Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

Schematic to display the mesoporous structures in wood where the cell walls are aligned vertically. After lignin is removed and the index-matching polymer is filled in, the thick (up to centimeter) piece of wood becomes a highly transparent structural material. b) Pictures to show that wood becomes highly transparent after the two steps.

Materials scientist Liangbing Hu and his team at the University of Maryland, College Park, have removed the molecule in wood, lignin, that makes it rigid and dark in color. They left behind the colorless cellulose cell structures, filled them with epoxy, and came up with a version of the wood that is mostly see-thru. “It can be used in automobiles when the wood is made both transparent and high strength.” said Dr. Mingwei Zhu...

Today’s food is stamped with inaccurate “best before” dates, which mean that both retailers and consumers throw away perfectly edible food. Credit: GeirMogen/SINTEF

Bioplastic packaging that extends the shelf life of food and tells us when it is no longer fit to eat will result in less waste. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN estimates that a third of all food produced on the planet is wasted. This isn’t simply just an economic or ethical problem, but also causes major environmental damage due to greenhouse gas emissions. In industrial countries, most waste is generated in retail outlets and households eg food is stamped with inaccurate “best before” dates, which mean that both retailers and consumers throw away perfectly edible food.

However, 4 yrs ago an EU project was laun...

Functionalization mediates heat transport of graphene nanoflakes. Credit: Photo source: Johan Liu, credit: Philip Krantz, Krantz Nanoart

Heat dissipation in electronics and optoelectronics is a severe bottleneck in the further development of systems in these fields. To come to grips with this serious issue, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have developed an efficient way of cooling electronics by using functionalized graphene nanoflakes.

“Essentially, we have found a golden key with which to achieve efficient heat transport in electronics and other power devices by using graphene nanoflake-based film. This can open up potential uses of this kind of film in broad areas, and we are getting closer to pilot-scale production based on this discovery,” says Johan Liu, Professor.

T...

Phosphorene, a single layer of phosphorous in a particular configuration, has potential application in semiconductor transistors. Credit: Matthew Cherny

A new method to quickly determine the orientation of phosphorene has been found using interactions between light and electrons within phosphorene and other atoms-thick crystals of black phosphorus. It is a promising material with potential application as a material for semiconducting transistors in ever faster and more powerful computers. Many useful properties of 2D phosphane, aka phosphorene, like its ability to conduct electrons, are anisotropic, ie they vary depending on the orientation of the crystal.

Phosphorene–a single layer of phosphorus atoms–was isolated for the first time in 2014, allowing physicists to begin exploring its prop...