Tag Archives: Iowa State University

Printing metal on flowers or gelatin

Martin Thuo and his research group have developed heat-free technology that can print conductive, metallic lines and traces on just about anything, including a rose petal. Photo courtesy of Martin Thuo.

I’m not sure how I feel about an electrified rose but it is strangely fascinating. Here’s more from a July 29, 2019 news item on Nanowerk,

Martin Thuo of Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory clicked through the photo gallery for one of his research projects.

How about this one? There was a rose with metal traces printed on a delicate petal.

Or this? A curled sheet of paper with a flexible, programmable LED display.

Maybe this? A gelatin cylinder with metal traces printed across the top.

Caption: Martin Thuo and his research group have printed electronic traces on gelatin. Credit: Martin Thuo/Iowa State University

A July 26, 2019 Iowa State University news release (also on EurekAlert but published on July 29, 2019), which originated the news item,

All those photos showed the latest application of undercooled metal technology developed by Thuo and his research group. The technology features liquid metal (in this case Field’s metal, an alloy of bismuth, indium and tin) trapped below its melting point in polished, oxide shells, creating particles about 10 millionths of a meter across.

When the shells are broken – with mechanical pressure or chemical dissolving – the metal inside flows and solidifies, creating a heat-free weld or, in this case, printing conductive, metallic lines and traces on all kinds of materials, everything from a concrete wall to a leaf.

That could have all kinds of applications, including sensors to measure the structural integrity of a building or the growth of crops. The technology was also tested in paper-based remote controls that read changes in electrical currents when the paper is curved. Engineers also tested the technology by making electrical contacts for solar cells and by screen printing conductive lines on gelatin, a model for soft biological tissues, including the brain.

“This work reports heat-free, ambient fabrication of metallic conductive interconnects and traces on all types of substrates,” Thuo and a team of researchers wrote in a paper describing the technology recently published online by the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Thuo – an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Iowa State, an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and a co-founder of the Ames startup SAFI-Tech Inc. that’s commercializing the liquid-metal particles – is the lead author. Co-authors are Andrew Martin, a former undergraduate in Thuo’s lab and now an Iowa State doctoral student in materials science and engineering; Boyce Chang, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, who earned his doctoral degree at Iowa State Zachariah Martin, Dipak Paramanik and Ian Tevis, of SAFI-Tech; Christophe Frankiewicz, a co-founder of Sep-All in Ames and a former Iowa State postdoctoral research associate; and Souvik Kundu, an Iowa State graduate student in electrical and computer engineering.
The project was supported by university startup funds to establish Thuo’s research lab at Iowa State, Thuo’s Black & Veatch faculty fellowship and a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant.

Thuo said he launched the project three years ago as a teaching exercise.

“I started this with undergraduate students,” he said. “I thought it would be fun to get students to make something like this. It’s a really beneficial teaching tool because you don’t need to solve 2 million equations to do sophisticated science.”

And once students learned to use a few metal-processing tools, they started solving some of the technical challenges of flexible, metal electronics.

“The students discovered ways of dealing with metal and that blossomed into a million ideas,” Thuo said. “And now we can’t stop.”

And so the researchers have learned how to effectively bond metal traces to everything from water-repelling rose petals to watery gelatin. Based on what they now know, Thuo said it would be easy for them to print metallic traces on ice cubes or biological tissue.

All the experiments “highlight the versatility of this approach,” the researchers wrote in their paper, “allowing a multitude of conductive products to be fabricated without damaging the base material.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Heat‐Free Fabrication of Metallic Interconnects for Flexible/Wearable Devices by Andrew Martin, Boyce S. Chang, Zachariah Martin, Dipak Paramanik, Christophe Frankiewicz, Souvik Kundu, Ian D. Tevis, Martin Thuo. Advanced Functional Materials Online Version of Record before inclusion in an issue 1903687 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201903687 First published online: 15 July 2019

This paper is behind a paywall.

US Dept. of Agriculture announces its nanotechnology research grants

I don’t always stumble across the US Department of Agriculture’s nanotechnology research grant announcements but I’m always grateful when I do as it’s good to find out about  nanotechnology research taking place in the agricultural sector. From a July 21, 2017 news item on Nanowerk,,

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) today announced 13 grants totaling $4.6 million for research on the next generation of agricultural technologies and systems to meet the growing demand for food, fuel, and fiber. The grants are funded through NIFA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), authorized by the 2014 Farm Bill.

“Nanotechnology is being rapidly implemented in medicine, electronics, energy, and biotechnology, and it has huge potential to enhance the agricultural sector,” said NIFA Director Sonny Ramaswamy. “NIFA research investments can help spur nanotechnology-based improvements to ensure global nutritional security and prosperity in rural communities.”

A July 20, 2017 USDA news release, which originated the news item, lists this year’s grants and provides a brief description of a few of the newly and previously funded projects,

Fiscal year 2016 grants being announced include:

Nanotechnology for Agricultural and Food Systems

  • Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, $450,200
  • Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas, $340,000
  • University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, $444,550
  • University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada,$150,000
  • North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota, $149,000
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, $455,000
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, $450,200
  • Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, $402,550
  • University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, $405,055
  • Gordon Research Conferences, West Kingston, Rhode Island, $45,000
  • The University of Tennessee,  Knoxville, Tennessee, $450,200
  • Utah State University, Logan, Utah, $450,200
  • The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., $450,200

Project details can be found at the NIFA website (link is external).

Among the grants, a University of Pennsylvania project will engineer cellulose nanomaterials [emphasis mine] with high toughness for potential use in building materials, automotive components, and consumer products. A University of Nevada-Las Vegas project will develop a rapid, sensitive test to detect Salmonella typhimurium to enhance food supply safety.

Previously funded grants include an Iowa State University project in which a low-cost and disposable biosensor made out of nanoparticle graphene that can detect pesticides in soil was developed. The biosensor also has the potential for use in the biomedical, environmental, and food safety fields. University of Minnesota (link is external) researchers created a sponge that uses nanotechnology to quickly absorb mercury, as well as bacterial and fungal microbes from polluted water. The sponge can be used on tap water, industrial wastewater, and in lakes. It converts contaminants into nontoxic waste that can be disposed in a landfill.

NIFA invests in and advances agricultural research, education, and extension and promotes transformative discoveries that solve societal challenges. NIFA support for the best and brightest scientists and extension personnel has resulted in user-inspired, groundbreaking discoveries that combat childhood obesity, improve and sustain rural economic growth, address water availability issues, increase food production, find new sources of energy, mitigate climate variability and ensure food safety. To learn more about NIFA’s impact on agricultural science, visit www.nifa.usda.gov/impacts, sign up for email updates (link is external) or follow us on Twitter @USDA_NIFA (link is external), #NIFAImpacts (link is external).

Given my interest in nanocellulose materials (Canada was/is a leader in the production of cellulose nanocrystals [CNC] but there has been little news about Canadian research into CNC applications), I used the NIFA link to access the table listing the grants and clicked on ‘brief’ in the View column in the University of Pennsylania row to find this description of the project,

ENGINEERING CELLULOSE NANOMATERIALS WITH HIGH TOUGHNESS

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) are natural materials with exceptional mechanical properties that can be obtained from renewable plant-based resources. CNFs are stiff, strong, and lightweight, thus they are ideal for use in structural materials. In particular, there is a significant opportunity to use CNFs to realize polymer composites with improved toughness and resistance to fracture. The overall goal of this project is to establish an understanding of fracture toughness enhancement in polymer composites reinforced with CNFs. A key outcome of this work will be process – structure – fracture property relationships for CNF-reinforced composites. The knowledge developed in this project will enable a new class of tough CNF-reinforced composite materials with applications in areas such as building materials, automotive components, and consumer products.The composite materials that will be investigated are at the convergence of nanotechnology and bio-sourced material trends. Emerging nanocellulose technologies have the potential to move biomass materials into high value-added applications and entirely new markets.

It’s not the only nanocellulose material project being funded in this round, there’s this at North Dakota State University, from the NIFA ‘brief’ project description page,

NOVEL NANOCELLULOSE BASED FIRE RETARDANT FOR POLYMER COMPOSITES

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Synthetic polymers are quite vulnerable to fire.There are 2.4 million reported fires, resulting in 7.8 billion dollars of direct property loss, an estimated 30 billion dollars of indirect loss, 29,000 civilian injuries, 101,000 firefighter injuries and 6000 civilian fatalities annually in the U.S. There is an urgent need for a safe, potent, and reliable fire retardant (FR) system that can be used in commodity polymers to reduce their flammability and protect lives and properties. The goal of this project is to develop a novel, safe and biobased FR system using agricultural and woody biomass. The project is divided into three major tasks. The first is to manufacture zinc oxide (ZnO) coated cellulose nanoparticles and evaluate their morphological, chemical, structural and thermal characteristics. The second task will be to design and manufacture polymer composites containing nano sized zinc oxide and cellulose crystals. Finally the third task will be to test the fire retardancy and mechanical properties of the composites. Wbelieve that presence of zinc oxide and cellulose nanocrystals in polymers will limit the oxygen supply by charring, shielding the surface and cellulose nanocrystals will make composites strong. The outcome of this project will help in developing a safe, reliable and biobased fire retardant for consumer goods, automotive, building products and will help in saving human lives and property damage due to fire.

One day, I hope to hear about Canadian research into applications for nanocellulose materials. (fingers crossed for good luck)

Treating graphene with lasers for paper-based electronics

Engineers at Iowa State University have found a way they hope will make it easier to commercialize graphene. A Sept. 1, 2016 news item on phys.org describes the research,

The researchers in Jonathan Claussen’s lab at Iowa State University (who like to call themselves nanoengineers) have been looking for ways to use graphene and its amazing properties in their sensors and other technologies.

Graphene is a wonder material: The carbon honeycomb is just an atom thick. It’s great at conducting electricity and heat; it’s strong and stable. But researchers have struggled to move beyond tiny lab samples for studying its material properties to larger pieces for real-world applications.

Recent projects that used inkjet printers to print multi-layer graphene circuits and electrodes had the engineers thinking about using it for flexible, wearable and low-cost electronics. For example, “Could we make graphene at scales large enough for glucose sensors?” asked Suprem Das, an Iowa State postdoctoral research associate in mechanical engineering and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory.

But there were problems with the existing technology. Once printed, the graphene had to be treated to improve electrical conductivity and device performance. That usually meant high temperatures or chemicals – both could degrade flexible or disposable printing surfaces such as plastic films or even paper.

Das and Claussen came up with the idea of using lasers to treat the graphene. Claussen, an Iowa State assistant professor of mechanical engineering and an Ames Laboratory associate, worked with Gary Cheng, an associate professor at Purdue University’s School of Industrial Engineering, to develop and test the idea.

A Sept. 1, 2016 Iowa State University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail about the intellectual property, as well as, the technology,

… They found treating inkjet-printed, multi-layer graphene electric circuits and electrodes with a pulsed-laser process improves electrical conductivity without damaging paper, polymers or other fragile printing surfaces.

“This creates a way to commercialize and scale-up the manufacturing of graphene,” Claussen said.

Two major grants are supporting the project and related research: a three-year grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under award number 11901762 and a three-year grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust. Iowa State’s College of Engineering and department of mechanical engineering are also supporting the research.

The Iowa State Research Foundation Inc. has filed for a patent on the technology.

“The breakthrough of this project is transforming the inkjet-printed graphene into a conductive material capable of being used in new applications,” Claussen said.

Those applications could include sensors with biological applications, energy storage systems, electrical conducting components and even paper-based electronics.

To make all that possible, the engineers developed computer-controlled laser technology that selectively irradiates inkjet-printed graphene oxide. The treatment removes ink binders and reduces graphene oxide to graphene – physically stitching together millions of tiny graphene flakes. The process makes electrical conductivity more than a thousand times better.

“The laser works with a rapid pulse of high-energy photons that do not destroy the graphene or the substrate,” Das said. “They heat locally. They bombard locally. They process locally.”

That localized, laser processing also changes the shape and structure of the printed graphene from a flat surface to one with raised, 3-D nanostructures. The engineers say the 3-D structures are like tiny petals rising from the surface. The rough and ridged structure increases the electrochemical reactivity of the graphene, making it useful for chemical and biological sensors.

All of that, according to Claussen’s team of nanoengineers, could move graphene to commercial applications.

“This work paves the way for not only paper-based electronics with graphene circuits,” the researchers wrote in their paper, “it enables the creation of low-cost and disposable graphene-based electrochemical electrodes for myriad applications including sensors, biosensors, fuel cells and (medical) devices.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

3D nanostructured inkjet printed graphene via UV-pulsed laser irradiation enables paper-based electronics and electrochemical devices by Suprem R. Das, Qiong Nian, Allison A. Cargill, John A. Hondred, Shaowei Ding, Mojib Saei, Gary J. Cheng, and   Jonathan C. Claussen. Nanoscale, 2016,8, 15870-15879 DOI: 10.1039/C6NR04310K First published online 12 Jul 2016

This paper is open access but you do need to have registered for your free account to access the material.

$5.2M in nanotechnology grants from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)

A March 30, 2016 news item on Nanowerk announces the 2016 nanotechnology grants from the US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA),

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today [March 30, 2016] announced an investment of more than $5.2 million to support nanotechnology research at 11 universities. The universities will research ways nanotechnology can be used to improve food safety, enhance renewable fuels, increase crop yields, manage agricultural pests, and more. The awards were made through the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), the nation’s premier competitive, peer-reviewed grants program for fundamental and applied agricultural sciences.

A March 30, 2016 USDA news release provides more detail,

“In the seven years since the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative was established, the program has led to true innovations and ground-breaking discoveries in agriculture to combat childhood obesity, improve and sustain rural economic growth, address water availability issues, increase food production, find new sources of energy, mitigate the impacts of climate variability and enhance resiliency of our food systems, and ensure food safety. Nanoscale science, engineering, and technology are key pieces of our investment in innovation to ensure an adequate and safe food supply for a growing global population,” said Vilsack. “The President’s 2017 Budget calls for full funding of the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative so that USDA can continue to support important projects like these.”

Universities receiving funding include Auburn University in Auburn, Ala.; Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, Conn.; University of Central Florida in Orlando, Fla; University of Georgia in Athens, Ga.; Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa; University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mass.; Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss.; Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo.; Clemson University in Clemson, S.C.; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va.; and University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wis.

With this funding, Auburn University proposes to improve pathogen monitoring throughout the food supply chain by creating a user-friendly system that can detect multiple foodborne pathogens simultaneously, accurately, cost effectively, and rapidly. Mississippi State University will research ways nanochitosan can be used as a combined fire-retardant and antifungal wood treatment that is also environmentally safe. Experts in nanotechnology, molecular biology, vaccines and poultry diseases at the University of Wisconsin will work to develop nanoparticle-based poultry vaccines to prevent emerging poultry infections. USDA has a full list of projects and longer descriptions available online.

Past projects include a University of Georgia project developing a bio-nanocomposites-based, disease-specific, electrochemical sensors for detecting fungal pathogen induced volatiles in selected crops; and a University of Massachusetts project creating a platform for pathogen detection in foods that is superior to the current detection method in terms of analytical time, sensitivity, and accuracy using a novel, label-free, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) mapping technique.

The purpose of AFRI is to support research, education, and extension work by awarding grants that address key problems of national, regional, and multi-state importance in sustaining all components of food and agriculture. AFRI is the flagship competitive grant program administered by USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture [NIFA]. Established under the 2008 Farm Bill, AFRI supports work in six priority areas: plant health and production and plant products; animal health and production and animal products; food safety, nutrition and health; bioenergy, natural resources and environment; agriculture systems and technology; and agriculture economics and rural communities. Since AFRI’s creation, NIFA has awarded more than $89 million to solve challenges related to plant health and production; $22 million of this has been dedicated to nanotechnology research. The President’s 2017 budget request proposes to fully fund AFRI for $700 million; this amount is the full funding level authorized by Congress when it established AFRI in the 2008 Farm Bill.

Each day, the work of USDA scientists and researchers touches the lives of all Americans: from the farm field to the kitchen table and from the air we breathe to the energy that powers our country. USDA science is on the cutting edge, helping to protect, secure, and improve our food, agricultural and natural resources systems. USDA research develops and transfers solutions to agricultural problems, supporting America’s farmers and ranchers in their work to produce a safe and abundant food supply for more than 100 years. This work has helped feed the nation and sustain an agricultural trade surplus since the 1960s. Since 2009, USDA has invested $4.32 billion in research and development grants. Studies have shown that every dollar invested in agricultural research now returns over $20 to our economy.

Since 2009, NIFA has invested in and advanced innovative and transformative initiatives to solve societal challenges and ensure the long-term viability of agriculture. NIFA’s integrated research, education, and extension programs, supporting the best and brightest scientists and extension personnel, have resulted in user-inspired, groundbreaking discoveries that are combating childhood obesity, improving and sustaining rural economic growth, addressing water availability issues, increasing food production, finding new sources of energy, mitigating climate variability, and ensuring food safety.

2013 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners

Thanks to a RT from @coreyspowell I stumbled across a Feb. 7, 2014 article in Science (magazine) describing the 2013 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners. I am highlighting a few of the entries here but there are more images in the article and a slideshow.

First Place: Illustration

Credit: Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards, Greg Dunn Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Marty Saggese, Society for Neuroscience, Washington, D.C.; Tracy Bale, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Rick Huganir, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

Cortex in Metallic Pastels. Credit: Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards, Greg Dunn Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Marty Saggese, Society for Neuroscience, Washington, D.C.; Tracy Bale, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Rick Huganir, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

From the article, a description of Greg Dunn and his work,

With a Ph.D. in neuroscience and a love of Asian art, it may have been inevitable that Greg Dunn would combine them to create sparse, striking illustrations of the brain. “It was a perfect synthesis of my interests,” Dunn says.

Cortex in Metallic Pastels represents a stylized section of the cerebral cortex, in which axons, dendrites, and other features create a scene reminiscent of a copse of silver birch at twilight. An accurate depiction of a slice of cerebral cortex would be a confusing mess, Dunn says, so he thins out the forest of cells, revealing the delicate branching structure of each neuron.

Dunn blows pigments across the canvas to create the neurons and highlights some of them in gold leaf and palladium, a technique he is keen to develop further.

“My eventual goal is to start an art-science lab,” he says. It would bring students of art and science together to develop new artistic techniques. He is already using lithography to give each neuron in his paintings a different angle of reflectance. “As you walk around, different neurons appear and disappear, so you can pack it with information,” he says.

People’s Choice:  Games & Apps

Meta!Blast: The Leaf. Credit: Eve Syrkin Wurtele, William Schneller, Paul Klippel, Greg Hanes, Andrew Navratil, and Diane Bassham, Iowa State University, Ames

Meta!Blast: The Leaf. Credit: Eve Syrkin Wurtele, William Schneller, Paul Klippel, Greg Hanes, Andrew Navratil, and Diane Bassham, Iowa State University, Ames

More from the article,

“Most people don’t expect a whole ecosystem right on the leaf surface,” says Eve Syrkin Wurtele, a plant biologist at Iowa State University. Meta!Blast: The Leaf, the game that Wurtele and her team created, lets high school students pilot a miniature bioship across this strange landscape, which features nematodes and a lumbering tardigrade. They can dive into individual cells and zoom around a chloroplast, activating photosynthesis with their ship’s search lamp. Pilots can also scan each organelle they encounter to bring up more information about it from the ship’s BioLog—a neat way to put plant biology at the heart of an interactive gaming environment.

This is a second recognition for Meta!Blast, which won an Honorable Mention in the 2011 visualization challenge for a version limited to the inside of a plant cell.

The Metablast website homepage describes the game,

The last remaining plant cell in existence is dying. An expert team of plant scientists have inexplicably disappeared. Can you rescue the lost team, discover what is killing the plant, and save the world?

Meta!Blast is a real-time 3D action-adventure game that puts you in the pilot’s seat. Shrink down to microscopic size and explore the vivid, dynamic world of a soybean plant cell spinning out of control. Interact with numerous characters, fight off plant pathogens, and discover how important plants are to the survival of the human race.

Enjoy!

What is a diamond worth?

A couple of diamond-related news items have crossed my path lately causing me to consider diamonds and their social implications. I’ll start first with the news items, according to an April 4, 2012 news item on physorg.com a quantum computer has been built inside a diamond (from the news item),

Diamonds are forever – or, at least, the effects of this diamond on quantum computing may be. A team that includes scientists from USC has built a quantum computer in a diamond, the first of its kind to include protection against “decoherence” – noise that prevents the computer from functioning properly.

I last mentioned decoherence in my July 21, 2011 posting about a joint (University of British Columbia, University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Southern California) project on quantum computing.

According to the April 5, 2012 news item by Robert Perkins for the University of Southern California (USC),

The multinational team included USC professor Daniel Lidar and USC postdoctoral researcher Zhihui Wang, as well as researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Iowa State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The findings were published today in Nature.

The team’s diamond quantum computer system featured two quantum bits, or qubits, made of subatomic particles.

As opposed to traditional computer bits, which can encode distinctly either a one or a zero, qubits can encode a one and a zero at the same time. This property, called superposition, along with the ability of quantum states to “tunnel” through energy barriers, some day will allow quantum computers to perform optimization calculations much faster than traditional computers.

Like all diamonds, the diamond used by the researchers has impurities – things other than carbon. The more impurities in a diamond, the less attractive it is as a piece of jewelry because it makes the crystal appear cloudy.

The team, however, utilized the impurities themselves.

A rogue nitrogen nucleus became the first qubit. In a second flaw sat an electron, which became the second qubit. (Though put more accurately, the “spin” of each of these subatomic particles was used as the qubit.)

Electrons are smaller than nuclei and perform computations much more quickly, but they also fall victim more quickly to decoherence. A qubit based on a nucleus, which is large, is much more stable but slower.

“A nucleus has a long decoherence time – in the milliseconds. You can think of it as very sluggish,” said Lidar, who holds appointments at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Though solid-state computing systems have existed before, this was the first to incorporate decoherence protection – using microwave pulses to continually switch the direction of the electron spin rotation.

“It’s a little like time travel,” Lidar said, because switching the direction of rotation time-reverses the inconsistencies in motion as the qubits move back to their original position.

Here’s an image I downloaded from the USC webpage hosting Perkins’s news item,

The diamond in the center measures 1 mm X 1 mm. Photo/Courtesy of Delft University of Technolgy/UC Santa Barbara

I’m not sure what they were trying to illustrate with the image but I thought it would provide an interesting contrast to the video which follows about the world’s first purely diamond ring,

I first came across this ring in Laura Hibberd’s March 22, 2012 piece for Huffington Post. For anyone who feels compelled to find out more about it, here’s the jeweller’s (Shawish) website.

What with the posting about Neal Stephenson and Diamond Age (aka, The Diamond Age Or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer; a novel that integrates nanotechnology into a story about the future and ubiquitous diamonds), a quantum computer in a diamond, and this ring, I’ve started to wonder about role diamonds will have in society. Will they be integrated into everyday objects or will they remain objects of desire? My guess is that the diamonds we create by manipulating carbon atoms will be considered everyday items while the ones which have been formed in the bowels of the earth will retain their status.

Learn to love spiders and their silk as they may help you beat global warming

Most of the research I’ve seen on spider silk has focused on its strength not its thermal conductivity. From the March 5, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Xinwei Wang had a hunch that spider webs were worth a much closer look. So he ordered eight spiders – Nephila clavipes, golden silk orbweavers – and put them to work eating crickets and spinning webs in the cages he set up in an Iowa State University greenhouse.

Wang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State, studies thermal conductivity, the ability of materials to conduct heat. He’s been looking for organic materials that can effectively transfer heat. It’s something diamonds, copper and aluminum are very good at; most materials from living things aren’t very good at all. …

What Wang and his research team found was that spider silks – particularly the draglines that anchor webs in place – conduct heat better than most materials, including very good conductors such as silicon, aluminum and pure iron. Spider silk also conducts heat 1,000 times better than woven silkworm silk and 800 times better than other organic tissues.

The March 5, 2012 news release from Iowa State University provides this detail,

The paper [about the discovery,  “New Secrets of Spider Silk: Exceptionally High Thermal Conductivity and its Abnormal Change under Stretching” – has just been published online by the journal Advanced Materials] reports that using laboratory techniques developed by Wang – “this takes time and patience” – spider silk conducts heat at the rate of 416 watts per meter Kelvin. Copper measures 401. And skin tissues measure .6.

“This is very surprising because spider silk is organic material,” Wang said. “For organic material, this is the highest ever. There are only a few materials higher – silver and diamond.”

Even more surprising, he said, is when spider silk is stretched, thermal conductivity also goes up. Wang said stretching spider silk to its 20 percent limit also increases conductivity by 20 percent. Most materials lose thermal conductivity when they’re stretched.

That discovery “opens a door for soft materials to be another option for thermal conductivity tuning,” Wang wrote in the paper.

And that could lead to spider silk helping to create flexible, heat-dissipating parts for electronics, better clothes for hot weather, bandages that don’t trap heat and many other everyday applications.

Here’s a look at one of Wang’s Golden Silk Orbweavers,

Photo courtesy of the Xinwei Wang research group.

Given that global warming is increasingly described as a certainty, (Simon Fraser University [located in Vancouver, Canada] March 4, 2012 news release,

Warming of 2 degrees inevitable over Canada

Even if zero emissions of greenhouse gases were to be achieved, the world’s temperature would continue to rise by about a quarter of a degree over a decade. That’s a best-case scenario, according to a paper co-written by a Simon Fraser University researcher.

New climate change research – Climate response to zeroed emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols — published in Nature’s online journal, urges the public, governments and industries to wake up to a harsh new reality.

“Let’s be honest, it’s totally unrealistic to believe that we can stop all emissions now,” says Kirsten Zickfeld, an assistant professor of geography at SFU. “Even with aggressive greenhouse gas mitigation, it will be a challenge to keep the projected global rise in temperature under 2 degrees Celsius,” emphasizes Zickfeld.

The geographer wrote the paper with Damon Matthews, a University of Concordia associate professor at the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment.

This discovery about spider silk and its possible applications is very welcome.