Carbon Nanotubes tagged posts

As fast as modern electronics have become, they could be much faster if their operations were based on light, rather than electricity. Fiber optic cables already transport information at the speed of light; to do computations on that information without translating it back to electric signals will require a host of new optical components.

Researchers at the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering have now developed such a device: one that can be adjusted on the fly to give light different degrees of circular polarization. Because information can be stored in this chiral property of light, the researchers’ device could serve as a multifunctional, reconfigurable component of an optical computing system.

Led by Weilu Gao, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical & C...

Ovarian cancer kills 14,000 women in the United States every year...

Flexible thermoelectric generators could be useful way to make carbon ‘green’. Invisibly small carbon nanotubes aligned as fibers and sewn into fabrics become a thermoelectric generator that can turn heat from the sun or other sources into other forms of energy.

The Rice University lab of physicist Junichiro Kono led an effort with scientists at Tokyo Metropolitan University and the Rice-based Carbon Hub to make custom nanotube fibers and test their potential for large-scale applications.

Their small-scale experiments led to a fiber-enhanced, flexible cotton fabric that turned heat energy into...

Using DNA, smallest silica particles, and carbon nanotubes, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) developed novel programmable materials. These nanocomposites can be tailored to various applications and programmed to degrade quickly and gently. For medical applications, they can create environments in which human stem cells can settle down and develop further. Additionally, they are suited for the setup of biohybrid systems to produce power, for instance. The results are presented in Nature Communications and on the bioRxiv platform.

Stem cells are cultivated for fundamental research and development of effective therapies agains...