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Flowering plants may have originated more than 100 million years earlier than previously thought, according to scientists in Switzerland and Germany.
The previously oldest known flowering plant-like pollen dates from the Early Cretaceous period.
But the team described six types of fossil pollen grains from older Middle Triassic core samples that closely resemble these earliest examples.
The research is published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
Flowering plants - also known as angiosperms - are the most numerous and diverse group of seed-producing plants on land.
All seed-producing plants make pollen, with each grain enclosing the developing male cell used in sexual reproduction.
Phys.org) —A research team that includes a physics professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) has recorded a drastically reduced measurement of the Casimir effect, a fundamental quantum phenomenon experienced between two neutral bodies that exist in a vacuum.
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) have been selected by ARPA-E, the US government's Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, to carry out a one year project aimed at developing a low cost method to obtain titanium metal from its ore. It is thought that the process could lower the cost of the metal by up to 60 percent.
FutureTimeline.forumOct. 9, 2013 — Terahertz (THz) radiation -- radiation in the wavelength range of 30 to 300 microns -- is gaining attention due to its applications in security screening, medical and industrial imaging, agricultural inspection, astronomical research, and other areas. Traditional methods of generating terahertz radiation, however, usually involve large and expensive instruments, some of which also require cryogenic cooling. A compact terahertz source -- similar to the laser diode found in a DVD player -- operating at room temperature with high power has been a dream device in the terahertz community for decades.
Read more at: Mix of graphene nanoribbons, polymer has potential for cars, soda, beerA discovery at Rice University aims to make vehicles that run on compressed natural gas more practical. It might also prolong the shelf life of bottled beer and soda.
The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has enhanced a polymer material to make it far more impermeable to pressurized gas and far lighter than the metal in tanks now used to contain the gas.
The combination could be a boon for an auto industry under pressure to market consumer cars that use cheaper natural gas. It could also find a market in food and beverage packaging.
Tour and his colleagues at Rice and in Hungary, Slovenia and India reported their results this week in the online edition of the American Chemistry Society journal ACS Nano.
They tested GNR/TPU films by putting pressurized nitrogen on one side and a vacuum on the other side. For films with no GNRs, the pressure dropped to zero in about 100 seconds as nitrogen escaped into the vacuum chamber. With GNRs at 0.5 percent, the pressure didn't budge over 1,000 seconds, and it dropped only slightly over more than 18 hours.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-10-graphene-nanoribbons-polymer-potential-cars.html#jCp
Carbyne is a chain of carbon atoms held together by either double or alternating single and triple atomic bonds. That makes it a true one-dimensional material, unlike atom-thin sheets of graphene, which have a top and a bottom, or hollow nanotubes, which have an inside and outside.
According to calculations by theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his group:
•Carbyne’s tensile strength — the ability to withstand stretching — surpasses “that of any other known material” and is double that of graphene. (Scientists have calculated it would take an elephant on a pencil to break through a sheet of graphene.)
•It has twice the tensile stiffness of graphene and carbon nanotubes and nearly three times that of diamond.
•Stretching carbyne as little as 10 percent alters its electronic band gap significantly.
•If outfitted with molecular handles at the ends, it can also be twisted to alter its band gap. With a 90-degree end-to-end rotation, it becomes a magnetic semiconductor.
•Carbyne chains can take on side molecules that may make the chains suitable for energy storage.
•The material is stable at room temperature, largely resisting crosslinks with nearby chains.
“You could look at it as an ultimately thin graphene ribbon, reduced to just one atom, or an ultimately thin nanotube,” Yakobson said.. It could be useful for nanomechanical systems, in spintronic devices, as sensors, as strong and light materials for mechanical applications, or for energy storage.
Read more at: New material gives visible light an infinite wavelengthResearchers from the FOM Institute AMOLF and the University of Pennsylvania have fabricated a material which gives visible light a nearly infinite wavelength. The new metamaterial is made by stacking silver and silicon nitride nanolayers. It may find applications in novel optical components or circuits and the design of more efficient leds. The work will appear on October 13th in Nature Photonics.
Since the earliest days of brewing beer and making wine, the search has been on for an easy, affordable method of chilling drinks quickly without diluting them in the process. Florida-based start-up Spin Chill claims to have a solution to this vexing problem with a portable device that (literally) turns beverages ice cold in 60 seconds.
Spin Chill aims to radically shorten the time required to cool a canned or bottled beverage – 20-30 minutes if you simply put the container in the freezer. To solve this problem wouldn't seem to require more than a little planning ahead, but somehow running out of cold beer always seems to come as a surprise. Spin Chill brings this cooling time down to less than a minute.
If Angus MacGyver was a particle physicist, he might face a challenge like this: Take a femtosecond laser and a fused quartz grating and make the world's most powerful particle accelerator. Despite the apparent incongruity of the resources and the goal, researchers at Stanford University and the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have fabricated a proof-of-principle electron accelerator using just such equipment. In the demonstration, electrons from a 60 MeV beam saw a force of acceleration about ten times greater than possible in a conventional accelerator.
Flying Cars Coming Soon: Terrafugia Says Its First Vehicle Will Be Available in 2015 [VIDEO] - International Science TimesTerrafugia says they will have a flying car in the skies in just two years. The Massachusetts-based company is developing two "roadable aircrafts": the Transition, an airplane with fold-up wings which can be driven to the airport, and the TF-X, a consumer-focused "flying car for all of us," which can vertically take off and land in your driveway.
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"The potential benefit to humanity of a practical flying car is tremendous," says Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich. "The global impact of widely distributed, practical, personal airborne transportation has been estimated by the non-profit CAFE Foundation at approximately $800 billion/year. NASA has estimated it at $1 trillion/year. I believe it is impossible to quantify the benefit to humanity."
The Transition, which will be the first commercially available flying car from Terrafugia, is closer to a novel airplane than a flying car. The Transition is designed to be kept in your garage, but must be driven to an airport for takeoff (and must land at an airport too). The Transition is classified as a Light Sport Aircraft and requires a sport pilot certificate, so it isn't a flying car you'd take to the mall. It's for pilots, not for drivers, and at a cost of $279,000 it obviously isn't going to be the flying car for every driveway.
For automobile manufacturers, the electric elephant in the room continues to be bulky and weighty battery packs. This week, Volvo unveiled an innovative potential solution to the problem that it has been working on for the past three and a half years with other European partners; replace steel body panels with carbon fiber composite panels infused with nano-batteries and super capacitors.
The conductive material used around the vehicle to charge and store energy can be recharged via the vehicle’s regenerative braking system or via the grid. When the system and motor requires charge, the energized panels behave like any traditional battery pack and discharge accordingly. According to Volvo, the system not only charges faster than traditional battery configurations but also takes a charge faster.
Using a Volvo S80 as a test platform, the team replaced the vehicle’s trunk lid and plenum cross member over the engine bay with the new material. Volvo claims the composite trunk lid, which is stronger than the outgoing steel component, could not only power the vehicle's 12 volt system but the weight savings alone could increase an EV's overall range and performance as a result.
There is a saying in flying: “If it looks good, it will fly well.” Stefan Klein, a designer from the Slovak Republic, has announced the first flight of his Aeromobil Version 2.5, a flying car prototype he has been developing over the last 20 years. This vehicle is a strikingly beautiful design with folding wings and a propeller in the tail. But will its flight capabilities match its looks?
The Aeromobil V2.5 is a propeller-driven aircraft that also functions as an automobile – or you can think of it it a car with lofty aspirations. The aviation aspects seem to be prominent in the design, with a streamlined cockpit, super light weight, and sleek tail fins in the back. Propulsion is provided by a 100 hp Rotax 912 water cooled engine mounted behind the seats, with drive shafts leading both aft to the propeller and forward to the two front wheels for driving.
This project is not the only flying car around. There is also the US-based Terrafugia, which folds up its wings vertically on the sides of the vehicle. There is also a Dutch design called the PAL-V, where the ground vehicle is a three wheeled tilting motorcycle that turns into a gyrocopter at the airport.
Researchers from FOM Institute AMOLF, Philips Research, and the Autonomous University of Madrid have identified a new type of particle that might make quantum condensation possible at room temperature. The particles, so called PEPs, could be used for fundamental studies on quantum mechanics and applications in lasers and LEDs. The researchers published their results on 18 October in Physical Review Letters.
In quantum condensation (also known as Bose-Einstein condensation) microscopic particles with different energy levels collapse into a single macroscopic quantum state. In that state, particles can no longer be distinguished. They lose their individuality and so the matter can be considered to be one 'superparticle'.
Quantum condensation was predicted in the 1920s by Bose and Einstein, who theorised that particles will form a condensate at very low temperatures. The first experimental demonstration of the quantum condensate followed in the 1990s, when a gas of atoms was cooled to just a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero (-273°C). The need for such an extremely low temperature is related to the mass of the particles: the heavier the particles, the lower the temperature at which condensation occurs. This motivated an ongoing search for light particles that may condense at higher temperatures than atoms. The eventual goal is to find particles that form a condensate at room temperature.
UPTON, NY—Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a general approach for combining different types of nanoparticles to produce large-scale composite materials. The technique, described in a paper published online by Nature Nanotechnology on October 20, 2013, opens many opportunities for mixing and matching particles with different magnetic, optical, or chemical properties to form new, multifunctional materials or materials with enhanced performance for a wide range of potential applications.
Read more at: Nanodiamond production in ambient conditions opens door for flexible electronics, implants and moreInstead of having to use tons of crushing force and volcanic heat to forge diamonds, researchers at Case Western Reserve University have developed a way to cheaply make nanodiamonds on a lab bench at atmospheric pressure and near room temperature.
The nanodiamonds are formed directly from a gas and require no surface to grow on.
The discovery holds promise for many uses in technology and industry, such as coating plastics with ultrafine diamond powder and making flexible electronics, implants, drug-delivery devices and more products that take advantage of diamond's exceptional properties.
Their investigation is published today in the scientific journal Nature Communications. The findings build on a tradition of diamond research at Case Western Reserve.
To keep drinking water clean, experts are constantly monitoring our supply to check it for contaminants. Now laser technology will give them a helping hand: a new system automatically analyzes water samples at the waterworks itself.
(Phys.org) —Researchers in electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Santa Barbara have introduced and modeled an integrated circuit design scheme in which transistors and interconnects are monolithically patterned seamlessly on a sheet of graphene, a 2-dimensional plane of carbon atoms. The demonstration offers possibilities for ultra energy-efficient, flexible, and transparent electronics.
New device stores electricity on silicon chips(Phys.org) —Solar cells that produce electricity 24/7, not just when the sun is shining. Mobile phones with built-in power cells that recharge in seconds and work for weeks between charges.
These are just two of the possibilities raised by a novel supercapacitor design invented by material scientists at Vanderbilt University that is described in a paper published in the Oct. 22 issue of the journal Scientific Reports.
New technique creates multifunctional nanomaterials by mixing and matching existing particlesResearchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) have developed a generalized method of blending two different types of nanoparticles into a single large-scale composite material using synthetic DNA strands. The technique has great potential for designing a vast range of new nanomaterials with precise electrical, mechanical or magnetic properties.
The "mix and match" approach
Assembly of nanostructures using synthetic DNA isn't new, and has already been used to combine two or even three different types of nanoparticles into a single material. However, the process as it stands comes with a number of limitations, such as the inability to control the distance between the nanoparticles.
The technique developed at BNL is much more generalized and can be used to control parameters such as the spacing and ordering of the different particles, allowing for the mixing and matching of nanoparticles with different magnetic, optical, or chemical properties.
Physicist Oleg Gang and his team first coat the two kinds of nanoparticles with binding chemicals and then attach them to two complementary strands of lab-synthesized DNA. When the two DNA strands are placed in close proximity, they help the nanoparticles mix and match into a very large three-dimensional array.
Like it or not, passing through security is part of life nowadays. Whether you're headed to a sporting event, a theme park or hopping on a plane, passing through security is pretty much a given. In its current state, a security check can not only be a choke point, but can leave you feeling abused and manhandled by the horrific rogue's gallery of security employees venues see fit to employ.
A single airport security checkpoint, for instance, usually sports around seven disgruntled TSA agents sitting around and deriding travelers as they try to make their flight. While security concerns are a given, it's this sort of emotional assault that travelers can really do without. And thankfully a California-based security firm has a solution. They call it the Qylatron, and it's an autonomous, universal checkpoint that requires only a single security agent per gate.
