Category Technology/Electronics

Graphene drives potential for Next-gen Green Fuel-Efficient Cars

>>converting heat into electricity. Graphene’s range of superlative properties and small size causes the transfer of heat through the material to slow leading to the desired lower operating temperatures. Harvesting heat produced by a car’s engine which would otherwise be wasted and using it to recharge the car’s batteries or powering the air-conditioning system could be a significant feature in the next generation of hybrid cars.

The average car currently loses around 70% of energy generated through fuel consumption to heat. Utilising that lost energy requires a thermoelectric material which can generate an electrical current from the application of heat...

This corresponds to half of the pressure of Earth’s core. With their high-pressure experiments the Mainz researchers have thus not only set a new record for superconductivity, their findings have also highlighted a potential new way to transport current at room temperature with no loss.

For many solid-state physicists, superconductors that are suitable for use at room temperature are still a dream. Special copper oxide ceramics, so-called cuprates, took the leading positions in terms of transition temperature, i.e., the temperature at which the material loses its resistance. The record for a ceramic of this type is roughly -140C at normal air pressure -109C at high pressure. In the ceramics, a special, unconventional form of superconductivity occurs...

The team created devices to stablise 2D materials. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Manchester

Newly developed 2D crystals are capable of delivering designer materials with revolutionary new properties. By protecting the new reactive crystals with more stable 2D materials, such as graphene, via computer control in a specially designed inert gas chamber environments, these materials can be successfully isolated to a single atomic layer for the first time.

University of Manchester team demonstrate how tailored fabrication methods can make these previously inaccessible materials useful...

i-Motif DNA structures have previously been utilised for many different nanotechnological applications, but all have used changes in pH to fold the DNA. Herein we describe how copper(II) cations can alter the conformation of i-motif DNA into an alternative hairpin structure which is reversible by chelation with EDTA

Scientists can now ‘switch’ the structure of DNA using copper salts and EDTA. Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid is an agent commonly found in shampoo and other household products. The applications for this discovery include nanotechnology – where DNA is used to make tiny machines, and in DNA-based computing – where computers are built from DNA rather than silicon...