Article reproduced verbatim from here.   This is for my personal record of news that interest me and I do not claim ownership of any of the matter reproduced.

UA inventor Joseph Kennedy receives 100th patent Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Akron, OH — World-renowned scientist, researcher and inventor Dr. Joseph Kennedy, distinguished professor of polymer science and chemistry at The University of Akron, recently received his 100th U.S. patent — no small accomplishment in the world of innovation. In fact, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office says an achievement of this magnitude is extremely rare. Kenneth Preston, UA’s associate vice president of research and director of technology transfer, notes that many of the world’s finest inventors have no more than 10 patents to their names. Kennedy’s work has indirectly saved millions of lives. His invention of the polystyrene-polyisobutylene-polystyrene block copolymer and thermoplastic elastomer is the basis of a biocompatible polymer coating on Boston Scientific’s TAXUS® drug-eluting cardiovascular stent, which has been implanted in about 5 million patients worldwide. While the stent does its work to open clogged coronary arteries, Kennedy’s polymer coating time-releases drugs and replaces the bare metal stent of bygone days with one more compatible with human tissue. Kennedy’s 100th patent is U.S. Patent 7,388,065, “Process for Preparing Siloxane Compounds,” which involves an improved method for producing high-performance silicone rubbers. Such polymers could be used in range of applications, including industrial, household and medical products

Natural Dyes Adsorbed on TiO₂ Nanowire for Photovoltaic Applications: Enhanced Light Absorption and Ultrafast Electron Injection

Sheng Meng, Jun Ren, and Efthimios Kaxiras^*

Source

Nano Lett., 8 (10), 3266–3272, 2008. 10.1021/nl801644d
Web Release Date: September 13, 2008

Copyright © 2008 American Chemical Society

Abstract:

We investigate the electronic coupling between a TiO₂ nanowire and a natural dye sensitizer, using state-of-the-art time-dependent first-principles calculations. The model dye molecule, cyanidin, is deprotonated into the quinonoidal form upon adsorption on the wire surface. This results in its highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) being located in the middle of the TiO₂ bandgap and its lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) being close to the TiO₂ conduction band minimum (CBM), leading to greatly enhanced visible light absorption with two prominent peaks at 480 and 650 nm. We find that excited electrons are injected into the TiO₂ conduction band within a time scale of 50 fs with negligible electron−hole recombination and energy dissipation, even though the dye LUMO is located 0.1−0.3 eV lower than the CBM of the TiO₂ nanowire.

Graphene-Based Ultracapacitors

Meryl D. Stoller, Sungjin Park, Yanwu Zhu, Jinho An, and Rodney S. Ruoff^*

Nano Lett., 8 (10), 3498–3502, 2008. 10.1021/nl802558y
Web Release Date: September 13, 2008

Copyright © 2008 American Chemical Society

Abstract:

The surface area of a single graphene sheet is 2630 m²/g, substantially higher than values derived from BET surface area measurements of activated carbons used in current electrochemical double layer capacitors. Our group has pioneered a new carbon material that we call chemically modified graphene (CMG). CMG materials are made from 1-atom thick sheets of carbon, functionalized as needed, and here we demonstrate in an ultracapacitor cell their performance. Specific capacitances of 135 and 99 F/g in aqueous and organic electrolytes, respectively, have been measured. In addition, high electrical conductivity gives these materials consistently good performance over a wide range of voltage scan rates. These encouraging results illustrate the exciting potential for high performance, electrical energy storage devices based on this new class of carbon material.

Reproduced (cut and pasted) from this site: This article is from the November/December Issue of Technology Review.

Consolidating interesting news for personal use.  Disclaimer – the information is reproduced directly from the parent site with no personal inputs whatsoever.

Sun + Water = Fuel

With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy.

By Kevin Bullis

“I’m going to show you something I haven’t showed anybody yet,” said Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, speaking this May to an auditorium filled with scientists and U.S. government energy officials. He asked the house manager to lower the lights. Then he started a video. “Can you see that?” he asked excitedly, pointing to the bubbles rising from a strip of material immersed in water. “Oxygen is pouring off of this electrode.” Then he added, somewhat cryptically, “This is the future. We’ve got the leaf.”

What Nocera was demonstrating was a reaction that generates oxygen from water much as green plants do during photosynthesis–an achievement that could have profound implications for the energy debate. Carried out with the help of a catalyst he developed, the reaction is the first and most difficult step in splitting water to make hydrogen gas. And efficiently generating hydrogen from water, Nocera believes, will help surmount one of the main obstacles preventing solar power from becoming a dominant source of electricity: there’s no cost-effective way to store the energy collected by solar panels so that it can be used at night or during cloudy days.

Solar power has a unique potential to generate vast amounts of clean energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming. But without a cheap means to store this energy, solar power can’t replace fossil fuels on a large scale. In Nocera’s scenario, sunlight would split water to produce versatile, easy-to-store hydrogen fuel that could later be burned in an internal-combustion generator or recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell. Even more ambitious, the reaction could be used to split seawater; in that case, running the hydrogen through a fuel cell would yield fresh water as well as electricity.

Storing energy from the sun by mimicking photosynthesis is something scientists have been trying to do since the early 1970s. In particular, they have tried to replicate the way green plants break down water. Chemists, of course, can already split water. But the process has required high temperatures, harsh alkaline solutions, or rare and expensive catalysts such as platinum. What Nocera has devised is an inexpensive catalyst that produces oxygen from water at room temperature and without caustic chemicals–the same benign conditions found in plants. Several other promising catalysts, including another that Nocera developed, could be used to complete the process and produce hydrogen gas.

Nocera sees two ways to take advantage of his breakthrough. In the first, a conventional solar panel would capture sunlight to produce electricity; in turn, that electricity would power a device called an electrolyzer, which would use his catalysts to split water. The second approach would employ a system that more closely mimics the structure of a leaf. The catalysts would be deployed side by side with special dye molecules designed to absorb sunlight; the energy captured by the dyes would drive the water-splitting reaction. Either way, solar energy would be converted into hydrogen fuel that could be easily stored and used at night–or whenever it’s needed.

Nocera’s audacious claims for the importance of his advance are the kind that academic chemists are usually loath to make in front of their peers. Indeed, a number of experts have questioned how well his system can be scaled up and how economical it will be. But Nocera shows no signs of backing down. “With this discovery, I totally change the dialogue,” he told the audience in May. “All of the old arguments go out the window.”

The Dark Side of Solar
Sunlight is the world’s largest potential source of renewable energy, but that potential could easily go unrealized. Not only do solar panels not work at night, but daytime production waxes and wanes as clouds pass overhead. That’s why today most solar panels–both those in solar farms built by utilities and those mounted on the roofs of houses and businesses–are connected to the electrical grid. During sunny days, when solar panels are operating at peak capacity, homeowners and companies can sell their excess power to utilities. But they generally have to rely on the grid at night, or when clouds shade the panels.

This system works only because solar power makes such a tiny contribution to overall electricity production: it meets a small fraction of 1 percent of total demand in the United States. As the contribution of solar power grows, its unreliability will become an increasingly serious problem.

If solar power grows enough to provide as little as 10 percent of total electricity, utilities will need to decide what to do when clouds move in during times of peak demand, says Ryan Wiser, a research scientist who studies electricity markets at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. Either utilities will need to operate extra natural-gas plants that can quickly ramp up to compensate for the lost power, or they’ll need to invest in energy storage. The first option is currently cheaper, Wiser says: “Electrical storage is just too expensive.”

But if we count on solar energy for more than about 20 percent of total electricity, he says, it will start to contribute to what’s called base load power, the amount of power necessary to meet minimum demand. And base load power (which is now supplied mostly by coal-fired plants) must be provided at a relatively constant rate. Solar energy can’t be harnessed for this purpose unless it can be stored on a large scale for use 24 hours a day, in good weather and bad.

In short, for solar to become a primary source of electricity, vast amounts of affordable storage will be needed. And today’s options for storing electricity just aren’t practical on a large enough scale, says Nathan Lewis, a professor of chemistry at Caltech. Take one of the least expensive methods: using electricity to pump water uphill and then running the water through a turbine to generate elec­tricity later on. One kilogram of water pumped up 100 meters stores about a kilojoule of energy. In comparison, a kilogram of gasoline stores about 45,000 kilojoules. Storing enough energy this way would require massive dams and huge reservoirs that would be emptied and filled every day. And try finding enough water for that in places such as Arizona and Nevada, where sunlight is particularly abundant.

Batteries, meanwhile, are expensive: they could add $10,000 to the cost of a typical home solar system. And although they’re improving, they still store far less energy than fuels such as gasoline and hydrogen store in the form of chemical bonds. The best batteries store about 300 watt-hours of energy per kilogram, Lewis says, while gasoline stores 13,000 watt-hours per kilogram. “The numbers make it obvious that chemical fuels are the only energy-dense way to obtain massive energy storage,” Lewis says. Of those fuels, not only is hydrogen potentially cleaner than gasoline, but by weight it stores much more energy–about three times as much, though it takes up more space because it’s a gas.

The challenge lies in using energy from the sun to make such fuels cheaply and efficiently. This is where Nocera’s efforts to mimic photosynthesis come in.

Imitating Plants
In real photosynthesis, green plants use chlorophyll to capture energy from sunlight and then use that energy to drive a series of complex chemical reactions that turn water and carbon dioxide into energy-rich carbohydrates such as starch and sugar. But what primarily interests many researchers is an early step in the process, in which a combination of proteins and inorganic catalysts helps break water efficiently into oxygen and hydrogen ions.

The field of artificial photosynthesis got off to a quick start. In the early 1970s, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, Akira Fujishima, and his thesis advisor, Kenichi Honda, showed that electrodes made from titanium dioxide–a component of white paint–would slowly split water when exposed to light from a bright, 500-watt xenon lamp. The finding established that light could be used to split water outside of plants. In 1974, Thomas Meyer, a professor of chemistry at the University of North Caro­lina, Chapel Hill, showed that a ruthenium-based dye, when exposed to light, underwent chemical changes that gave it the potential to oxidize water, or pull electrons from it–the key first step in water splitting.

Ultimately, neither technique proved practical. The titanium dioxide couldn’t absorb enough sunlight, and the light-induced chemical state in Meyer’s dye was too transient to be useful. But the advances stimu­lated the imaginations of scientists. “You could look ahead and see where to go and, at least in principle, put the pieces together,” Meyer says.

Over the next few decades, scientists studied the structures and materials in plants that absorb sunlight and store its energy. They found that plants carefully choreograph the movement of water molecules, electrons, and hydrogen ions–that is, protons. But much about the precise mechanisms involved remained unknown. Then, in 2004, researchers at Imperial College London identified the structure of a group of proteins and metals that is crucial for freeing oxygen from water in plants. They showed that the heart of this catalytic complex was a collection of proteins, oxygen atoms, and manganese and calcium ions that interact in specific ways.

“As soon as we saw this, we could start designing systems,” says Nocera, who had been trying to fully understand the chemistry behind photosynthesis since 1984. Reading this “road map,” he says, his group set out to manage protons and electrons somewhat the way plants do–but using only inorganic materials, which are more robust and stable than proteins.

Initially, Nocera didn’t tackle the biggest challenge, pulling oxygen out from water. Rather, “to get our training wheels,” he began with the reverse reaction: combining oxygen with protons and electrons to form water. He found that certain complex compounds based on cobalt were good catalysts for this reaction. So when it came time to try splitting water, he decided to use similar cobalt compounds.

Nocera knew that working with these compounds in water could be a problem, since cobalt can dissolve. Not surprisingly, he says, “within days we realized that cobalt was falling out of this elaborate compound that we made.” With his initial attempts foiled, he decided to take a different approach. Instead of using a complex compound, he tested the catalytic activity of dissolved cobalt, with some phosphate added to the water to help the reaction. “We said, let’s forget all the elaborate stuff and just use cobalt directly,” he says.

The experiment worked better than Nocera and his colleagues had expected. When a current was applied to an electrode immersed in the solution, cobalt and phosphate accumulated on it in a thin film, and a dense layer of bubbles started forming in just a few minutes. Further tests confirmed that the bubbles were oxygen released by splitting the water. “Here’s the luck,” Nocera says. “There was no reason for us to expect that just plain cobalt with phosphate, versus cobalt being tied up in one of our complexes, would work this well. I couldn’t have predicted it. The stuff that was falling out of the compounds turned out to be what we needed.

“Now we want to understand it,” he continues. “I want to know why the hell cobalt in this thin film is so active. I may be able to improve it or use a different metal that’s better.” At the same time, he wants to start working with engineers to optimize the process and make an efficient water-splitting cell, one that incorporates catalysts for generating both oxygen and hydrogen. “We were really interested in the basic science. Can we make a catalyst that works efficiently under the conditions of photosynthesis?” he says. “The answer now is yes, we can do that. Now we’ve really got to get to the technology of designing a cell.”

Catalyzing a Debate
Nocera’s discovery has garnered a lot of attention, and not all of it has been flattering. Many chemists find his claims overstated; they don’t dispute his findings, but they doubt that they will have the consequences he imagines. “The claim that this is the answer for artificial photosynthesis is crazy,” says Thomas Meyer, who has been a mentor to Nocera. He says that while Nocera’s catalysts “could prove technologically important,” the advance is “a research finding,” and there’s “no guarantee that it can be scaled up or even made practical.”

Many critics’ objections revolve around the inability of ­Nocera’s lab setup to split water nearly as rapidly as commercial electrolyzers do. The faster the system, the smaller a commercial unit that produced a given amount of hydrogen and oxygen would be. And smaller systems, in general, are cheaper.

The way to compare different catalysts is to look at their “current density”–that is, electrical current per square centimeter–when they’re at their most efficient. The higher the current, the faster the catalyst can produce oxygen. Nocera reported results of 1 milliamp per square centimeter, although he says he’s achieved 10 milliamps since then. Commercial electrolyzers typically run at about 1,000 milliamps per square centimeter. “At least what he’s published so far would never work for a commercial electrolyzer, where the current density is 800 times to 2,000 times greater,” says John Turner, a research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO.

Other experts question the whole principle of converting sunlight into electricity, then into a chemical fuel, and then back into electricity again. They suggest that while batteries store far less energy than chemical fuels, they are nevertheless far more efficient, because using electricity to make fuels and then using the fuels to generate electricity wastes energy at every step. It would be better, they say, to focus on improving battery technology or other similar forms of electrical storage, rather than on developing water splitters and fuel cells. As Ryan Wiser puts it, “Electrolysis is [currently] inefficient, so why would you do it?”

The Artificial Leaf
Michael Grätzel, however, may have a clever way to turn Nocera’s discovery to practical use. A professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was one of the first people Nocera told about his new catalyst. “He was so excited,” Grätzel says. “He took me to a restaurant and bought a tremendously expensive bottle of wine.”

In 1991, Grätzel invented a promising new type of solar cell. It uses a dye containing ruthenium, which acts much like the chlorophyll in a plant, absorbing light and releasing electrons. In ­Grätzel’s solar cell, however, the electrons don’t set off a water-splitting reaction. Instead, they’re collected by a film of titanium dioxide and directed through an external circuit, generating electricity. Grätzel now thinks that he can integrate his solar cell and ­Nocera’s catalyst into a single device that captures the energy from sunlight and uses it to split water.

If he’s right, it would be a significant step toward making a device that, in many ways, truly resembles a leaf. The idea is that Grätzel’s dye would take the place of the electrode on which the catalyst forms in Nocera’s system. The dye itself, when exposed to light, can generate the voltage needed to assemble the catalyst. “The dye acts like a molecular wire that conducts charges away,” Grätzel says. The catalyst then assembles where it’s needed, right on the dye. Once the catalyst is formed, the sunlight absorbed by the dye drives the reactions that split water. Grätzel says that the device could be more efficient and cheaper than using a separate solar panel and electrolyzer.

Another possibility that Nocera is investigating is whether his catalyst can be used to split seawater. In initial tests, it performs well in the presence of salt, and he is now testing it to see how it handles other compounds found in the sea. If it works, Nocera’s system could address more than just the energy crisis; it could help solve the world’s growing shortage of fresh water as well.

Artificial leaves and fuel-producing desalination systems might sound like grandiose promises. But to many scientists, such possibilities seem maddeningly close; chemists seeking new energy technologies have been taunted for decades by the fact that plants easily use sunlight to turn abundant materials into energy-rich molecules. “We see it going on all around us, but it’s something we can’t really do,” says Paul Alivisatos, a professor of chemistry and materials science at the University of California, Berkeley, who is leading an effort at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to imitate photosynthesis by chemical means.

But soon, using nature’s own blueprint, human beings could be using the sun “to make fuels from a glass of water,” as Nocera puts it. That idea has an elegance that any chemist can appreciate–and possibilities that everyone should find hopeful.

http://www.batterypoweronline.com/images/PDFs_articles_whitepaper_appros/UniversalPower%20Group.pdf

http://www.batterypoweronline.com/images/PDFs_articles_whitepaper_appros/Maxwell%20Technologies.pdf

http://www.batterypoweronline.com/eprints/free/Motorolanov03.pdf

http://www.batterypoweronline.com/bppt_edhighlights.htm#BC

As if we needed an excuse to drink beer.

a group of Rice University students are [...] using genetic engineering to create beer that contains resveratrol, a chemical in wine that’s been shown to reduce cancer and heart disease in lab animals.

Read more.

Did anyone ever know that the earthworm can have sixteen (16, XVI) hearts?

Did anyone know eating eating earthworms can reduce cholesterol?

Did anyone know that earthworms hatch from cocoons smaller than a grain of rice?

Does the word “Worm Grunting” bring weird images to your mind?

Read about the king and queen of worms here.

So how many cells does it take to screw a light bulb?

One, it seems.

Monkeys taught to play a computer game were able to overcome wrist paralysis with an experimental device that might lead to new treatments for patients with stroke and spinal cord injury.

Remarkably, the monkeys regained use of paralyzed muscles by learning to control the activity of just a single brain cell.

Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

Read more..

Doubts:

1. Does this only include classical music or what-is-more-recently-perceived-as-music such as rap and belch music?

2.  Does this include only instrumental experts or bathroom singers too?

3. Elevated IQ score?  Sounds far fetched to me, but heck, I am not the expert.

First the gecko.  Now the snail.

`A UC San Diego engineer has revealed a new mode of propulsion based on how water snails create ripples of slime to crawl upside down beneath the surface. [...]

Some freshwater and marine snails crawl by “hanging” from the water surface while secreting a trail of mucus. The snail’s foot wrinkles into little rippling waves, which produces corresponding waves in the mucus layer that it secretes between the foot and the air. [...]

Anette Hosoi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has already imitated the adhesive/ lubricating propulsive method of land snails to drive a robotic device.

And you thought testing various secretions of the body and measuring temperature at various times of the month can tell you the “safe” period for that date with hot dude?

Here is an alternative.

A woman raises the pitch of her voice during her most fertile period of the month in an unconscious boost to her femininity, according to a US study. [...]

An analysis of the recordings revealed the closer a woman was to ovulation the more she raised her pitch.

The increase in tone was only slight – it wasn’t Minnie Mouse on helium – but the peaks were enough to be picked up by the voice decoder and presumably by the male ear, as well.

Aha !

Show me the meaning of being lonely
Is this the feeling I need to walk with
Tell me why I can’t be there where you are …

Simply because it is inhabitable, baby.

The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 kilometers (1.74 miles) beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat (140 degrees Fahrenheit).

D. audaxviator survives in a habitat where it gets its energy not from the sun but from hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive decay of uranium.

Read more.

We have come a long way from the discovery of the gene to the current status of complete genome sequencing for five thousand bucks.

Starting next spring, a complete human-genome sequence can be ordered for just $5,000, thanks to a new sequencing service announced by Complete Genomics, a startup based in Mountain View, CA. The stunning price drop–sequencing currently costs approximately 20 times that amount–could completely change the way that human-genomics research is done and open up new possibilities in personalized medicine. Researchers say that a $5,000 genome would enable new studies to identify rare genetic variants linked to common diseases, and it could open up the sequencing market to diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies, making genome sequencing a routine part of clinical drug testing.

Grignard is apparently not the only reaction to convert carbon dioxide to carboxyllic acids any more.

The team [Zhaomin Hou, of RIKEN's Advanced Science Institute]was also able to study exactly how the catalyst works, by isolating key molecules at various intermediate stages of the reaction. They found that the active copper catalyst first displaces the boron group from the starting molecule, forming a new copper–carbon bond. Carbon dioxide then inserts itself into this bond before the copper catalyst is finally removed, leaving behind a carboxylic acid (-CO2H) group.

Read more here.

For some of us, nothing is more disgusting than watching a gecko climb a wall and go on to the ceiling and stay there without succumbing to effects of gravity.  For a few others, it is inspirational.

Adhesives that, like gecko feet, are dry, powerful, reusable, and self-cleaning could help robots climb walls or hold together electrical components, even in the harsh conditions of outer space. [...]

Using a silicon substrate, he [Liming Dai, a professor of materials engineering at the University of Dayton] and his group grew arrays of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes topped with an unaligned layer of nanotubes, like rows of trees with branching tops. The adhesive force of these nanotube arrays is about 100 newtons per square centimeter–enough for a four-by-four-millimeter square of the material to hold up a 1,480-gram textbook. And its adhesive properties were the same when tested on very different surfaces, including glass plates, polymer films, and rough sandpaper.

So in future some of us are going to be paranoid about robots climbing walls too.

The probability that you would be struck by a meteor in a given hour is about 8.3 × 10^-15.

The age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years, or 1.2 × 10¹⁴ hours. An extreme underestimate would be that a meteorite hit the earth only once during this time span. Then the probability that such a disaster would happen in a given hour is the inverse of the above number, about 8.3 × 10^-15. This rather sloppy calculation provides a rough idea of how small the probability 10^-15 is. Iba and Hukushima recently succeeded in generating rare events with probabilities as small as 10^-60 on a computer.

From here.

It has always puzzled me why some people are cured (at least temporarily) of cancer through various treatmnets, with no remission for extended periods of time, while a few others succumb to the disease despite medical intervention.  This could be why.

A growing body of evidence indicates that only certain cancer cells are capable of generating and maintaining a tumor. Dubbed cancer stem cells, they can divide indefinitely to perpetuate the cancer over time. They may also be the reason why some therapies fail to wipe out a cancer entirely: cancer stem cells seem to be particularly resistant to standard cancer treatments and can remain behind like the roots of a weed.

Identifying the root is half the battle won.

A team of researchers at Harvard Medical School has now developed a new way to find drugs that selectively kill cancer stem cells or prevent them from dividing.

Who on earth is Hubert J. Farnsworth?  Apparently, I am him, according to this site.

And while we are at it, it seems I am “Iron”