and how microscale fluid dynamics relates to other topics in the field. Because these techniques allow researchers very fine control over droplets, there are many chemical and biological possibilities for microfluidic experiments, some of which are shown in the video. Microfluidics in medicine are also already more common than you may think. For example, test strips used by diabetic patients to measure their blood glucose levels are microfluidic circuits! (Video and image credit: The Lutetium Project; submitted by Guillaume D.)

↳ Whisper of the Heart ||

OSKI

Pop-Outs: How the Brain Extracts Meaning From Noise

UC Berkeley neuroscientists have now observed this re-tuning in action by recording directly from the surface of a person’s brain as the words of a previously unintelligible sentence suddenly pop out after the subject is told the meaning of the garbled speech. The re-tuning takes place within a second or less, they found.

The research is in Nature Communications. (full open access)

This supercapacitor battery can be recharged 30,000 times

A thin, flexible supercapacitor boasts high energy and power densities. Credit: University of Central Florida

Everyone and anyone with a smartphone know it is not long before your phone holds a charge for less and less time as the battery begins to degrade. But new research by scientists at the NanoScience Technology Center at the University of Central Florida (UCF), USA, could change that. The team have developed a new method for producing flexible supercapacitors that can store greater amounts of energy and can be recharged over 30,000 times without degradation. This new method could transform technology such as electric vehicles and mobile phones in the future.

‘If you were to replace the batteries with these supercapacitors, you could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn’t need to charge it again for over a week,’ said University of Central Florida researcher Nitin Choudhary.

The UCF team has attempted to apply newly discovered 2D materials that measure just a few atoms thick to supercapacitors. Other scientists have also tried formulations with other 2D materials including graphene, but had only limited success. The new supercapacitors are composed of millions of nanometre-thick wires coated with shells of 2D materials. The core facilitates the super-fast charging and discharging that makes supercapacitors powerful, and the 2D coating delivers the energy storage ability.

‘We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can very nicely integrate the existing materials with the two-dimensional materials,’ said Yeonwoong Eric Jung, assistant professor of the study. Jung is working with UCF’s Office of Technology Transfer to patent the new process. ‘It’s not ready for commercialisation,’ Jung said. ‘But this is a proof-of-concept demonstration, and our studies show there are very high impacts for many technologies.’

Earlier this fall, I attempted my first corn maze. It didn’t work out very well. Early on I unknowingly cut through an area meant to be impassable and thus ended up missing the majority of the maze. Soap, as it turns out, is a much better maze-solver, taking nary a false turn as it heads inexorably to the exit. The secret to soap’s maze-solving prowess is the Marangoni effect. 

Soap has a lower surface tension than the milk that makes up the maze, which causes an imbalance in the forces at the surface of the liquid. That imbalance causes a flow in the direction of higher surface tension; in other words, it tends to pull the soap molecules in the direction of the highest milk concentration. But that explains why the soap moves, not how it knows the right path to take. It turns out that there’s another factor at work. Balancing gravitational forces and surface tension forces shows that the soap tends to spread toward the path with the largest surface area ahead. That’s the maze exit, so Marangoni forces pull the soap right to the way out! (Video credit: F. Temprano-Coleto et al.)

Golden Gate Bridge by Jason Jko

Untitled // Jake Chamseddine

winter sunrise reflections

by Denny Bitte