These long-term goals attracted the researchers, led by George Olah, a chemist at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Olah, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in chemistry, has long envisioned future society relying primarily on fuel made from methanol, a simple liquid alcohol. As easily recoverable fossil fuels become scarce in the decades to come, he suggests that society could harvest atmospheric CO₂ and combine it with hydrogen stripped from water to generate a methanol fuel for myriad uses.

Olah and his colleagues also work on making cheap, iron-based batteries that can store excess power generated by renewable energy sources and feed it into the electrical grid during times of peak demand. To function, the iron batteries grab oxygen from the air. But if even tiny amounts of CO₂ get into the reaction, it kills the battery. In recent years, researchers have come up with good CO₂ absorbers made from porous solids called zeolites and metal organic frameworks. But they’re expensive. So Olah and his colleagues set out to find a cheaper alternative.

They turned to polyethylenimine (PEI), a cheap polymer that is a decent CO₂ absorber. But it only grabs CO₂ at its surface. To boost PEI’s surface area, the USC team dissolved the polymer in a methanol solvent and spread it atop a batch of fumed silica, a cheap, industrially produced porous solid made from microscopic droplets of glass fused together. When the solvent evaporated, it left solid PEI with a high surface area.

When the researchers tested the new material’s CO₂-grabbing abilities, they found that in humid air—the kind present in most ambient conditions—each gram of the material sopped up an average of 1.72 nanomoles of CO₂. That’s well above the 1.44 nanomoles per gram absorbed by a recent rival made from aminosilica and among the highest levels of CO₂ absorption from air ever tested, the team reported last month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Once saturated with CO₂, the PEI-silica combo is easy to regenerate. The CO₂floats away after the polymer is heated to 85°C. Other commonly used solid CO₂ absorbers must be heated to over 800°C to drive off the CO₂.

“This is intriguing. It’s nice that it works at low temperatures,” says Klaus Lackner, a CO₂ air-capture expert at Columbia University. That could make it useful for grabbing CO₂ out of the air in addition to safeguarding batteries, says USC chemist and team member Surya Prakash. The polymer could be useful for building massive farms of artificial trees that would aim to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ and prevent the worst ravages of climate change. But that’s only if countries around the globe are willing to spend untold billions of dollars to rein in atmospheric CO₂. The polymer also degrades at high temperatures, meaning it likely can’t be used to snag CO₂ from industrial smokestacks or automobile tailpipes, where the CO₂ is often highly concentrated but typically comes out at high temperature. To overcome that limitation, Prakash says the USC team is now working to produce high surface-area PEIs that are better at taking the heat.

Full article on Sciencemag.org

Originated From Ted.com

Nanosensors patrolling your bloodstream for the first sign of an imminent stroke or heart attack, releasing anticlotting or anti-inflammatory drugs to stop it in its tracks. Cell phones that display your vital signs and take ultrasound images of your heart or abdomen. Genetic scans of malignant cells that match your cancer to the most effective treatment.

In cardiologist Eric Topol’s vision, medicine is on the verge of an overhaul akin to the one that digital technology has brought to everything from how we communicate to how we locate a pizza parlor. Until now, he writes in his upcoming book The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care, the “ossified” and “sclerotic” nature of medicine has left health “largely unaffected, insulated, and almost compartmentalized from [the] digital revolution.” But that, he argues, is about to change.

Digital technologies, he foresees, can bring us true prevention (courtesy of those nanosensors that stop an incipient heart attack), individualized care (thanks to DNA analyses that match patients to effective drugs), cost savings (by giving patients only those drugs that help them), and a reduction in medical errors (because of electronic health records, or EHRs). Virtual house calls and remote monitoring could replace most doctor visits and even many hospitalizations. Topol, the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, is far from alone: e-health is so widely favored that the 2010 U.S. health-care reform act allocates billions of dollars to electronic health records in the belief that they will improve care.

Anyone who has ever been sick or who is likely to ever get sick—in other words, all of us—would say, Bring it on. There is only one problem: the paucity of evidence that these technologies benefit patients. Topol is not unaware of that. The eminently readable Creative Destruction almost seems to have two authors, one of them a rigorous, hard-nosed physician/researcher who insightfully critiques the tendency to base treatments on what is effective for the average patient. This Topol cites study after study showing that much of what he celebrates may not benefit many individual patients at all. The other author, however, is a kid in the electronics store whose eyes light up at every cool new toy. He seems to dismiss the other Topol as a skunk at a picnic.

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At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, chip maker Intel refreshed the familiar notebook computer with ideas borrowed from more glamorous competitors.

Touch, voice control, and even gesture control—the latter popularized by Microsoft’s Kinect gaming controller—will be coming to lightweight laptops dubbed “ultrabooks,” said Mooly Eden, Intel’s vice president for sales and marketing, at Intel’s press conference this morning.

Intel dominates the market for desktop, laptop, and server processors, but has been a spectator to the rapid growth of smart phones and tablets. Worse for the Santa Clara, California, chip maker, high-powered smart-phone and tablet processors based on designs from U.K.-based ARM are beginning to show potential in Intel’s traditional realm.

Smart phones, tablets, and Apple’s super-lightweight MacBook Air have made conventional laptops look rather staid in recent years, threatening a major source of revenue for Intel. Eden’s presentation made it clear that Intel has spent considerable effort in its labs developing new technologies to refresh the notebook. Touch, voice recognition, and novel hybrid tablet-laptop designs have all been developed and will be licensed to partners such as Asus, Acer, and HP, which make ultrabooks.

Eden also showed a brief demonstration of an ultrabook able to recognize hand and arm gestures made in front of its screen, using software developed by Intel. A simple game involved using a slingshot, operated by extending an arm into the space in front of the ultrabook, making a grasping motion in thin air, then pulling back and releasing to fire the catapult. “We believe that we’ll see gestures even with our ultrabook,” said Eden. He didn’t explain how the technology worked but the ultrabook appeared to have a normal camera, suggesting it was using machine vision software to process video from its webcam.

Eden presented all those new twists on the notebook as logical moves enabled by more power-efficient processors and by a better appreciation of the importance of human-machine interaction. “In the last 30 years, the number of transistors went up a million percent, but we didn’t do enough with the man-machine interface,” he said.

There was no reason for touch to have appeared in phones and tablet devices but not laptops, said Eden. “Let me tell you something, it’s not going to skip the ultrabook,” he said. Trials in Europe, the U.S., China, and Brazil involving prototype ultrabooks with touch screens have found that people used the touch panel for around 70 percent of operations, he said. Eden also dismissed claims that people would find operating a touch panel in a notebook tiring: “People say that it’s very easy.”

Eden was dismissive of tablets, labeling them devices well suited to consuming movies and other content, but not to doing work or creating content. Intel’s anthropologists had discovered that being able to do both is important, he said. “People don’t buy the story that consumption is enough,” Eden said. “We are people; consumption is for cows.”

Eden also showed ultrabooks with designs halfway between phone and tablet. The screen of one design, which he described as a “slider,” could be moved over the keyboard to become a tablet. A prototype called a Nikiski has a large, transparent touch pad that stretches the full width of the device. When a Nikiski laptop is closed, some of its screen is visible through that touchpad, providing easy access to notifications like calendar events or e-mails. When open, the panel can detect when a person places his hands down to type on the keyboard.

The Nikiski prototype was shown running the forthcoming Windows 8 operating system. It includes a special interface, known as Metro, which presents notifications and access to programs using a grid of tiles intended to be swiped and tapped. It was originally designed for touch devices. “We’ll be able to get an even better [touch] experience with the tile experience,” said Eden.

Peter Mahoney, chief marketing offer for Nuance, which develops voice recognition technology, joined Eden to announce that future ultrabooks will be able to recognize voice commands in a manner similar to Apple’s Siri assistant, which is built into the iPhone 4S.

Nuance’s technology is licensed by Apple for use in Siri, but Mahoney said that voice control could be more powerful in an ultrabook because the devices have more computing power than phones do. Unlike Google or Apple’s voice recognition, there will be no need for speech data to be sent to cloud servers for analysis, he said, leading to quicker performance. The software can also adapt to a person’s voice and even relatively thick accents, he said. The feature will initially support nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Mandarin.

Eden said that the voice feature could be used to compose social-media messages and updates, and to ask a closed laptop in a person’s bag for information with questions such as “when is my next meeting?”

There are more than 75 ultrabook devices “in the design pipeline” for 2012, said Eden, and a handful will launch with touch screens before the year is out. Analysts at the Consumer Electronics Association, which organizes CES, estimate that Intel’s various partners will launch more than 50 regular ultrabooks this week.

Although Intel says ultrabooks will be the company’s main focus in 2012, the company is also working to gain a foothold in phones and tablets, and recently showed prototypes expected to be seen again at CES later this week.

Article sourced from www.technologyreview.com

Light warp: This is the largest sheet ever made of a metamaterial that can bend near infrared light backward. 

Tiny crystals called quantum dots emit intense, sharply defined colors. Now researchers have made LED displays that use quantum dots. Five years ago, QD Vision demonstrated its first, rudimentary one-color displays, using the nanoscale crystals. This year it demonstrated a full-color display capable of showing video. The company says it could be another five years before the technology appears in commercial displays. Samsung might get there first—it’s also developing quantum-dot displays, and demonstrated a full-color one in February.

Quantum-dot displays could use far less energy than LCDs. Another ingenious way to reduce energy use is make displays that emit no light at all, but instead reflect ambient light, an approach being taken by Qualcomm with its full-color Mirasol displays, which use only a tenth of the energy of an LCD. The technology has started to appear in tablet computers in South Korea.

No display looks good after it’s covered with fingerprints. A new coating based on soot from a candle flame could provide a cheap oil-repelling layer that could eliminate smudges.

Novel nanostructured materials could greatly enhance the power output of solar panels and make them cheaper by capturing light that would have otherwise been reflected. They could also achieve these goals by converting near infrared light into colors that conventional silicon solar cells can absorb. Another material could render stealth aircraft invisible at night—and invisible to radar night and day.

Metamaterials offer another approach to invisibility: instead of absorbing light, metamaterials bend it around an object. Until this year, researchers have only been able to make metamaterials on a small scale—less than a millimeter across. Now they’ve made them big enough to be practical. They don’t work yet for all wavelengths of light, but they could render  objects invisible to night vision equipment.

Stanford researchers built a battery electrode that can be recharged 40,000 times—compared to the 1,000 charges you’d get with a typical laptop battery. Since the electrode lasts so long, and is made of abundant materials, it could provide an inexpensive way to store power from wind turbines and solar panels.

Other researchers have developed inexpensive materials that can store 10 times as much energy as conventional graphite electrodes in lithium-ion batteries. Paired with an equally high-capacity opposite electrode, these could transform portable electronics and electric vehicles. One technology in particular, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, seems promising because it uses a conductive polymer that can be incorporated into existing manufacturing lines, instead of requiring the expensive new technology for making nanostructures required by others.

New tools could speed the next materials breakthroughs. A modeling program developed at Harvard has led to one of the best organic semiconductors ever made. And a robotic systemfor making thousands of battery cells with unique electrode chemistries has discovered materials that could boost lithium-ion battery storage capacity by 25 percent.

Sourced from www.technologyreview.com

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — In a move that has angered Republicans, President Obama on Wednesday announced he’s making a recess appointment of Richard Cordray to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sidestepping the Senate confirmation process.

“Today, I’m appointing Richard as America’s consumer watchdog,” Obama said in a speech in Ohio, where Cordray served as attorney general. “That means he’ll be in charge of one thing: Looking out for the best interests of American consumers.”

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Editor’s note: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon  is a fellow and deputy director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council of Foreign Relations. She writes extensively about women entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Bosnia and Rwanda. She wrote “The Dressmaker of Khair Khana,” a book that tells the story of an Afghan girl whose business created jobs and hope during the Taliban years.

(CNN) – Tales of war leave out half the story much of the time:

Women.

Now that attention is turning to what women endure during war, it is time to ensure they get a say in the peace.

In 1951, Eric Hoffer wrote, “Though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.”

The true believer is everywhere in “In the Land of Blood and Honey.” The film forces its audience to consider the cruelty men are capable of visiting upon one another and what nobility and humanity people share while enduring horror beyond the imagination’s capacity to digest.

Read full article on CNN

Claiming it is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam, an innovative new material called a micro-lattice has been developed by the California Institute of Technology, HRL Laboratories, based in Malibu, CA, and the University of California-Irvine.

Based on a crisscross lattice structure on a micro-scale, the material is made up of a series of tiny, hollow nickel-phosphorous tubes angled to connect at nodes, which form repeating, asterisk-like unit cells in three dimensions.

The micro-lattice’s unique structure consists of 99.99% air, and just 0.01% material. The tubes have a wall thickness of 100 nanometers – 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Bill Carter, manager of architected materials group at HRL, tells WardsAuto a key focus for the material will be its potential application in automotive technologies. By replacing primary structures in cars and airplanes with micro-lattice, manufacturers will be able to produce lighter and more fuel-efficient products, he says.

The material also is tough, Carter says in a statement, noting that while the metal is ultra-low in density it absorbs energy well because of its lattice design. He compares the micro-lattice to the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge.

Those structures “are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architectures,” Carter says. “We are revolutionizing lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the materials level and designing their architectures at the nano and micro scales.”

The material’s cellular architecture also gives it unprecedented mechanical behavior for a metal, which includes a complete recovery from compression – exceeding 50% strain – and an extremely high level of energy absorption, the researchers say.

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