by Prachi Patel
A thin membranes made from a web of nanowires might become a promising tool for cleaning up oil spills and removing toxic contaminants from groundwater. When dipped into a mixture of water and oil, the 50-micrometer-thick membrane absorbs the oil, swelling to 20 times its weight.
Typically, oil spills are cleaned up using the same basic technology used 20 years ago. This includes using absorbent materials to sop up traces of oil. Natural sorbents such as hay and cellulose can soak up between 3 and 15 times their weight in oil, while synthetic polymer-based sorbents can absorb up to 70 times their weight. But these materials tend to absorb water as well.
TAU scientists create a solar energy device from a plant protein structure
Scientists can now listen to a set of solar wind data that’s usually represented visually, as numbers or graphs. University of Michigan researchers have “sonified” the data. They’ve created an acoustic, or musical, representation of it.
by David l. Chandler
by David L. Chandler
In an advance that might interest Q-Branch, the gadget makers for James Bond, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and partners from industry and academia have designed and tested experimental antennas that are highly efficient and yet a fraction of the size of standard antenna systems with comparable properties. The novel antennas may be useful in ever-shrinking and proliferating wireless systems such as emergency communications devices, micro-sensors and portable ground-penetrating radars to search for tunnels, caverns and other geophysical features.