Posts Tagged ‘Imperial College of London’

Latest on UK and graphene

Friday, December 28th, 2012

The Brits are at it again with another graphene funding announcement, from the Dec. 28, 2012 news item on Azonano,

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne MP, today announced £21.5 million of capital investment to commercialise graphene, one of the thinnest, lightest, strongest and most conductive materials to have been discovered, marked by the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics as one of the world’s most ground breaking scientific achievements.

Three research projects at Imperial will share the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funding as part of a new programme with a number of industrial partners, including aeroplane manufacturer Airbus. The scientists receiving the grant hope to develop graphene technologies that will contribute to the UK economy and can be applied by industries around the world.

The Imperial College of London Dec. 27, 2012 news release, which originated the item, describes how the college’s £4.5M award will be used for three of its graphene projects,

In one project worth £1.35 million, led by Professor Tony Kinloch from the Department of Mechanical Engineering with colleagues from the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, researchers will explore how combining graphene with current materials can improve the properties of aeroplane parts, such as making them resistant to lightning-strikes. They hope the same technology can also be used to develop coatings for wind-turbine blades, to make them scratch resistant and physically tougher in extreme weather conditions.

Professor Eduardo Saiz, from the Department of Materials, will develop new manufacturing processes using liquids that contain tiny suspended particles of graphene, in order to reduce the cost of currently expensive industrial techniques. This project will receive £1.91 million funding and involves scientists from Imperial’s Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and Queen Mary, University of London.

£1.37 million of funding received by Professor Norbert Klein, also from the Department of Materials and shared with Imperial’s Department of Physics, will pay for new equipment to deposit extremely thin sheets of graphene, so scientists can explore its electrical properties. They hope that new medical scanning technology may be developed as a result of how graphene responds to high frequency electromagnetic waves, from microwave to terahertz frequencies and all the way to the wavelengths of visible light.

As noted on numerous occasions here  (most recently in an Oct. 11, 2012 posting), there is a competition for two prizes of 1 billion Euros each to be awarded to two European research projects in the European Union’s Future and Emerging Technologies Initiatives (FET). There are six flagship projects (whittled down from a larger number a few years ago) competing to be one of the two winners. There’s more about the FET Graphene Flagship project here. As you might expect, the Brits are heavily involved in the graphene flagship project.

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Modestly viral science communication inspires

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Students in the science communication masters programme at the Imperial College of London have created a video (Science Nation Army) that has gone modestly viral. From the Feb. 23, 2012 posting by Anna Perman on the Guardian Science blogs,

This week, a video made by myself and three friends from the science communications masters course at Imperial College went viral. Not “Fenton the dog” viral, but trending on YouTube (316,000 hits and counting), a spot on CBS News blog, in the Sun newspaper and a teeny-tiny snippet in the Guardian’s own G2 (too tiny even for a link). The video shows us recreating Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes, using as our instruments the tools lying around in a lab at Imperial, and some “creative” editing techniques.

We did this to communicate science. And it seems to have worked.

Here’s the video,

It is part of a larger project, a multimedia blog developed by these students, Inside Knowledge: The Student Blog for the Public Library of Science (PLoS) blog network. More from Perman about the project,

A year ago, the four of us [Anna Perman, Ben Good, Lizzie Crouch, and David Robertson] started working with the research group at Imperial’s Blast lab (now part of the Royal British Legion Centre for Blast Injury Studies) to make a multimedia blog for the PLoS blog network about their work. It wasn’t an easy journey. The lab includes military personnel, has links to the ministry of defence and works with human tissue, so getting permission to film and write about their research was no mean feat.

…

In our film we tried to convey the entire experience of science, from the tedium of sitting with a lab book, to the excitement of their explosive experiments.

We also wanted to get people to think about the lab environment not as somewhere scary and alien, but somewhere accessible, and most importantly, somewhere fun to work.

This particular video was to show the variety of people who must work harmoniously to conduct a piece of scientific research. Just like a band in which a group with different talents create something more than the sum of its parts, a research group like Blast contains a diversity of doctors, mechanical engineers and biophysicists.

There are two groups working on The Student Blog, the group from the UK’s Imperial College of London (Inside Knowledge) and a second group from Stanford University in the US called Science, Upstream (Jamie Hansen and Julia James). I find the project a little confusing as I don’t see any postings after Sept. 2011 for Inside Knowledge and Science, Upstream, which seems to have a separate space on the PLoS website, doesn’t feature any postings after April 2011.

Still, I like the idea of the video and of communicating science in as many ways and in as many venues as possible. Oh, and I really enjoyed the Science Nation Army.

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Are we creating a Star Trek world? T-rays and tricorders

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

There’s been quite a flutter online (even the Huffington Post has published a piece) about ‘Star Trek-hand-held medical scanners’ becoming possible due to some recent work in the area of T-rays. From the Jan. 20, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Scientists who have developed a new way to create a type of radiation known as Terahertz (THz) or T-rays – the technology behind full-body security scanners – say their new, stronger and more efficient continuous wave T-rays could be used to make better medical scanning gadgets and may one day lead to innovations similar to the “tricorder” scanner used in Star Trek.

In a study published recently in Nature Photonics (“Greatly enhanced continuous-wave terahertz emission by nano-electrodes in a photoconductive photomixer” [behind a paywall]), researchers from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), a research institute of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore and Imperial College London in the UK have made T-rays into a much stronger directional beam than was previously thought possible and have efficiently produced T-rays at room-temperature conditions. This breakthrough allows future T-ray systems to be smaller, more portable, easier to operate, and much cheaper.

For anyone who’s not familiar with ‘Star Trek world’ and tricorders, here’s a brief description from a Wikipedia essay about tricorders,

In the fictional Star Trek universe, a tricorder is a multifunction handheld device used for sensor scanning, data analysis, and recording data.

David Freeman in his Jan. 21, 2012 article for the Huffington Post about the research puts it this way,

Trekkies, take heart. A scientific breakthrough involving a form of infrared radiation known as terahertz (THz) waves could lead to handheld medical scanners reminiscent of the “tricorder” featured on the original Star Trek television series.

What’s the breakthrough? Using nanotechnology, physicists in London and Singapore found a way to make a beam of the”T-rays”–which are now used in full-body airport security scanners–stronger and more directional.

Here’s how the improved T-ray technology works (from the Jan. 20, 2012 news item on Nanowerk),

In the new technique, the researchers demonstrated that it is possible to produce a strong beam of T-rays by shining light of differing wavelengths on a pair of electrodes – two pointed strips of metal separated by a 100 nanometre gap on top of a semiconductor wafer. The unique tip-to-tip nano-sized gap electrode structure greatly enhances the THz field and acts like a nano-antenna that amplifies the THz wave generated. The waves are produced by an interaction between the electromagnetic waves of the light pulses and a powerful current passing between the semiconductor electrodes from the carriers generated in the underlying semiconductor. The scientists are able to tune the wavelength of the T-rays to create a beam that is useable in the scanning technology.

Lead author Dr Jing Hua Teng, from A*STAR’s IMRE, said: “The secret behind the innovation lies in the new nano-antenna that we had developed and integrated into the semiconductor chip.” ….

Research co-author Stefan Maier, a Visiting Scientist at A*STAR’s IMRE and Professor in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, said: “T-rays promise to revolutionise medical scanning to make it faster and more convenient, potentially relieving patients from the inconvenience of complicated diagnostic procedures and the stress of waiting for accurate results. Thanks to modern nanotechnology and nanofabrication, we have made a real breakthrough in the generation of T-rays that takes us a step closer to these new scanning devices. …”

It’s another story about handheld (or point-of-care) diagnostic devices and I have posted on this topic previously:

  • Jan. 4, 2012 about work in Alberta;
  •  Dec. 22, 2011 on grants to scientists in the US and Canada working on these devices;
  •  Aug. 4, 2011 about a diagnostic device the size of a credit card;
  •  Mar. 1, 2011 about nanoLAB from Stanford University (my last sentence in that posting “It’s not quite Star Trek yet but we’re getting there.”); and,
  •  Feb. 5, 2011 about the Argento and PROOF initiatives.

I see I had four articles last year and this year (one month old), I already have two articles on these devices. It reflects my own interest, as well as, the amount work being done in this area.

 

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