Category Technology/Electronics

Single-Atomic Ruthenium Catalytic Sites on Nitrogen-Doped Graphene for Oxygen Reduction Reaction in Acidic Medium. ACS Nano, 2017; DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.7b02148

Project disperses single atoms on graphene to match platinum standard. Rice University scientists have fabricated a durable catalyst for high-performance fuel cells by attaching single ruthenium atoms to graphene. Catalysts that drive the oxygen reduction reaction that lets fuel cells turn chemical energy into electricity are usually made of platinum, which stands up to the acidic nature of the cell’s charge-carrying electrolyte. But platinum is expensive.

The ruthenium-graphene combination may fit the bill...

A rendering of how changes in an electron’s motion (bottom view) alter the scattering of light (top view), as measured in a new experiment that scattered more than 500 photons of light from a single electron. Previous experiments had managed to scatter no more than a few photons at a time. Credit: Extreme Light Laboratory|University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Physicists from University of Nebraska-Lincoln are seeing an everyday phenomenon in a new light. By focusing laser light to a brightness one billion times greater than the surface of the sun – the brightest light ever produced on Earth – the physicists have observed changes in a vision-enabling interaction between light and matter...

Amay J. Bandodkar et al. Soft, stretchable, high power density electronic skin-based biofuel cells for scavenging energy from human sweat, Energy Environ. Sci. (2017). DOI: 10.1039/C7EE00865A

A team at the University of California has developed a skin patch that uses human sweat as a fuel source to power an external device. Scientists and engineers are convinced that consumers want easy-to-wear consumer products—health monitors that are built into clothes, for example, or that adhere to the skin. In this new effort, they have found a way to harness human sweat as an energy source and report that the device they built was able to power a Bluetooth transmitter.

Sweat can be used as an energy source because it contains lactate, which produces energy when it oxidizes with lactate oxidase...

Enhancing Magnetic Functionality with Scandium: Breaking Stereotypes in the Design of Rare Earth Materials. Chemistry of Materials, 2017; 29 (9): 3962 DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.7b00314

Researchers at the US. Dept of Energy’s Ames Laboratory discovered that they could functionalize magnetic materials through a thoroughly unlikely method, by adding amounts of the virtually non-magnetic element scandium to a gadolinium-germanium alloy. It was so unlikely they called it a “counterintuitive experimental finding” in their published work on the research. “People don’t talk much about scandium when they are talking magnetism, because there has not been much reason to,” said Yaroslav Mudryk, an Associate Scientist at Ames Laboratory. “It’s rare, expensive, and displays virtually no magnetism.”

“Co...