Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

The Structure and Rechargeability of a Room-Temperature Li-N2 Battery
(A) Structure of a Li-N2 battery with a Li-foil anode, ether-based electrolyte, and CC cathode.
(B) N2 fixation (blue) and N2 evolution (red) curves of a Li-N2 battery with a CC cathode at a current density of 0.05 mA cm−2.
(C) CV curves of a Li-N2 battery at a scan rate of 0.05 mV s−1 in N2-saturated (black) and Ar-saturated (red) atmospheres.
(D) Cyclic performance of a Li-N2 battery at a current density of 0.05 mA cm−2.

As the most abundant gas in Earth’s atmosphere, nitrogen has been an attractive option as a source of renewable energy...

This is the water harvester built at MIT with MOFs from UC Berkeley. Using only sunlight, the harvester can pull liters of water from low-humidity air over a 12-hour period. Credit: MIT photo from laboratory of Evelyn Wang

Metal-organic framework sucks up water from air with humidity as low as 20%. Imagine a future in which every home has a solar appliance that pulls all the water the household needs out of the air, even in desert climates. That future may be around the corner, with the demonstration this week of a water harvester that uses only ambient sunlight to pull liters of water out of the air each day with very low humidity. The solar-powered harvester was constructed at MIT using a special material – a metal-organic framework, or MOF – produced at UC, Berkeley.

Omar Yaghi, scienti...

Printed, flexible touchscreen. Credit: INM

Flexible smart phones are desirable for a lot of users. Up to now the displays of the innumerable phones and pods are rigid and do not yield to the anatomical forms adopted by the people carrying them. By now it is no longer any secret that the big players in the industry are working on flexible displays. INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials shows, how they might become reality in the near future: At this year’s Hannover Messe, INM will be presenting suitable coatings for cost-efficient inkjet processes on 24 April to 28 April.

INM will be demonstrating flexible touch screens, which are produced by printing recently developed nanoparticle inks on thin plastic foils...

How researchers replicate space radiation in the lab: a light source stimulates hydrogen and thus creates energy-rich ultraviolet radiation. Credit: © RUB, Damian Gorczany

What chemical processes in space could have created the building blocks of life is being researched by chemists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Prof Dr Wolfram Sander’s team. In their experiments, they are simulating the conditions in space to understand in detail how certain chemical reactions occur. One theory says that the building blocks of life were not created on Earth. Cometary impacts may have brought amino acids to our planet. How such complex molecules could have formed in space is a question being investigated by Sander’s team. The scientists are interested in processes in a condensed phase, i.e...