Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

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...

1. The breakthrough electrode prototype (right) can be combined with a solar cell (left) for on-chip energy harvesting and storage.
2. A western swordfern leaf magnified 400 times, showing the self-repeating fractal pattern of its veins.

Graphene-based electrode prototype, inspired by fern leaves, could be the answer to solar energy storage challenge. Inspired by an American fern, researchers have developed a groundbreaking prototype that could be the answer to the storage challenge still holding solar back as a total energy solution. The new type of electrode created by researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, could boost the capacity of existing integrable storage technologies by 3000%.

But the graphene-based prototype also opens a new path to the development of flexible ...

How can long DNA filaments, which have convoluted and highly knotted structure, manage to pass through the tiny pores of various biological systems? This is the fascinating question addressed by Antonio Suma and Cristian Micheletti, researchers at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste who used computer simulations to investigate the options available to the genetic material in such situations. The study has just been published in PNAS, the journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the Unites States. Credit: Antonio Suma, SISSA

How can long DNA filaments, which have convoluted and highly knotted structure, manage to pass through the tiny pores of various biological systems? This is the fascinating question addressed by Antonio Suma and Cristian Micheletti, re...