Laboratory Equipment

Transparent Electrode Key to Flexible Solar Cells

Researchers have created a new type of transparent electrode that might find uses in solar cells, flexible displays for computers and consumer electronics and future “optoelectronic” circuits for sensors and information processing.

The electrode is made of silver nanowires covered with graphene, an extremely thin layer of carbon. The hybrid material shows promise as a possible replacement for indium tin oxide, or ITO, used in transparent electrodes for touch-screen monitors, cell-phone displays and flat-screen televisions. Industry is seeking alternatives to ITO because of drawbacks: it is relatively expensive due to limited abundance of indium, and it is inflexible and degrades over time, becoming brittle and hindering performance.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/transparent-electrode-key-flexible-solar-cells

Technology Enables One-Step Genetic Engineering

A new, streamlined approach to genetic engineering drastically reduces the time and effort needed to insert new genes into bacteria, the workhorses of biotechnology, scientists are reporting. Published in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology, the method paves the way for more rapid development of designer microbes for drug development, environmental cleanup and other activities.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/technology-enables-one-step-genetic-engineering

Model Sheds Light on Mechanisms of Drug-Coated Balloons

Over the past few decades, scientists have developed many devices that can reopen clogged arteries, including angioplasty balloons and metallic stents. While generally effective, each of these treatments has drawbacks, including the risk of side effects.

A study from MIT analyzes the potential usefulness of a new treatment that combines the benefits of angioplasty balloons and drug-releasing stents, but may pose fewer risks. With this new approach, a balloon is inflated in the artery for only a brief period, during which it releases a drug that prevents cells from accumulating and clogging the arteries over time.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/model-sheds-light-mechanisms-drug-coated-balloons

Research Overcomes the Oxide Barrier

Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have uncovered the characteristics of a low-resistance electrical contact to strontium titanate, SrTiO3, an important prototypical oxide semiconductor. Oxides are likely to be important materials in next-generation electronic devices, and they need to be extremely small. Getting electrical signals into and out of oxide semiconductors is hard because a large energy barrier typically develops at the junction with metal contacts.

Metal contacts are required to get electricity into and out of a semiconductor device in much the same way that jumper cables are needed to transfer power from a healthy car battery to a dead battery. This work shows how to eliminate this barrier while keeping the contact area extremely small, at the nanometer (one billionth of a meter) level.

Read more: http://www.chromatographytechniques.com/news/2013/05/research-overcomes-oxide-barrier

Method Improves Carbon-Fiber Composites for Airplanes

These days, aerospace engineering is all about the light stuff: building airplanes with lighter wings, fuselage and landing gear in an effort to reduce fuel costs.

Advanced carbon-fiber composites have been used in recent years to lighten planes’ loads. These materials can match aluminum and titanium in strength but at a fraction of the weight, and can be found in aircraft like the Boeing 787 and Airbus A380, reducing such jets’ weight by 20 percent.

read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/method-improves-carbon-fiber-composites-airplanes

Physicists Develop Low-Power Polariton Laser

Lasers are an unseen backbone of modern society. They’re integral to technologies ranging from high-speed Internet services to Blu-ray players.

The physics powering lasers, however, has remained relatively unchanged through 50 years of use. Now, an international research team led by Stanford’s Yoshihisa Yamamoto, a professor of electrical engineering and of applied physics, has demonstrated a revolutionary electrically driven polariton laser that could significantly improve the efficiency of lasers.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/physicists-develop-low-power-polariton-laser

Waterproof Fabric Drains Sweat

Waterproof fabrics that whisk away sweat could be the latest application of microfluidic technology developed by bioengineers at the Univ. of California, Davis.

The new fabric works like human skin, forming excess sweat into droplets that drain away by themselves, said inventor Tingrui Pan, professor of biomedical engineering. One area of research in Pan’s Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory at UC Davis is a field known as microfluidics, which focuses on making “lab on a chip” devices that use tiny channels to manipulate fluids. Pan and his colleagues are developing such systems for applications like medical diagnostic tests.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/waterproof-fabric-drains-sweat

Foldable Electronics Possible with Inkjet-Printed Graphene

Imagine a bendable tablet computer or an electronic newspaper that could fold to fit in a pocket.

The technology for these devices may not be so far off. Northwestern Univ. researchers have recently developed a graphene-based ink that is highly conductive and tolerant to bending, and they have used it to inkjet-print graphene patterns that could be used for extremely detailed, conductive electrodes.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/foldable-electronics-possible-inkjet-printed-graphene

Stress Makes Glass Stronger

Alterations to the usual glass production process, such as putting the material under stress, can introduce effects that linger even after the material hardens. While manufacturers have long exploited this phenomenon to strengthen glass, a new theory aims to get closer to understanding why it happens.

Glass is not as well understood as most materials, because it straddles the line between liquid and solid. In typical crystalline materials, molecules assemble into a set structure over the span of the entire material as the substance solidifies from a disordered liquid form. Glass, on the other hand, retains a liquid-like disorder even after it hardens.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/stress-makes-glass-stronger

Artificial Forest Splits Water

In the wake of the sobering news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, an important advance in the race to develop carbon-neutral renewable energy sources has been achieved. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. While “artificial leaf” is the popular term for such a system, the key to this success was an “artificial forest.”

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/artificial-forest-splits-water

Cells Can Be Living Calculators

MIT engineers have transformed bacterial cells into living calculators that can compute logarithms, divide and take square roots, using three or fewer genetic parts.

Inspired by how analog electronic circuits function, the researchers created synthetic computation circuits by combining existing genetic “parts,” or engineered genes, in novel ways.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/cells-can-be-living-calculators

Scientist of the Week: Yaroslav Urzhumov

Every Thursday, Laboratory Equipment features a Scientist of the Week, chosen from the science industry’s latest headlines. This week’s scientist is Yaroslav Urzhumov, from Duke Univ. He and a team used a 3D printer to make an invisibility cloak.

The original article can be found here: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/do-it-yourself-invisibility-cloak

He speaks about his work here: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/scientist-week-yaroslav-urzhumovHave a question for Yaroslav Urzhumov? Let us now and we’ll pass it on!

Hardware Makes Frequency-Hopping Radios Practical

The way in which radio spectrum is currently allocated to different wireless technologies can lead to gross inefficiencies. In some regions, for instance, the frequencies used by cell phones can be desperately congested, while large swaths of the broadcast-television spectrum stand idle.

One solution to that problem is the 15-year-old idea of “cognitive radio,” in which wireless devices would scan their environments for vacant frequencies and use these for transmissions. Different proposals for cognitive radio place different emphases on hardware and software, but the chief component of many hardware approaches is a bank of filters that can isolate any frequency in a wide band.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/hardware-makes-frequency-hopping-radios-practical

Carbon Aerogels Absorbs Hydrocarbons

Foamy aerogels made of carbon, like their more well studied silicon-based cousins, have innumerable potential uses, from catalysts to sensors. Until now, their synthesis has been expensive or complicated, or has required toxic materials. A team led by Yu Shuhong at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Micrscale (HFNL), Univ.of Science and Technology of China (USTC) is pursuing their production from biomass. They selected bacterial cellulose (BC) pellicles, a commonly used, inexpensive, nontoxic form of biomass consisting of a tangled network of cellulose nanofibers, as precursor to produce carbon nanofiber aerogels in large-scale. This biomass can easily be produced on an industrial scale through microbial fermentation.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/carbon-aerogels-absorbs-hydrocarbons