Monthly Archives: June 2013

Crystalline cellulose nanofibers and biomass fuel

Leave a reply

Perhaps one day the researchers who work with cellulose at the nanoscale will agree to some kind of terminology. Unfortunately, that day does not seem to be scheduled for the near future as per the latest research from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) in the June 19, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

Improved methods for breaking down cellulose nanofibers are central to cost-effective biofuel production and the subject of new research from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC). Scientists are investigating the unique properties of crystalline cellulose nanofibers to develop novel chemical pretreatments and designer enzymes for biofuel production from cellulosic — or non-food — plant derived biomass.

“Cellulose is laid out in plant cell walls as crystalline nanofibers, like steel reinforcements embedded in concrete columns,” says GLBRC’s Shishir Chundawat. “The key to cheaper biofuel production is to unravel these tightly packed nanofibers more efficiently into soluble sugars using fewer enzymes.”

The June 19, 2013 Los Alamos National Laboratory news release, which originated the news item, explains the new technique in more detail,

An article published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests—counter-intuitively—that increased binding of enzymes to cellulose polymers doesn’t always lead to faster breakdown into simple sugars. In fact, Chundawat’s research team found that using novel biomass pretreatments to convert cellulose to a unique crystalline structure called cellulose III reduced native enzyme binding while increasing sugar yields by as much as five times.

…

The researchers had previously demonstrated that altering the crystal structure of native cellulose to cellulose III accelerates enzymatic deconstruction; however, the recent observation that cellulose III increased sugar yields with reduced levels of bound enzyme was unexpected. To explain this finding, Chundawat and a team of LANL researchers led by Gnana Gnanakaran and Anurag Sethi developed a mechanistic kinetic model indicating that the relationship between enzyme affinity for cellulose and catalytic efficiency is more complex than previously thought.

Cellulose III was found to have a less sticky surface that makes it harder for native enzymes to get stuck non-productively on it, unlike untreated cellulose surfaces. The model further predicts that the enhanced enzyme activity, despite reduced binding, is due to the relative ease with which enzymes are able to pull out individual cellulose III chains from the pretreated nanofiber surface and then break them apart into simple sugars.

“These findings are exciting because they may catalyze future development of novel engineered enzymes that are further tailored for conversion of cellulose III rich pretreated biomass to cheaper fuels and other useful compounds that are currently derived from non-renewable fossil fuels,” says Gnanakaran.

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

Increased enzyme binding to substrate is not necessary for more efficient cellulose hydrolysis by Dahai Gaoa, Shishir P. S. Chundawat, Anurag Sethic, Venkatesh Balana, S. Gnanakaranc, and Bruce E. Dalea. Published online before print June 19, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1213426110
PNAS June 19, 2013

There is open access to the article (I’m not sure if this is permanent or temporary).

As I hinted at the beginning of this piece, there are a number of terms used to describe cellulose at the nanoscale. For example, there’s nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) which is also known as cellulose nanocrystals (CNC); this second term now seems to be preferred. My latest writing on nanocellulose, which seems to be a generic term covering all of the versions cellulose at the nanoscale is in a May 21, 2013 posting about some nanotoxicology studies and in a May 7, 2013 posting about a Saskatchewan-based (Canada) biorefinery (Blue Goose Biorefinery) and its production of CNC.

There are many more here on the topic and, if you’re interested, you may want to try CelluForce, FPInnovations, CNC, and/or NCC, as well as, nanocellulose or cellulose, as blog search terms.

Wooden batteries in Maryland (US)

Leave a reply

There seems to be a gusher of interest in making wooden batteries. Last year, there was news from a joint Polish-Swedish research team (my Aug. 14, 2012 posting) who’d combined lignin with a conductive polymer (polypyrrole) to create a battery cathode. Today, June 19, 2013, Nanowerk featured a news item about a team at the University of Maryland (US) who are also using wood to make battery components (Note: A link has been removed),

A sliver of wood coated with tin could make a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly battery (“Tin Anode for Sodium-Ion Batteries Using Natural Wood Fiber as a Mechanical Buffer and Electrolyte Reservoir”).

But don’t try it at home yet– the components in the battery tested by scientists at the University of Maryland are a thousand times thinner than a piece of paper. Using sodium instead of lithium, as many rechargeable batteries do, makes the battery environmentally benign. Sodium doesn’t store energy as efficiently as lithium, so you won’t see this battery in your cell phone — instead, its low cost and common materials would make it ideal to store huge amounts of energy at once – such as solar energy at a power plant.

The June 19, 2013 University of Maryland news release, which originated the news item, explains why this work with wood is so exciting (Note: Links have been removed),

Existing batteries are often created on stiff bases, which are too brittle to withstand the swelling and shrinking that happens as electrons are stored in and used up from the battery. Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and their team found that wood fibers are supple enough to let their sodium-ion battery last more than 400 charging cycles, which puts it among the longest lasting nanobatteries.

“The inspiration behind the idea comes from the trees,” said Hu, an assistant professor of materials science. “Wood fibers that make up a tree once held mineral-rich water, and so are ideal for storing liquid electrolytes, making them not only the base but an active part of the battery.”

Lead author Hongli Zhu and other team members noticed that after charging and discharging the battery hundreds of times, the wood ended up wrinkled but intact. Computer models showed that that the wrinkles effectively relax the stress in the battery during charging and recharging, so that the battery can survive many cycles.

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

Tin Anode for Sodium-Ion Batteries Using Natural Wood Fiber as a Mechanical Buffer and Electrolyte Reservoir by Hongli Zhu, Zheng Jia, Yuchen Chen, Nicholas Weadock, Jiayu Wan, Oeyvind Vaaland, Xiaogang Han, Teng Li, and Liangbing Hu. Nano Lett., Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/nl400998t Publication Date (Web): May 29, 2013

Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Social and/or scientific unrest in Spain, Canada, the UK, Egypt, and Turkey

Leave a reply

The latest scientist protest took place in Spain on Friday, June 14, 2013 according to Michele Catanzaro’s June 14, 2013 article for Nature magazine,

Scientists gathered in public meetings in 19 Spanish cities this morning under the slogan ‘Let’s save research’. The gatherings were called by the Letter for Science movement, a coalition that includes the main scientific organizations of the country.

According to the movement, 5,000 scientists in Madrid marched …

Scientists, after seeing Spain’s investment in science double from the late 1990s to 2009, have watched as budgets have been cut and the science ministry has been eliminated (2011). Earlier this year, the government announced that science funding would not be increased until 2014. A recent June 4,2013 announcement that science projects would receive some additional funding does not appear to have appeased scientists.

While Spanish scientists are the latest to protest, they are not alone.

In Canada, there was a July 10, 2012 protest, the Death of Evidence Rally, which attracted either 1,500 or several hundred protestors (as is often the case, police estimates were considerably lower than organizers’ estimates). I have coverage from the day of the event in my July 10, 2013 posting and a roundup of  post-event commentary in my July 13, 2013 posting. Again, the issue was funding but the situation seems to have been exacerbated by the ‘muzzle’ put on Canadian government scientists.

For anyone not familiar with the situation, scientists working for various government departments have been informed over a period of years (muzzle edicts have been handed out in a staggered fashion to various departments; there’s a brief description in my Sept. 16, 2010 posting; and, there’s an update about the current legal action regarding the ‘muzzle’ in my April 8, 2013 posting [scroll down about 75% of the way])  that they could no longer speak directly to media. Since this is often a Canadian scientist’s primary form of public outreach, having to to hand all requests to the communications section of their department means that someone not familiar with the science may be crafting the messages or simply refusing to answer any or all questions for reasons that may not be clear to the scientist or the person asking the questions.

Getting back to last year’s Canadian rally, it seems to have been modeled on a UK protest where scientists gathered in London and staged a mock funeral to protest science funding policies, according to Adam Smith in a May 15, 2012 article for the Guardian newspaper.

Egyptian scientists too have expressed their displeasure. In 2011, they contributed to the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising against Hosni Mubarak as I noted in my Feb. 4, 2011 posting. For an insider’s perspective, you may want to check out, Eyptian journalist and Nature Middle East editor, Mohammed Yahia’s Feb. 2, 2011 article for Nature Middle East,

Anti-Mubarak protests continued into their eighth day across Egypt yesterday culminating in mass demonstrations in Egypt’s three main cities of Cairo, Alexandria and Suez. While the academic community did not kick-start the popular uprising, academics joined the ranks of protesters on the streets to demand political reform and an end to President Mubarak’s three decades in power.

Several senior academics took to the streets of Cairo to have their voices heard. Nature Middle East was on the ground to hear what they had to say on the state of science under Mubarak’s regime and what hopes they have for science under any new government.

Also in 2011, there was a situation with scientists in Turkey. According to my Sept. 9, 2011 posting, Turkish scientists were threatening to “resign en masse” from the Turkish Academy of Sciences when the government stripped the academy of its autonomy. The current protests in Turkey do not feature scientists and are focused on other issues (according to a June 17, 2013 article by Graham E. Fuller for the Christian Science Monitor). In Egypt, they were protesting a dictatorship; in Turkey, they are protesting an arrogant prime minister’s actions.  Although I have to wonder how Turkey’s Prime Minister and/or its military are going to react as the protests are continuing; I can’t be the only person concerned that a coup may be in Turkey’s near future.

Getting to my point and eliminating the segues, it seems that over the last two years scientists in various countries have been taking political action of one kind or another and my impression is that this represents a substantive shift in how scientists view their role in society.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and bony 3D printing

Leave a reply

Markus Buehler (last mentioned here in a Nov. 28, 2012 posting*, about spider silk and music) and his research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been inspired by various biomaterials to create materials that resemble bone matter, from the June 17, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

Researchers working to design new materials that are durable, lightweight and environmentally sustainable are increasingly looking to natural composites, such as bone, for inspiration: Bone is strong and tough because its two constituent materials, soft collagen protein and stiff hydroxyapatite mineral, are arranged in complex hierarchical patterns that change at every scale of the composite, from the micro up to the macro.

…

Now researchers at MIT have developed an approach that allows them to turn their designs into reality. In just a few hours, they can move directly from a multiscale computer model of a synthetic material to the creation of physical samples.

In a paper published online June 17 in Advanced Functional Materials, associate professor Markus Buehler of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and co-authors describe their approach.

The June 17, 2013 MIT news release by Denise Brehm, which originated the news item, explains the researchers’ approach in more detail (Note: A link has been removed),

The collagen in bone is too soft and stretchy to serve as a structural material, and the mineral hydroxyapatite is brittle and prone to fracturing. Yet when the two combine, they form a remarkable composite capable of providing skeletal support for the human body. The hierarchical patterns help bone withstand fracturing by dissipating energy and distributing damage over a larger area, rather than letting the material fail at a single point.

“The geometric patterns we used in the synthetic materials are based on those seen in natural materials like bone or nacre, but also include new designs that do not exist in nature,” says Buehler, who has done extensive research on the molecular structure and fracture behavior of biomaterials. His co-authors are graduate students Leon Dimas and Graham Bratzel, and Ido Eylon of the 3-D printer manufacturer Stratasys. “As engineers we are no longer limited to the natural patterns. We can design our own, which may perform even better than the ones that already exist.”

The researchers created three synthetic composite materials, each of which is one-eighth inch thick and about 5-by-7 inches in size. The first sample simulates the mechanical properties of bone and nacre (also known as mother of pearl). This synthetic has a microscopic pattern that looks like a staggered brick-and-mortar wall: A soft black polymer works as the mortar, and a stiff blue polymer forms the bricks. Another composite simulates the mineral calcite, with an inverted brick-and-mortar pattern featuring soft bricks enclosed in stiff polymer cells. The third composite has a diamond pattern resembling snakeskin. This one was tailored specifically to improve upon one aspect of bone’s ability to shift and spread damage.

The scientists are hinting that they’ve improved on nature and that may be so but I recall reading similar suggestions in studies I’ve read about 19th and 20th century research. It seems to me that scientists have claimed to be improving on nature for quite some time.

Interestingly, the suggested application for this new material is not biomedical, from the news release,

According to Buehler, the process could be scaled up to provide a cost-effective means of manufacturing materials that consist of two or more constituents, arranged in patterns of any variation imaginable and tailored for specific functions in different parts of a structure. He hopes that eventually entire buildings might be printed with optimized materials that incorporate electrical circuits, plumbing and energy harvesting. “The possibilities seem endless, as we are just beginning to push the limits of the kind of geometric features and material combinations we can print,” Buehler says.

You can find a link to and a citation for the published paper at the end of the ScienceDaily June 17, 2013 news item.

* Date changed from 2013 to 2012 on June 4, 2014

Nanotechnology for Green Innovation report, Canada, and the OECD’s Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials

Leave a reply

I will get to the report in a moment but since it led me on a magical mystery tour through the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and its new website and assorted organizational confusions, I thought I’d share those first.

February 2012 marks the last report from the OECD’s Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials that I can find. As well, the OECD appears to have changed its website recently (since Feb. 2012) and I find searching it less rewarding.

There’s more, it seems that the Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials either no longer exists or has been subsumed as part of the Working Party on Nanotechnology. I mourn the old nanomaterials working party as I found much valuable information there about the Canadian situation that was available nowhere else. Oddly, Industry Canada still has a webpage devoted to the OECD’s Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials but the OECD link on the Industry Canada leads you to a database,

The OECD Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials (WPMN ) was established in September, 2006 in order to foster international co-operation in health and environmental safety-related aspects of manufactured nanomaterials. Environment Canada represents the Government of Canada at the WPMN, supported by other interested federal departments and agencies, including Industry Canada, and stakeholders. For more information on the work of the WPMN, please visit the WPMN website or contact Environment Canada.

Nostalgia buffs can find all 37 of the Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials reports here on the Nanotechnology Industries Association website (save one) or here on the OECD’s Publications in the Series on the Safety of Manufactured Nanomaterials webpage.

A new ‘green’ nanotechnology and innovation report was announced in a June 18, 2013 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

A new paper by the OECD Working Party on Nanotechnology (“Nanotechnology for Green Innovation”; pdf) brings together information collected through discussions and projects undertaken relevant to the development and use of nanotechnology for green innovation. It relies in particular on preliminary results from the WPN project on the Responsible Development of Nanotechnology and on conclusions from a symposium, organised by the OECD WPN together with the United States National Nanotechnology Initiative, which took place in March 2012 in Washington DC, United States, on Assessing the Economic Impact of Nanotechnology. [emphases mine]  It also draws on material from the four background papers that were developed for the symposium. The background papers were:

“Challenges for Governments in Evaluating the Return on Investment from Nanotechnology and its Broader Economic Impact” by Eleanor O’Rourke and Mark Morrison of the Institute of Nanotechnology, United Kingdom;

“Finance and Investor Models in Nanotechnology” by Tom Crawley, Pekka Koponen, Lauri Tolvas and Terhi Marttila of Spinverse, Finland;

“The Economic Contributions of Nanotechnology to Green and Sustainable Growth” by Philip Shapira and Jan Youtie, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, United States; and

“Models, Tool and Metrics Available to Assess the Economic Impact of Nanotechnology” by Katherine Bojczuk and Ben Walsh of Oakdene Hollins, United Kingdom.

The purpose of the paper is to provide background information for future work by the WPN on the application of nanotechnology to green innovation.

I wrote about the March 2012 symposium in a March 29, 2012 posting,

I was hoping for a bit more detail about how one would go about including nanotechnology-enabled products in this type of economic impact assessment but this is all I could find (from the news release),

In their paper, Youtie and Shapira cite several examples of green nanotechnology, discuss the potential impacts of the technology, and review forecasts that have been made.

…

I checked both Philip Shapira‘s webpage and Jan Youtie‘s at Georgia Tech to find that neither lists this latest work, which hopefully includes additional detail. I’m hopeful there’ll be a document published in the proceedings for this symposium and access will be possible.

So, I’m very happy to see this 2013 report and  I have three different ways to access it,

  1. OECD library page for Nanotechnology for Green Innovation
  2. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/5k450q9j8p8q.pdf?expires=1371578116&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=F308B436A883BF6533E66C19182ECF17 which features a title page identifying this is as  an OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers No. 5 (this one lists 35 pp)
  3. http://search.oecd.org/officialdocuments/displaydocumentpdf/?cote=DSTI/STP/NANO%282013%293/FINAL&docLanguage=En which is identified with this Unclassified DSTI/STP/NANO(2013)3/FINAL and a publication date of June 13, 2013 (this one lists 34 pp)

The following comments are based on a very quick read through the report. Pulling together four papers and trying to create a cohesive and coherent single report after the fact is difficult and this report shows some of the stresses. One  of the problems is that 34 or 35 pp., depending on which version you’re reading, isn’t enough to cover the very broad topic indicated by the report’s title. I couldn’t find a clear general statement about government policies. For example, there are various countries with policies and there are trade blocks such as the European Union which also has policies. Additionally, there may be other jurisdictions. All of which contribute an environment which makes ‘green’ innovation nano or otherwise a challenge but no mention is made of this challenge. Further, I don’t recall seeing any mention of patents, which I’d expect would be a major talking point in a paper with innovation in its title. If there was mention of intellectual property, it made no impact on me, odd, especially where nanotechnology is concerned.

The report does have some good specifics and  it is worthwhile reading. For example, I found the section on lithium-ion batteries quite informative.

In any event, I’m not really the audience for this document, the “purpose of the paper is to provide background information for future work by the WPN on the application of nanotechnology to green innovation.”

ETA June 18, 2013 6:00 pm PDT: Here’s a link to the new OECD nanotechnology page, STInano

Golden milk—Swiss researchers have created a gold-milk hybrid material

Leave a reply

The researchers didn’t start out by trying to develop a ‘gold-milk hybrid’ material; that came later, according to the June 18, 2013 news item on Nanowerk (Note: Links have been removed),

Raffaele Mezzenga, professor of food and soft materials, came up with the idea of “gold paper” a year ago. At the time, his group was working on an unusual hybrid material, a wafer-thin, paper-like mixture of graphene and protein fibres (see ETH Life report). The recipe is universally applicable and relatively simple: you mix fibroid objects with plate-like entities in a watery solution and filter the mixture with the aid of vacuum. The plates and fibres congregate and remain on the filter as a thin film.

As a result, Mezzenga set two of his team members, Chaoxu Li and Sreenath Bolisetty, the task of producing a kind of gold leaf out of protein fibres and gold plates (“Hybrid Nanocomposites of Gold Single-Crystal Platelets and Amyloid Fibrils with Tunable Fluorescence, Conductivity, and Sensing Properties”). First of all, the researchers had to make the fibres by stretching them naturally from milk globular proteins, the so-called beta-lactoglobulin, with the aid of heat and acid. Like all proteins, milk proteins are also composed of a chain of numerous individual amino acids that form complex compact structures under native conditions. Heat or chemicals break open the compact configuration, causing the chains to unravel.

The June 18, 2013 ETH Life news article [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] by Peter Rüegg. which originated the news item, describes what happens after the milk protein’s amino acid chains unravel,

Several of these milk protein fibres then organise themselves into thicker, helical fibres. The researchers added gold in the form of a salt to the acidic solution of the fibres. The protein fibres allow the gold to reduce into small plates with a diameter of one micrometre and a thickness of 100 nanometres. The gold grows as a so-called monocrystal and the gold ions form a crystal lattice completely devoid of any defects.

Gold plates and fibres then accumulate in layers. The thin film that remains after filtration is formed in much the same way as paper from cellulose. The novel hybrid material is very stable, but remarkably changes its physical and optical properties when it comes into contact with water.

Here’s an image of the ‘golden milk’,

The hybrid film on a filter (r.a.) and on glass (ETH logo). REM reveals the micro (upper left) and nano (bottom left) structure of this particular material. (Images: from Li, C., Adv. Mater. 2013) [downloaded from https://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/archive_articles/130618_goldfolie_per/index_EN]

The hybrid film on a filter (r.a.) and on glass (ETH logo). REM reveals the micro (upper left) and nano (bottom left) structure of this particular material. (Images: from Li, C., Adv. Mater. 2013) [downloaded from https://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/archive_articles/130618_goldfolie_per/index_EN]

The researchers have some ideas for how this material could be commercialized,

Mezzenga sees an initial application in gastronomy. In culinary applications, pure gold has an approved E-number code (E-175) allowing his use as additive in foods and indeed gold leafs have long been used to decorate desserts, drinks and other specially prepared foods. Because the new hybrid material is made of gold and dietary proteins, the researchers do not anticipate any hurdles in using it for culinary purposes, thereby considerably reducing the cost of using pure gold.

Even more interesting, however, are the unusual optical properties of the “gold paper”, especially as the gold is available as monocrystals. These properties change according to the pH value, for instance, which means the hybrid material could be used for acidity measurements in sensors. The “paper” is also conductive to varying degrees depending on its composition and lends itself to applications in microelectronics.

…

Because, at face value, the gold paper is barely distinguishable from gold leaf – it has the lustre and colour of gold – it may also be interesting for the clock and jewellery industries, which could reduce their demand for the precious metal with protein gold leaf. In order to imitate gold leaf, the hybrid material only needs a ratio of one third weight percentage of gold. The new material would thus be just the ticket for gold-plating the numbers on the faces of wristwatches, for instance. “When you consider how much pure gold costs, this new material makes a massive difference,” says the ETH-Zurich professor. On the one hand, it could help to reduce the global demand for gold and thus relieve the pressure on natural resources; on the other hand, the hybrid material broadens the fields of application for the metal.

The researchers have filed a patent for their invention. Mezzenga hopes that industry will show an interest in the new material. “Gold is a delicate subject. Nonetheless, the potential for applications is vast.”

Here’s a link to and reference for the research paper,

Li C, Bolisetty S and Mezzenga R (2013). Hybrid Nanocomposites of Gold Single-Crystal Platelets and Amyloid Fibrils with Tunable Fluorescence, Conductivity, and Sensing Properties. Adv. Mater. doi: 10.1002/adma.201300904

This paper is behind a paywall.

In the category of idle thoughts, perhaps I should have called this ‘milky gold’, eh?

University of Victoria’s (Canada) microscope, world’s most powerful, unveiled

Leave a reply

This new microscope at the University of Victoria (UVic) was supposed to be unveiled in 2011 according to my July 28, 2009 posting about the purchase,

In other BC news, the University of Victoria (Canada) will be getting a new microscope which senses at subatomic levels. (From the media release on Azonano),

The new microscope-called a Scanning Transmission Electron Holography Microscope (STEHM) — will use an electron beam and holography techniques to observe the inside of materials and their surfaces to an expected resolution as small as one-fiftieth the size of an atom.

This is being done in collaboration with Hitachi High-Technologies which is building the microscope in Japan and installing it at U Vic in late 2010. The microscope will be located in a specially adapted room where work to prepare and calibrate it will continue until it becomes operational sometime in 2011.

I had been wondering if I’d ever hear of the microscope again, so finding a June 18, 2013 news item on Nanowerk announcing the world’s most powerful microscope at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) answered the question for me (Note: A link has been removed),

The world’s most powerful microscope, which resides in a specially constructed room at the University of Victoria, has now been fully assembled and tested, and has a lineup of scientists and businesses eager to use it.

The seven-tonne, 4.5-metre tall Scanning Transmission Electron Holography Microscope (STEHM), the first such microscope of its type in the world, came to the university in parts last year,. A team from Hitachi, which constructed the ultra high-resolution, ultra-stable instrument, spent one year painstakingly assembling the STEHM in a carefully controlled lab in the basement of the Bob Wright Centre.

The wait was worth it, says Rodney Herring, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of UVic’s Advanced Microscopy Facility. [emphasis mine]

The June 17, 2013 University of Victoria news release, which originated the news item, doesn’t address the two year delay directly as Herring’s quote seems to be in reference to the one-year assembly period. The news release goes on to describe the microscope’s resolution,

Herring viewed gold atoms through the microscope at a resolution of 35 picometres. One picometre is a trillionth of a metre. This resolution is much better than the previous best image with 49-picometre resolution taken at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in California, and is about 20 million times human sight.

The STEHM allows researchers to see the atoms in a manner never before possible. It has full analytical capabilities that can determine the types and number or elements present, and high-resolution cameras for collecting data.

It will be used by researchers of many science and engineering disciplines for projects requiring knowledge of small atomic scale structures (nanoscience) and nanotechnology. Dr. Vincenzo Grillo from the Istituto Nanoscienze Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche in Modena [Italy] will be the first visiting researcher later this month.

A line-up seems to have formed (from the news release),

Local scientists and businesses are also eager to use it. Ned Djilali, a UVic professor of mechanical engineering, is working with the National Research Council, Ballard Power Systems in Vancouver and Mercedes-Benz on fuel cell research. The STEHM “opens up entirely new possibilities” in fuel cell technology, says Djilali.

Redlen Technologies, a local company that manufactures high resolution semiconductor radiation detectors that are used for such things as nuclear cardiology, CT scanning, baggage scanning and dirty bomb detection, has been waiting for the STEHM to open for the company’s research and development.

If you are curious but don’t have any special influence, you can find out about the microscope (and perhaps view it?) later this week (from the news release),

Herring will give details of the results at a microscopy conference this week at UVic, as well as during a talk Thursday, June 20, that is open to the public. [emphasis mine] It is from 4:30 to 5 p.m. at the Bob Wright Centre, in Flury Hall, room B150.

I don’t usually include funding information but since I am from British Columbia, I have more of an interest than usual (from the news release),

The STEHM microscope is supported by $9.2 million in funding from the government of Canada through the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the BC Knowledge Development Fund and UVic, as well as significant in-kind support from Hitachi.

Since microscopes and big equipment (in general) are weirdly fascinating to me, here are some details from UVic’s STEHM backgrounder,

The Scanning Transmission Electron Holography Microscope (STEHM) is the highest resolution microscope ever built and the only one of its kind in the world. It’s arrival makes the University of Victoria a global leader in the competitive field of advanced microscopy.

Unlike conventional microscopes, which use light to peer at specimens, the STEHM uses an electron beam and holography techniques to observe the inside of materials and their surfaces to an expected resolution smaller than the size of an atom.

The STEHM will see materials beyond the nanoscale to the picoscale. A nanometer is one-billionth of a metre, while a picometre is one-trillionth of a metre. Atoms are typically between 62 and 520 picometres in diameter.

…

The STEHM will not only see individual atoms, but it will indicate what type of atoms they are. It also features an electron vortex beam, which researchers can use like tweezers to manipulate individual atoms in a specimen.

The microscope itself is a 4.5-metre tall cylinder encased in metal shielding to block magnetic fields. It has a footprint of six square metres and weighs seven tonnes.

The microscope is so huge that researchers will climb a stepladder to insert their specimens through a tiny airlock into the vacuum of the column. They’ll then leave the room, wait for the air currents in the room to calm, and then operate the microscope remotely from an adjoining room.

The microscope is so sensitive that its image could be affected by little more than a passing cloud. …

I don’t know how many times the public will have any access to this microscope given its extreme sensitivity so you might want to make a point of attending the public talk on Thursday, June 20, 2013 at the University of Victoria.

One final comment, I find it a bit disconcerting that the only ‘academic’ research mentioned seems to be Italian and that the ‘Canadian’ research is primarily commercial. It’s very nice that Dr. Herring saw a gold nanoparticle but are there any local or Canadian publicly funded academic researchers using this microscope, which seems to have been paid for by taxpayers? Hopefully, this is a case where excitement took over and the writer who almost always focuses on local, academic research got carried away with the international involvement and big name companies (Mercedes Benz).

Review of ‘You Are Very Star’ transmedia show (in Vancouver, Canada)

Leave a reply

Blasting backwards (1968) and forwards (2048) in time, the You Are Very Star immersive, transmedia experience offered by Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre is an exciting experiment as I discovered on opening night, June 15, 2013.

Don’t expect to sit passively in a theatre seat. We trotted around the building to visit or remember 1968 in one theatre, then zipped out to a 20 minute 2013 intermission where we played a game (they gave us maps with our programmes, which you are invited to return at the end of the intermission), and, finally, were escorted to the planetarium theatre to encounter 2048.

I’m not sure about the artistic intention for the 1968 portion of the show. It was one of those situations where my tiny bit of knowledge and considerable fund of ignorance combined to create confusion. For example, one of the characters, Earle Birney, a poet, writer, and titan of Canadian literature, did found the creative writing programme at the University of British Columbia as they note in the show but by 1968 he’d left Vancouver for Toronto. One of the other characters in this segment is called Esther, a black feminist and more, with whom Birney’s character appears to establish a liaison. Birney was married to an Esther whom I met some years ago. She was a white Englishwoman and a feminist but of a somewhat different character than the Esther of the play.

In addition, the clothing wasn’t quite right. No tie dye, no macrame, no beads, no granny dresses, and not enough fringe. Plus, I can’t recall seeing any bell bottom pants, mini dresses and skirts, and/or go go boots.

There were some interesting tonal changes in this section ranging from humour, political angst and anger, and pathos. The depiction of the professor who’s decided to let people grade themselves and who takes an hallucinogenic drug in front of his class seemed pretty typical of a few of the crackpot professors of the time.

Unexpectedly, the professor decides to get high on ayahuasca. LSD, magic mushrooms, marijuana and hashish would have been more typical. I can understand clothing and some of the dialogue not being typical of the period but getting the preferred drugs wrong seems odd, which is why I questioned *whether the artists introduced these incongruencies intentionally.

The actors all shone at one time or another as they delivered some pretty snappy dialogue . I’m hoping they tighten this section up so there’s less waiting for the snappy stuff and perhaps they could find some device other than xx hours/days earlier to signify a change in the timeframe. I lost count of how often they flashed a slide onscreen notifying us that the next scene had taken place at an earlier time. Finally, I loved the shadow puppets but they were on for a brief time only, never to return.

Our intermission was pretty active. There were lots of places on the map, given with the programme, where one was meant to discover things. I never did figure out what was happening with the stuffed toys that were being given out but I’m ok with those kinds of mysteries.

The last stop was the planetarium theatre for 2048. Very interesting costuming, especially the head gear. Still, I have to ask why do people in the future, in the more ‘optimistic’ versions of it, tend to wear white?

I found 2048 the most interesting part but that may be due to the references to human enhancement (a topic I’ve covered here a number of times). The playwrights also seem to have spent some time studying Ray Kurzweil and the singularity he’s predicting. From the Technological singularity essay on Wikipedia (Note: Links and footnotes have been removed),

The technological singularity is the theoretical emergence of superintelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the technological singularity is seen as an occurrence beyond which events cannot be predicted.

The first use of the term “singularity” in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann. Neumann in the mid-1950s spoke of “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue”. The term was popularized by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement, or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity. Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited von Neumann’s use of the term in a foreword to von Neumann’s classic The Computer and the Brain.

Proponents of the singularity typically postulate an “intelligence explosion”, where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, that might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent’s cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human.

Kurzweil predicts the singularity to occur around 2045 whereas Vinge predicts some time before 2030. At the 2012 Singularity Summit, Stuart Armstrong did a study of artificial generalized intelligence (AGI) predictions by experts and found a wide range of predicted dates, with a median value of 2040. His own prediction on reviewing the data is that there’s an 80% probability that the singularity will occur in a range of 5 to 100 years. An alternative view, the “mitochondrial singularity,” proposed by microbiologist Joan Slonczewski, holds that the singularity is a gradual process that began centuries ago, as humans have outsourced our intelligence to machines, and that we may become reduced to vestigial power providers analogous to the mitochondria of living cells.

I thank the playwrights for introducing some of the more difficult aspects of the science and technology discussion that are taking place into this piece. For example, those who are enhanced and moving towards the singularity and those who are not enhanced are both represented here and so the playwrights have introduced some ideas about the social implications of employing new and emerging technologies.

You Are Very Star is not a perfect production but it is as I noted earlier very exciting both for the ways the company is trying to immerse audiences in an experience and for the ideas and dialogue they are attempting to stimulate.

The show goes on until June 29, 2013 and tickets are $30,

TO ORDER

youareverystar.brownpapertickets.com

1-800-838-3006

This production is being held at,

H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
1100 Chestnut Street, in Vanier Park
8:00pm Tues – Sun
2:00pm Sun
12:00pm Thurs June 20

Do enjoy!

* Correction June 19,2013: ‘where’ changed to ‘whether’

ETA June 24, 2013: I noticed that where I use the word ‘enhancement’ other reviewers such as Colin Thomas in his June 17, 2013 review for the Georgia Straight are using ‘augment’

Fish gets invisibility cloak first, cat waits patiently

1 Reply

An invisibility cloak devised by researchers in Singapore and China is receiving a high degree of interest online with a June 14, 2013 news item on Nanowerk, a June 11, 2013 article by Philip Ball for Nature, and a June 13, 2013 article by Sarah Gates for Huffington Post.

The research paper, Natural Light Cloaking for Aquatic and Terrestrial Creatures by Hongsheng Chen, Bin Zheng, Lian Shen, Huaping Wang, Xianmin Zhang, Nikolay Zheludev, Baile Zhang was submitted June 7, 2013 to arXiv.org (arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. Submissions to arXiv must conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned and operated by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution),

A cloak that can hide living creatures from sight is a common feature of mythology but still remains unrealized as a practical device. To preserve the phase of wave, the previous cloaking solution proposed by Pendry \emph{et al.} required transforming electromagnetic space around the hidden object in such a way that the rays bending around it have to travel much faster than those passing it by. The difficult phase preservation requirement is the main obstacle for building a broadband polarization insensitive cloak for large objects. Here, we suggest a simplifying version of Pendry’s cloak by abolishing the requirement for phase preservation as irrelevant for observation in incoherent natural light with human eyes that are phase and polarization insensitive. This allows the cloak design to be made in large scale using commonly available materials and we successfully report cloaking living creatures, a cat and a fish, in front of human eyes.

What they seem to be saying is that it’s possible to create an invisibility cloak perceptible to the human eye that is made of everyday materials.

I’ll show the fish video first. Pay attention as that fish darts behind its invisibility cloak almost as soon as the video starts (from the Nanowerk Youbube channel; June 14, 2013 Nanowerk news item),

Then, there’s the cat (also from the Nanowerk Youtube channel),


The June 11, 2013 article by Philip Ball for Nature describes the device which provides invisibility,

… This latest addition to the science of invisibility cloaks is one of the simplest implementations so far, but there’s no denying its striking impact.

The ‘box of invisibility’ has been designed by a team of researchers at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, led by Hongsheng Chen, and their coworkers. The box is basically a set of prisms made from high-quality optical glass that bend light around any object in the enclosure around which the prisms are arrayed, the researchers describe in a paper posted on the online repository arXiv.

Ball suggests that this latest invisibility cloak is very similar to a Victorian era music hall trick,

As such, the trick is arguably closer to ‘disappearances’ staged in Victorian music hall using arrangements of slanted mirrors than to the modern use of substances called metamaterials to achieve invisibility by guiding light rays in unnatural ways.

As far as I know, the ‘metamaterial’ invisibility cloaks require very sophisticated equipment for their production, are incredibly expensive, and aren’t all that practical.

Gates’s June 13, 2013 article for the Huffington Post provides an overview of some of the recent work on invisibility cloaks and metamaterials, as well as, previous work done by Dr. Hongsheng Chen, an electromagnetics professor at Zhejiang University (China), and Baile Zhang, an assistant physics professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University before they unveiled this latest invisibility cloak.

My most recent posting on the topic was a June 6, 2013 piece on a temporal invisibility cloak.

“Sensational” 15% can become up to 50% oil recovery rate from dead oil wells with nanoparticle-enhanced water

Leave a reply

Texas, the Middle East, and/or Alberta leap to mind before Norway and China when one thinks of research into oil extraction, which makes this June 14, 2013 news item on Nanwerk about a Norway-China collaboration particularly intriguing,

When petroleum companies abandon an oil well, more than half the reservoir’s oil is usually left behind as too difficult to recover. Now, however, much of the residual oil can be recovered with the help of nanoparticles and a simple law of physics.

Oil to be recovered is confined in tiny pores within rock, often sandstone. Often the natural pressure in a reservoir is so high that the oil flows upwards when drilling reaches the rocks containing the oil.

…

In order to maintain the pressure within a reservoir, oil companies have learned to displace the produced oil by injecting water. This water forces out the oil located in areas near the injection point. The actual injection point may be hundreds or even thousands of metres away from the production well.

Eventually, however, water injection loses its effect. Once the oil from all the easily reached pores has been recovered, water begins emerging from the production well instead of oil, at which point the petroleum engineers have had little choice but to shut down the well.

The petroleum industry and research community have been working for decades on various solutions to increase recovery rates. One group of researchers at the Centre for Integrated Petroleum Research (CIPR) in Bergen, collaborating with researchers in China, has developed a new method for recovering more oil from wells – and not just more, far more. [emphasis mine]

The Chinese scientists had already succeeded in recovering a sensational 15 per cent of the residual oil in their test reservoir when they formed a collaboration with the CIPR researchers to find out what had actually taken place down in the reservoir. Now the Norwegian partner in the collaboration has succeeded in recovering up to 50 per cent of the oil remaining in North Sea rock samples.

The ?, 2013 article (Nanoparticles helping to recover more oil) by Claude R. Olsen/Else Lie. Translation: Darren McKellep/Carol B. Eckmann for the Research Council of Norway, which originated the news item, explains what is left after the easy oil has been extracted and how this news technique squeezes more oil out of the well,

Water in an oil reservoir flows much like the water in a river, accelerating in narrow stretches and slowing where the path widens.

When water is pumped into a reservoir, the pressure difference forces the water away from the injection well and towards the production well through the tiny rock pores. These pores are all interconnected by very narrow tunnel-like passages, and the water accelerates as it squeezes its way through these.

The new method is based on infusing the injection water with particles that are considerably smaller than the tunnel diameters. When the particle-enhanced water reaches a tunnel opening, it will accelerate faster than the particles, leaving the particles behind to accumulate and plug the tunnel entrance, ultimately sealing the tunnel.

This forces the following water to take other paths through the rock’s pores and passages – and in some of these there is oil, which is forced out with the water flow. The result is more oil extracted from the production well and higher profits for the petroleum companies.

The article writers do not provide a description of the nanoparticles but they do describe the genesis of this Norwegian-Sino collaboration,

The idea for this method of oil recovery came from the two Chinese researchers Bo Peng and Ming yuan Li who completed their doctorates in Bergen 10 and 20 years ago, respectively. The University of Bergen and China University of Petroleum in Beijing have been cooperating for over a decade on petroleum research, and this laid the foundation for collaboration on understanding and refining the particle method.

…

At first it was not known if the particles could be used in seawater, since the Chinese had done their trials with river water and onshore oilfields. Trials in Bergen using rock samples from the North Sea showed that the nanoparticles also work in seawater and help to recover an average of 20?30 per cent, and up to 50 per cent, more residual oil.