Monthly Archives: February 2014

British Library’s Beautiful Science exhibit of data visualization leads to Vancouver, Canada’s Martin Krzywinski, scientist and data visualizer

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One tends to think of data visualization as a new phenomenon but the practice dates back to the 17th century at least according to the British Library’s Beautiful Science exhibition opening today, Feb. 20, 2014 and extending to May 26, 2014. Rebekah Higgitt’s Feb. 20, 2014 posting for the Guardian’s Science blog network offers a preview (Note: Links have been removed),

Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight, which opens at the British Library tomorrow, is a small but thought-provoking display that looks at how scientific data has and can be visualised. Prompted by today’s interest in big data and infographics, it merges modern digital displays with historic texts and images.

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The display items are well-chosen, and include some key examples of innovation in data collection and presentation. However, the science- rather than history-led interpretation of the 17th- to 19th-century texts is clear in the fact that their selection reflects trends and concerns of the present, rather than a concern to reveal those of the past. There is, likewise, an emphasis on progress toward ever better and more accurate approaches to data visualisation (although in a post at PLOS Blogs, Kieniewicz suggests that designers have recently stolen a march over scientists in the display of data).

The PLOS (Public Library of Science) blogger mentioned in previous excerpt is Johanna Kieniewicz and the Beautiful Science exhibition’s curator. In the Feb. 13, 2014 posting on her ‘At the Interface’ blog, where she discusses the exhibit she also makes it clear that this is a personal blog and is not associated with her employers (Note: A link has been removed),

When it comes to the visual representation of scientific information, in a scientific context, does aesthetic matter? In my day job at the British Library, I’ve spent the past year curating the upcoming Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Ideas exhibition. This experience has given me a phenomenal opportunity to think about the way we communicate and discover things in science. And, I think there’s a strong case to be made for beautiful science.

The visual representation of data is a fundamental part of what it means to be a scientist today. Whether a single data point plotted on a graph or a whole genome sequence, data visualisation helps us to examine, interpret, and contextualise information in a way that numbers and statistics often do not. Moreover, at a time when we are expected to process ever-increasing volumes of information, visualisations are often more readily digestible than some of the more ‘traditional’ alternatives; as the increased prominence of colourful ‘data viz’ work in the pages of our newspapers, websites, and in-flight magazines would attest.

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You do have to be in London, UK to attend this show however the British Library’s Feb. 19, 2014 press release does offer more information which might satisfy curiosity about the show and associated events, as well as, some images (Note: Links have been removed),

In an age of rapidly advancing technologies Beautiful Science, opening tomorrow in The Folio Society Gallery at the British Library, shows that the challenge of presenting big data in innovative ways is not a new one. From 17th century illustrated diagrams to contemporary interactive visualisations, the exhibition explores how advances in science alongside changes in technology have allowed us to visually interpret masses of information.

Beautiful Science, sponsored by Winton Capital Management, explores the work of scientists and statisticians through the ages using the Library’s own vast science collections together with new and exciting technology, focusing on three key themes – public health, weather and evolution.

From an early visual representation of a hierarchically ordered universe in Robert Fludd’s ‘Great Chain of Being’ (1617) and Florence Nightingale’s seminal ‘rose diagram’ (1858), which showed that significantly more Crimean War deaths were caused by poor hospital conditions than battlefield wounds, to a contemporary moving infographic of ocean currents from NASA, this exhibition shows how visualising data has changed the way we see, interpret and understand the world around us.

Dr Johanna Kieniewicz, lead curator of Beautiful Science, says: “The British Library is home to the nation’s science collection and we’re thrilled to be opening up our fantastic collections in the Library’s first science exhibition. As big data is becoming a topic of such huge interest, we particularly wanted to show the important connections between the past and the present. Data that is centuries old from collections like ours is now being used to inform cutting edge science. We’re also delighted to include video interviews with leading experts, Dame Sally Davies, UK Chief Medical Officer, Sir Nigel Shadbolt, chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute, David McCandless, data-journalist and designer, and David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University.”

Following the success of last year’s Inspiring Science season, the exhibition is accompanied by a range of events including Festival of the Spoken Nerd: I Chart the Library, Seeing is Believing: Picturing the Nation’s Health with Sally Davies and David Spiegelhalter, Knowledge is Beautiful with David McCandless and a Family Discovery Day.

Now for some of the images in the show. This first one is Florence Nightingale’s Rose,

In her seminal ‘rose diagram’, Florence Nightingale demonstrated that far more soldiers died from preventable epidemic diseases (blue) than from wounds inflicted on the battlefield (red) or other causes (black) during the Crimean War (1853-56). Courtesy British Library

In her seminal ‘rose diagram’, Florence Nightingale demonstrated that far more soldiers died from preventable epidemic diseases (blue) than from wounds inflicted on the battlefield (red) or other causes (black) during the Crimean War (1853-56). Courtesy British Library

Next, there’s a contemporary reworking of Florence Nightingale’s Rose,

Cambridge University statistician David Spiegelhalter and his colleagues have taken the data from Florence Nightingale’s ‘rose diagram’ and animated the ‘rose’, as well as picturing the data as a bar chart and icon diagram. This shows not only the lasting relevance of Nightingale’s diagram as a visual icon, but also demonstrates how data can be pictured in different ways, to different effect. Courtesy British Library

Cambridge University statistician David Spiegelhalter and his colleagues have taken the data from Florence Nightingale’s ‘rose diagram’ and animated the ‘rose’, as well as picturing the data as a bar chart and icon diagram. This shows not only the lasting relevance of Nightingale’s diagram as a visual icon, but also demonstrates how data can be pictured in different ways, to different effect. Courtesy British Library

This next image from the Beautiful Science show leads to Vancouver,

Specially commissioned for Beautiful Science, these striking ‘Circos’ diagrams picture the genetic similarities between humans and five other animals: chimpanzee, dog, opossum, platypus and chicken. Courtesy British Library

Specially commissioned for Beautiful Science, these striking ‘Circos’ diagrams picture the genetic similarities between humans and five other animals: chimpanzee, dog, opossum, platypus and chicken. Courtesy British Library

This particular set of ‘Circos’ diagrams are also called the ‘Circles of Life’ and were created by Martin Krzywinski, a Vancouver-based scientist (mostly biosciences) and data visualizer. His blog features his data visualization work which is quite beautiful and, I imagine, is at least part of the reason for the worldwide interest in his work. Krzywinsk has contributed to a Nature (journal) group blog devoted to data visualization. The blog has since been retired but the July 30, 2013 posting provides a subject index to the group’s postings. Krzywinsk was also a featured speaker at a WIRED (magazine) Data | Life conference in New York City on Nov. 6, 2013.

 

 

Injectable and more powerful* batteries for live salmon

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Today’s live salmon may sport a battery for monitoring purposes and now scientists have developed one that is significantly more powerful according to a Feb. 17, 2014 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) news release (dated Feb. 18, 2014 on EurekAlert),

Scientists have created a microbattery that packs twice the energy compared to current microbatteries used to monitor the movements of salmon through rivers in the Pacific Northwest and around the world.

The battery, a cylinder just slightly larger than a long grain of rice, is certainly not the world’s smallest battery, as engineers have created batteries far tinier than the width of a human hair. But those smaller batteries don’t hold enough energy to power acoustic fish tags. The new battery is small enough to be injected into an organism and holds much more energy than similar-sized batteries.

Here’s a photo of the battery as it rests amongst grains of rice,

The microbattery created by Jie Xiao and Daniel Deng and colleagues, amid grains of rice. Courtesy PNNL

The microbattery created by Jie Xiao and Daniel Deng and colleagues, amid grains of rice. Courtesy PNNL

The news release goes on to explain why scientists are developing a lighter battery for salmon and how they achieved their goal,

For scientists tracking the movements of salmon, the lighter battery translates to a smaller transmitter which can be inserted into younger, smaller fish. That would allow scientists to track their welfare earlier in the life cycle, oftentimes in the small streams that are crucial to their beginnings. The new battery also can power signals over longer distances, allowing researchers to track fish further from shore or from dams, or deeper in the water.

“The invention of this battery essentially revolutionizes the biotelemetry world and opens up the study of earlier life stages of salmon in ways that have not been possible before,” said M. Brad Eppard, a fisheries biologist with the Portland District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“For years the chief limiting factor to creating a smaller transmitter has been the battery size. That hurdle has now been overcome,” added Eppard, who manages the Portland District’s fisheries research program.

The Corps and other agencies use the information from tags to chart the welfare of endangered fish and to help determine the optimal manner to operate dams. Three years ago the Corps turned to Z. Daniel Deng, a PNNL engineer, to create a smaller transmitter, one small enough to be injected, instead of surgically implanted, into fish. Injection is much less invasive and stressful for the fish, and it’s a faster and less costly process.

“This was a major challenge which really consumed us these last three years,” said Deng. “There’s nothing like this available commercially, that can be injected. Either the batteries are too big, or they don’t last long enough to be useful. That’s why we had to design our own.”

Deng turned to materials science expert Jie Xiao to create the new battery design.

To pack more energy into a small area, Xiao’s team improved upon the “jellyroll” technique commonly used to make larger household cylindrical batteries. Xiao’s team laid down layers of the battery materials one on top of the other in a process known as lamination, then rolled them up together, similar to how a jellyroll is created. The layers include a separating material sandwiched by a cathode made of carbon fluoride and an anode made of lithium.

The technique allowed her team to increase the area of the electrodes without increasing their thickness or the overall size of the battery. The increased area addresses one of the chief problems when making such a small battery — keeping the impedance, which is a lot like resistance, from getting too high. High impedance occurs when so many electrons are packed into a small place that they don’t flow easily or quickly along the routes required in a battery, instead getting in each other’s way. The smaller the battery, the bigger the problem.

Using the jellyroll technique allowed Xiao’s team to create a larger area for the electrons to interact, reducing impedance so much that the capacity of the material is about double that of traditional microbatteries used in acoustic fish tags.

“It’s a bit like flattening wads of Play-Doh, one layer at a time, and then rolling them up together, like a jelly roll,” says Xiao. “This allows you to pack more of your active materials into a small space without increasing the resistance.”

The new battery is a little more than half the weight of batteries currently used in acoustic fish tags — just 70 milligrams, compared to about 135 milligrams — and measures six millimeters long by three millimeters wide. The battery has an energy density of about 240 watt hours per kilogram, compared to around 100 for commercially available silver oxide button microbatteries.

The battery holds enough energy to send out an acoustic signal strong enough to be useful for fish-tracking studies even in noisy environments such as near large dams. The battery can power a 744-microsecond signal sent every three seconds for about three weeks, or about every five seconds for a month. It’s the smallest battery the researchers know of with enough energy capacity to maintain that level of signaling.

The batteries also work better in cold water where salmon often live, sending clearer signals at low temperatures compared to current batteries. That’s because their active ingredients are lithium and carbon fluoride, a chemistry that is promising for other applications but has not been common for microbatteries.

Last summer in Xiao’s laboratory, scientists Samuel Cartmell and Terence Lozano made by hand more than 1,000 of the rice-sized batteries. It’s a painstaking process, cutting and forming tiny snippets of sophisticated materials, putting them through a flattening device that resembles a pasta maker, binding them together, and rolling them by hand into tiny capsules. Their skilled hands rival those of surgeons, working not with tissue but with sensitive electronic materials.

A PNNL team led by Deng surgically implanted 700 of the tags into salmon in a field trial in the Snake River last summer. Preliminary results show that the tags performed extremely well. The results of that study and more details about the smaller, enhanced fish tags equipped with the new microbattery will come out in a forthcoming publication. Battelle, which operates PNNL, has applied for a patent on the technology.

I notice that while the second paragraph of the news release (in the first excerpt) says the battery is injectable, the final paragraph (in the second excerpt) says the team “surgically implanted” the tags with their new batteries into the salmon.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the newly published article in Scientific Reports,

Micro-battery Development for Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System Applications by Honghao Chen, Samuel Cartmell, Qiang Wang, Terence Lozano, Z. Daniel Deng, Huidong Li, Xilin Chen, Yong Yuan, Mark E. Gross, Thomas J. Carlson, & Jie Xiao. Scientific Reports 4, Article number: 3790 doi:10.1038/srep03790 Published 21 January 2014

This paper is open access.

* I changed the headline from ‘Injectable batteries for live salmon made more powerful’ to ‘Injectable and more powerful batteries for live salmon’  to better reflect the information in the news release. Feb. 19, 2014 at 11:43 am PST.

ETA Feb. 20, 2014: Dexter Johnson has weighed in on this very engaging and practical piece of research in a Feb. 19, 2014 posting on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers]) website (Note: Links have been removed),

There’s no denying that building the world’s smallest battery is a notable achievement. But while they may lay the groundwork for future battery technologies, today such microbatteries are mostly laboratory curiosities.

Developing a battery that’s no bigger than a grain of rice—and that’s actually useful in the real world—is quite another kind of achievement. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have done just that, creating a battery based on graphene that has successfully been used in monitoring the movements of salmon through rivers.

The microbattery is being heralded as a breakthrough in biotelemetry and should give researchers never before insights into the movements and the early stages of life of the fish.

The battery is partly made from a fluorinated graphene that was described last year …

Apply for media travel grant to attend EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) 2014

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The deadline for applications is Friday March 14, 2014 at 13:00 CET. For those who like a little more information or are unfamiliar with the EuroScience Open Forum, here’s a description from the ESOF hub homepage along with a description of the parent organization, EuroScience,

ESOF – EuroScience Open Forum – is the biennial pan-European meeting dedicated to scientific research and innovation. At ESOF meetings leading scientists, researchers, young researchers, business people, entrepreneurs and innovators, policy makers, science and technology communicators and the general public from all over Europe discuss new discoveries and debate the direction that research is taking in the sciences, humanities and social sciences.

EuroScience (ES) is a European non-profit grassroots association open to research professionals, teachers, students, science administrators, policy-makers, etc. and generally to any citizen interested in science and technology and its links with society. EuroScience represents not only European scientists of all ages, disciplines and nationalities but also from the business sector and public institutions such as universities and research institutes.

The 2014 ESOF is being held in Copenhagen, Denmark from June 21 – 26, 2014 with the general theme of ‘Science Building Bridges’ and following on that theme there are eight scientific themes (from the Scientific Themes page),

The Healthy Society

In recent years, scientific and technological developments have contributed to major progress in the health of individuals and for societies at large. What are the future roads to increased health in the world? How will science, technology and innovation contribute to this development? Where are the major challenges and possibilities?

Possible issues: Epidemology; Holistic Medicine; Healthy Workforces and Public Budgets; Ageing; Personalized Medicine; Telemedicine; Obesity; The Globalization of Disease; Diet, Physical Activity and
Health; Biomarkers; Gene Therapy; etc.

A Revolution of the Mind

Brain research and cognitive neuroscience have opened our understanding of the human mind. What should we use the knowledge for? What are the consequences for thinking and practice in academic, political and commercial life? And should new knowledge of the brain change our conception of human beings?

Possible issues: Neurobiology of Disease; Therapeutic Interventions; Mental Health; Arts and Pleasure; Behaviour and Marketing; Cognition and Computation; Animal Modelling; Ageing; Degeneration and
Regeneration; Physical Exercise and Mind; Development of Brain and Learning; etc.

Global Resource Management

Natural resources are essential for sustaining basic human welfare, e.g. drinking water and food. Moreover, for most industries some natural resources are necessary to manufacture products, e.g. metals, rare earths, water and bio-materials. The need for resources is stressing ecosystems and economic development. How can scientific and technological developments secure an effective and timely response for the global need for resources? How can resilience be built in?

Possible issues: Deep Sea Mining; Food Security; Geopolitics; Recycling; Oceanography; Environmental Administration; Ecosystem Services; Space Informatics; Geology; Water Management; Global Engineering; Global Justice; Efficient transport; Etc.

Learning in the 21st Century

Well-educated and knowledgeable citizens are essential for inclusive and vibrant societies. But what are the skills and knowledge needed in the future? And how should we learn them – are the days of national,
educational systems over and does science and technology offer ways to improve our ways of learning?

Possible themes: Early Childhood Learning; Life Long Learning; Assessment and Evaluation; Educational Organization and Leadership; Literacies; Science, Mathematics and Technology; Informal Learning; Mass education; Globalization; Higher Education; New Devices for Learning; Brain Development and Learning; Epigenetics and Learning; etc.

Green Economy

According to key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability. Many researchers, politicians, businesses and interest groups have responded with a call for a green economy that bridges continued economy growth and a sustainable, global ecosystem. Can science and technology deliver on this transition?

Possible themes: Fossil-based Energy; Forecasting; Future Energy Solutions; Economic Modelling; Renewable Energy; Transportation; Climate change; Climate Adaptation; Public-driven Transformation;
Eco-building; etc.

Material and Virtual World

The fundamental understanding of materials has shifted the borders of engineering and production. Moreover, the breakthroughs in information and communication technologies have altered our perceptions of what constitutes reality. Where will the next scientific breakthroughs take us?

Possible themes: Engineering; Surveillance, Nanotechnologies; Quantum computation; Industrial Virtual Reality; Simulation; Industrial Technologies; Manufacturing, Robotics; Human Enhancement; etc.

Urbanization, Design and Liveability

Forecasts claim that the future will be urbanized. So the grand challenges need to be faced in an urban setting. Moreover, the cities need to sustain and enhance urban areas as a place of vitality, liveability and accessibility – how can science, technology and innovation support the design of solutions?

Possible themes: Migration; Governance; Economic Growth; Rural-urban Transformations; Healthy Cities; Liveability; Demography; Water Management; Urban Planning, Security; Transportation, Welfare Design; Poverty; Regionalization; Waste Management; Sharing Economy; etc.

Science, Democracy & Citizenship

Science and scientists can facilitate, interrupt or enrich democratic decision making. When should science be the privileged provider of knowledge and when are scientists citizens? What should be the division of labour between facts and norms; between science and democracy?

Possible themes: Ethics; GMOs; Knowledge Society; Evidence-based Policy; Policy for Science; Climate Change; Authority; Social Choice; Deliberative Democracy; Trust; Institutionalism; Democratization; etc.

The ESOF 2014 website is easy to navigate and you can find out who has already signed up as a participant and/or speaker, as well as, many other details.

Getting back to the media travel grants,

1. – Purpose

The organisers of Europe’s largest general science event, EuroScience Open Forum, invite journalists from around the world to apply for media travel grants. It is expected that 250 media representatives will be at the science forum in Copenhagen from 21-26 June 2014.

The slogan of EuroScience Open Forum 2014 in Copenhagen (ESOF2014) is ‘Science Building Bridges’. One of the main objectives of the event is to build links between the media and the research community by providing a platform where journalists can discuss and report on the latest scientific developments.

To secure that journalists from a broad range of news organisations take part, EuroScience Open Forum 2014 in Copenhagen has announced its Media Travel Grant Scheme.

2. – The scheme

The ESOF2014 Secretariat offers a lump sum of €750 to help cover the costs of travel and accommodation for journalists who wish to report from ESOF2014.

Please note that all expenses covered must be in accordance with the travel guidelines issued by the Danish Agency for Science and Innovation. This means that all travel must be on economy class only and that accommodation expenses must not exceed €135 per night (February 2014).

3. – Who can apply?

Journalists irrespective of their gender, age, nationality, place of residence and media (newspaper, news agency, magazine, radio, TV or New Media) are welcome to apply. [emphasis mine]

4. – Application procedure

To submit an application, please follow the application procedure here

On submitting the application form for the travel grant, you agree to the full acceptance of the rules and to the decisions taken by the ESOF2014 Media Travel Grant Selection Committee.

The deadline for submitting an application is Friday 14 March 2014 at 13:00 CET.

5. – Selection Committee and decision

The Selection Committee is composed of members of the ESOF2014 Secretariat and the ESOF2014 International Media and Marketing Committee.

The selection of candidates will be based on the applicant’s CV and motivation statement. The Selection Committee will also strive to secure that various countries and types of media are represented in the group of successful applicants.

An e-mail with the decision will be sent in early April 2014 to all applicants stating whether or not their application has been successful.

6. – Payment conditions

Money will be transferred to the grantees after ESOF2014, subject to:

  • Mandatory participation at EuroScience Open Forum 2014 in Copenhagen.
  • Provision of documentation for travel and accommodation expenses up to a total of €750*
  • Completion of a feedback questionnaire regarding the scheme.

…

Good luck and one final comment. The ‘building bridges’ theme reminded me of an Oct. 21, 2010 posting where I was discussing Copenhagen, creativity, and science within the context of then recent research into what makes some cities attractive to scientists,

When the Øresund bridge connecting Copenhagen, Denmark, with Malmö, Sweden, opened in 2000, both sides had much to gain. Sweden would get a physical connection to the rest of mainland Europe; residents of Copenhagen would have access to cheaper homes close to the city; and economic cooperation would increase. But Christian Matthiessen, a geographer at the University of Copenhagen, saw another benefit — the joining of two burgeoning research areas. “Everyone was talking about the transport of goods and business connections,” he says, “and we argued that another benefit would be to establish links between researchers.”

Ten years later, those links seem to be strong. The bridge encouraged the establishment of the ‘Øresund region’, a loose confederation of nine universities, 165,000 students and 12,000 researchers. Co-authorship between Copenhagen and the southernmost province of Sweden has doubled, says Matthiessen. The collaborations have attracted multinational funds from the European Union. And the European Spallation Source, a €1.4-billion (US$2-billion) neutron facility, is on track to begin construction in Lund, Sweden, in 2013.

The region’s promoters claim that it is emerging as a research hub of northern Europe, aided in part by construction of the bridge. For Matthiessen, the bridge also inspired the start of a unique research project — to catalogue the growth and connections of geographical clusters of scientific productivity all over the world. [emphases mine]

You can find the Nature article by Richard Van Noorden describing research about cities and why they are or aren’t attractive to scientists here.

NanoStruck’s Letter of Intent about gold tailings in Mexico

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As I’ve come to expect from Canadian company NanoStruck, there’s not much detail in this Feb. 19, 2014 news item on Nanowerk,

NanoStruck Technologies Inc. announces a non-binding Letter of Intent (“LOI”) signed with Tierra Nuevo Mining Ltd (TNM), a private exploration company with mining assets in Mexico BG Partners Corp., brought this business relationship to NanoStruck.

The Feb. 18, 2014 NanoStruck news release, which originated the news item, describes the property where the Tierra Nuevo Mining would like to test NanoStruck’s technology,

The LOI is to explore the potential of TNM engaging NanoStruck to recover gold and silver from TMN’s tailings material using the NanoMet Technology at TNM’s Noche Buena Mine site, located in Zacatecas state, 10 kilometers northeast of Goldcorp’s Peñasquito Mine. The Noche Buena mine began operations sometime between 1926 and 1930 and was worked continuously until 1992 when it was shut down due to the collapse of metal prices.

Brian Mok, Senior Mining Consultant at BG Partners Corp. said: “This is a great opportunity for NanoStruck to demonstrate its technology and expertise in the mine tailings industry.”

Bundeep Singh Rangar, interim CEO and Chairman of the Board said: “A credible counter-party greatly accelerates the development and go-to-market strategy of our unique mine tailings processing technology.”

I last wrote about NanoStruck and mine tailings in a Feb. 10, 2014 posting titled: 96% of 9.1 grams per metric ton, or 0.32 ounces per ton, of gold recovered in gold tailings tests. As I noted at the time, I am hopeful the company will provide more information as to its technology at some point in the future, preferably sooner rather than later.

Studying corrosion from the other side

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Corrosion can be beautiful as well as destructive,

Typically, the process of corrosion has been studied from the metal side of the equation - See more at: http://www.anl.gov/articles/core-corrosion#sthash.ZPqFF13I.dpuf. Courtesy of the Argonne National Laboratory

Typically, the process of corrosion has been studied from the metal side of the equation – See more at: http://www.anl.gov/articles/core-corrosion#sthash.ZPqFF13I.dpuf. Courtesy of the Argonne National Laboratory

A Feb. 18, 2014 news item on Nanowerk expands on the theme of corrosion as destruction (Note: Links have been removed),

Anyone who has ever owned a car in a snowy town – or a boat in a salty sea – can tell you just how expensive corrosion can be.

One of the world’s most common and costly chemical reactions, corrosion happens frequently at the boundaries between water and metal surfaces. In the past, the process of corrosion has mostly been studied from the metal side of the equation.

However, in a new study (“Chloride ions induce order-disorder transition at water-oxide interfaces”), scientists at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory investigated the problem from the other side, looking at the dynamics of water containing dissolved ions located in the regions near a metal surface.

The Feb. 14, 2014 Argonne National Laboratory news release by Jared Sagoff, which originated the news item, describes how the scientists conducted their research,

A team of researchers led by Argonne materials scientist Subramanian Sankaranarayanan simulated the physical and chemical dynamics of dissolved ions in water at the atomic level as it corrodes metal oxide surfaces. “Water-based solutions behave quite differently near a metal or oxide surface than they do by themselves,” Sankaranarayanan said. “But just how the chemical ions in the water interact with a surface has been an area of intense debate.”

Under low-chlorine conditions, water tends to form two-dimensional ordered layers near solid interfaces because of the influence of its strong hydrogen bonds. However, the researchers found that increasing the proportion of chlorine ions above a certain threshold causes a change in which the solution loses its ordered nature near the surface and begins to act similar to water away from the surface. This transition, in turn, can increase the rate at which materials corrode as well as the freezing temperature of the solution.

This switch between an ordered and a disordered structure near the metal surface happens incredibly quickly, in just fractions of a nanosecond. The speed of the chemical reaction necessitates the use of high-performance computers like Argonne’s Blue/Gene Q supercomputer, Mira.

To further explore these electrochemical oxide interfaces with high-performance computers, Sankaranarayanan and his colleagues from Argonne, Harvard University and the University of Missouri have also been awarded 40 million processor-hours of time on Mira.

“Having the ability to look at these reactions in a more powerful simulation will give us the opportunity to make a more educated guess of the rates of corrosion for different scenarios,” Sankaranarayanan said. Such studies will open up for the first time fundamental studies of corrosion behavior and will allow scientists to tailor materials surfaces to improve the stability and lifetime of materials.

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

Chloride ions induce order-disorder transition at water-oxide interfaces by Sanket Deshmukh, Ganesh Kamath, Shriram Ramanathan, and Subramanian K. R. S. Sankaranarayanan. Phys. Rev. E 88 (6), 062119 (2013) [5 pages]

This article is behind a paywall on both the primary site and the beta site (the American Physical Society is testing a new website for its publications).

‘Giving’ life to liquid crystals

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A Feb. 18, 2014 news item on Azonano highlights a presentation about living liquid crystals that was given at the 58th annual Biophysical Society Meeting in San Francisco on Feb. 17, 2014,

Plop living, swimming bacteria into a novel water-based, nontoxic liquid crystal and a new physics takes over. The dynamic interaction of the bacteria with the liquid crystal creates a novel form of soft matter: living liquid crystal.

The new type of active material, which holds promise for improving the early detection of diseases, was developed by a research collaboration based at Ohio’s Kent State University and Illinois’ Argonne National Laboratory. The team will present their work at the 58th annual Biophysical Society Meeting, held in San Francisco, Feb.15-19 [2014].

ScienceDaily featured the story in a Feb. 17, 2014 news item,

As a biomechanical hybrid, living liquid crystal moves and reshapes itself in response to external stimuli. It also stores energy just as living organisms do to drive its internal motion. And it possesses highly desirable optical properties. In a living liquid crystal system, with the aid of a simple polarizing microscope, you can see with unusual clarity the wake-like trail stimulated by the rotation of bacterial flagella just 24-nanometers thick, about 1/4000th the thickness of an average human hair.

You can also control and guide active movements of the bacteria by manipulating variables such as oxygen availability, temperature or surface alignment, thus introducing a new design concept for creating microfluidic biological sensors. Living liquid crystal provides a medium to amplify tiny reactions that occur at the micro- and nano-scales — where molecules and viruses interact — and to also easily optically detect and analyze these reactions. That suits living liquid crystal to making sensing devices that monitor biological processes such as cancer growth, or infection. Such microfluidic technology is of increasing importance to biomedical sensing as a means of detecting disease in its earliest stages when it is most treatable, and most cost-effectively managed.

Quotes from the lead researcher and presentation details can be found in the Feb. 17, 2013 news item on newswise.com,

“As far as we know, these things have never been done systematically as we did before in experimental physics,” explained Shuang Zhou, a Ph.D. candidate at Ohio’s Kent State University. He collaborated on the project with Oleg Lavrentovich of Kent State, Andrey Sokolov of Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, and Igor Aranson of Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill.

“There are many potential applications for this kind of new material, but some of the more immediate are new approaches to biomedical sensing design,” Zhou said. He likens the current investigation to the “first handful of gold scooped out of a just-opened treasure chest. There are many more things to be done.”

The presentation “Living Liquid Crystals” by Shuang Zhou, Andrey Sokolov, Oleg D. Lavrentovich and Igor S. Aranson will be at 1:45 p.m. on Monday, February 17, 2014 in Hall D in San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center.
ABSTRACT: http://tinyurl.com/pmvbfbp

Here’s the presentation abstract (from the abstractsonline website),

Bio-mechanical hybrids are an emerging class of engineered composite soft materials with the ability to move and reconfigure their structure and properties in response to external stimuli. Similar to their biological counterparts, they can transduce energy stored in the environment to drive systematic movements. This functionality is critical for a variety of applications, from bioinspired micromachines and sensors to self-assembled microrobots. Here, by combining two seemingly incompatible concepts, living swimming bacteria and inanimate but orientationally ordered lyotropic liquid crystal, we conceive a fundamentally new class of matter – living liquid crystals (LLCs). LLCs can be actuated and controlled by the amount of oxygen available to bacteria, by concentration of ingredients or by the temperature. Our studies reveal a wealth of intriguing phenomena, caused primarily by the coupling between the activity-triggered flows and director reorientations. Among these are (a) coupling between the orientation and degree of order of LLC and the bacterial motion, (b) local nematic-isotropic phase transition caused by the bacteria-produced shear flows, (c) periodic stripe instabilities of the director in surface-anchored LLCs, (d) director pattern evolution into an array of disclinations with positive and negative topological charges as the surface anchoring is weakened or when the bacterial activity is enhanced; (e) direct optical visualization and quantitative characterization of microflows generated by the nanometers-thick bacterial flagella by the birefringent LLC medium. Our work suggests an unorthodox design concept of reconfigurable microfluidic chambers for control and manipulation of bacteria. Besides an obvious importance to active matter, our studies can result in valuable biosensing and biomedical applications.

The researchers associated with this work are,

Shuang Zhou, Andrey Sokolov, Oleg D. Lavrentovich, Igor S. Aranson

Their research has been published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),

Living liquid crystals by Shuang Zhou, Andrey Sokolov, Oleg D. Lavrentovich, and Igor S. Aranson. PNAS approved December 12, 2013 (received for review November 22, 2013) doi: 10.1073/pnas.1321926111

This paper is behind a paywall but it can be accessed via the tabs seen directly after the publication history (approved … received …).  You will see Abstract, Authors, … and two symbols signifying the formats in which the paper is available.

Nanodiamond contact lenses in attempt to improve glaucoma treatment

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A School of Dentistry, at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) or elsewhere, is not my first thought as a likely source for work on improving glaucoma treatment—it turns out that I’m a bit shortsighted (pun intended).  A Feb. 14, 2014 news item on Azonano describes the issue with glaucoma treatment and a new delivery system for it developed by a research team at UCLA,

By 2020, nearly 80 million people are expected to have glaucoma, a disorder of the eye that, if left untreated, can damage the optic nerve and eventually lead to blindness.

The disease often causes pressure in the eye due to a buildup of fluid and a breakdown of the tissue that is responsible for regulating fluid drainage. Doctors commonly treat glaucoma using eye drops that can help the eye drain or decrease fluid production.

Unfortunately, patients frequently have a hard time sticking to the dosing schedules prescribed by their doctors, and the medication — when administered through drops — can cause side effects in the eye and other parts of the body.

In what could be a significant step toward improving the management of glaucoma, researchers from the UCLA School of Dentistry have created a drug delivery system that may have less severe side effects than traditional glaucoma medication and improve patients’ ability to comply with their prescribed treatments. The scientists bound together glaucoma-fighting drugs with nanodiamonds and embedded them onto contact lenses. The drugs are released into the eye when they interact with the patient’s tears.

The new technology showed great promise for sustained glaucoma treatment and, as a side benefit, the nanodiamond-drug compound even improved the contact lenses’ durability.

The Feb. 13, 2014 UCLA news release by Brianna Deane, which originated the news item, describes the nanodiamonds and how they were employed in this project,

Nanodiamonds, which are byproducts of conventional mining and refining processes, are approximately five nanometers in diameter and are shaped like tiny soccer balls. They can be used to bind a wide spectrum of drug compounds and enable drugs to be released into the body over a long period of time.

To deliver a steady release of medication into the eye, the UCLA researchers combined nanodiamonds with timolol maleate, which is commonly used in eye drops to manage glaucoma. When applied to the nanodiamond-embedded lenses, timolol is released when it comes into contact with lysozyme, an enzyme that is abundant in tears.

“Delivering timolol through exposure to tears may prevent premature drug release when the contact lenses are in storage and may serve as a smarter route toward drug delivery from a contact lens.” said Kangyi Zhang, co-first author of the study and a graduate student in Ho’s lab.

One of the drawbacks of traditional timolol maleate drops is that as little as 5 percent of the drug actually reaches the intended site. Another disadvantage is burst release, where a majority of the drug is delivered too quickly, which can cause significant amounts of the drug to “leak” or spill out of the eye and, in the most serious cases, can cause complications such as an irregular heartbeat. Drops also can be uncomfortable to administer, which leads many patients to stop using their medication.

But the contact lenses developed by the UCLA team successfully avoided the burst release effect. The activity of the released timolol was verified by a primary human-cell study.

“In addition to nanodiamonds’ promise as triggered drug-delivery agents for eye diseases, they can also make the contact lenses more durable during the course of insertion, use and removal, and more comfortable to wear,” said Ho, who is also a professor of bioengineering and a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the California NanoSystems Institute.

Even with the nanodiamonds embedded, the lenses still possessed favorable levels of optical clarity. And, although mechanical testing verified that they were stronger than normal lenses, there were no apparent changes to water content, meaning that the contact lenses’ comfort and permeability to oxygen would likely be preserved.

By this time, I was madly curious as to what these contact lenses might look like and so I found this image, accompanying the researchers’ paper,  showing what looks like a standard contact lens with an illustration of how the artist imagines the diamonds and medications are functioning at the nanoscale,

nanodiamonds

[downloaded from http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn5002968]

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

Diamond Nanogel-Embedded Contact Lenses Mediate Lysozyme-Dependent Therapeutic Release by Ho-Joong Kim, Kangyi Zhang, Laura Moore, and Dean Ho. ACS Nano, Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/nn5002968 Publication Date (Web): February 8, 2014

Copyright © 2014 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Artificial graphene?

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I’m not sure I ever want to hear the word ‘revolutionary’ or its cousin’ revolution’ in relationship to science and/or technology ever again and I don’t think anyone’s going to be paying attention to this heartfelt plea: please, please, please find another word for a couple of years at least.  That said, artificial graphene does sound exciting as it’s described in a Feb. 17, 2014 news item on Azonano,

A new breed of ultra thin super-material has the potential to cause a technological revolution. “Artificial graphene” should lead to faster, smaller and lighter electronic and optical devices of all kinds, including higher performance photovoltaic cells, lasers or LED lighting.

For the first time, scientists are able to produce and have analysed artificial graphene from traditional semiconductor materials. Such is the scientific importance of this breakthrough these findings were published recently in one of the world’s leading physics journals, Physical Review X. A researcher from the University of Luxembourg played an important role in this highly innovative work.

The University of Luxembourg Feb. 14, 2014 news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes both graphene and artificial graphene

Graphene (derived from graphite) is a one atom thick honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms. This strong, flexible, conducting and transparent material has huge scientific and technological potential. Only discovered in 2004, there is a major global push to understand its potential uses. Artificial graphene has the same honeycomb structure, but in this case, instead of carbon atoms, nanometer-thick semiconductor crystals are used. Changing the size, shape and chemical nature of the nano-crystals, makes it possible to tailor the material to each specific task.

…

University of Luxembourg researcher Dr. Efterpi Kalesaki from the Physics and Materials Science Research Unit is the first author of the article appearing in the Physical Review X . Dr. Kalesaki said: “these self‐assembled semi-conducting nano-crystals with a honeycomb structure are emerging as a new class of systems with great potential.” Prof Ludger Wirtz, head of the Theoretical Solid-State Physics group at the University of Luxembourg, added: “artificial graphene opens the door to a wide variety of materials with variable nano‐geometry and ‘tunable’ properties.”

I’m going to provide two links and two citations to the paper as its publishing journal is currently beta testing a new website and the paper is available on both,

Dirac Cones, Topological Edge States, and Nontrivial Flat Bands in Two-Dimensional Semiconductors with a Honeycomb Nanogeometry by E. Kalesaki, C. Delerue, C. Morais Smith, W. Beugeling, G. Allan, and D. Vanmaekelbergh. Phys. Rev. X 4, 011010 (2014) [12 pages] DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.4.011010

Dirac Cones, Topological Edge States, and Nontrivial Flat Bands in Two-Dimensional Semiconductors with a Honeycomb Nanogeometry by E. Kalesaki, C. Delerue, C. Morais Smith, W. Beugeling, G. Allan, and D. Vanmaekelbergh. Phys. Rev. X 4, 011010 – Published 30 January 2014 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.011010

The second link to the paper will take you to the journal’s beta site. I have to give the designers a big thumbs up on the new design. To contextualize my review, I’m not a fan of changing website designs as functionality is too often sacrificed for ‘good looks’. Sadly, I do have a bit more work cutting and pasting with the new version but I’m hugely relieved that I did not have to spend several minutes trying to find the information.

Both versions of the paper are open access.

Quadruple the amount of electrical current by using carbon nanotube-based fibers

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The announcement from Rice University was written in an interesting fashion. The good news is that you can quadruple the amount of electrical current being carried by substituting copper with carbon nanotube-based fibers. Unfortunately, expectations are set for a much higher rate before the good news is revealed in this Feb.  14, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

On a pound-per-pound basis, carbon nanotube-based fibers invented at Rice University have greater capacity to carry electrical current than copper cables of the same mass, according to new research.

While individual nanotubes are capable of transmitting nearly 1,000 times more current than copper, the same tubes coalesced into a fiber using other technologies fail long before reaching that capacity.

But a series of tests at Rice showed the wet-spun carbon nanotube fiber still handily beat copper, carrying up to four times as much current as a copper wire of the same mass. [emphasis mine]

That, said the researchers, makes nanotube-based cables an ideal platform for lightweight power transmission in systems where weight is a significant factor, like aerospace applications.

The Feb. 13, 2014 Rice University news release (dated as Feb. 14, 2014 on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides context for this discovery (Note: Links have been removed),

The analysis led by Rice professors Junichiro Kono and Matteo Pasquali appeared online this week [week of Feb. 10 – 14, 2014] in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. Just a year ago [2013] the journal Science reported that Pasquali’s lab, in collaboration with scientists at the Dutch firm Teijin Aramid, created a very strong conductive fiber out of carbon nanotubes.

Present-day transmission cables made of copper or aluminum are heavy because their low tensile strength requires steel-core reinforcement.

Scientists working with nanoscale materials have long thought there’s a better way to move electricity from here to there. Certain types of carbon nanotubes can carry far more electricity than copper. The ideal cable would be made of long metallic “armchair” nanotubes that would transmit current over great distances with negligible loss, but such a cable is not feasible because it’s not yet possible to manufacture pure armchairs in bulk, Pasquali said.

I have a couple of notes (1) the 2013 work on ‘armchair’ carbon nanotubes was featured here in a Feb. 6, 2013 posting and (2) Teijin Aramid is located in the Netherlands while its parent company, Teijin, is located in Japan (you can find more about Teijin in this Wikipedia essay).

Getting back to this latest work from Rice (from the news release),

In the meantime, the Pasquali lab has created a method to spin fiber from a mix of nanotube types that still outperforms copper. The cable developed by Pasquali and Teijin Aramid is strong and flexible even though at 20 microns wide, it’s thinner than a human hair.

Pasquali turned to Kono and his colleagues, including lead author Xuan Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice, to quantify the fiber’s capabilities.

Pasquali said there has been a disconnect between electrical engineers who study the current carrying capacity of conductors and materials scientists working on carbon nanotubes. “That has generated some confusion in the literature over the right comparisons to make,” he said. “Jun and Xuan really got to the bottom of how to do these measurements well and compare apples to apples.”

The researchers analyzed the fiber’s “current carrying capacity” (CCC), or ampacity, with a custom rig that allowed them to test it alongside metal cables of the same diameter. The cables were tested while they were suspended in the open air, in a vacuum and in nitrogen or argon environments.

Electric cables heat up because of resistance. When the current load exceeds the cable’s safe capacity, they get too hot and break. The researchers found nanotube fibers exposed to nitrogen performed best, followed by argon and open air, all of which were able to cool through convection. The same nanotube fibers in a vacuum could only cool by radiation and had the lowest CCC.

“The outcome is that these fibers have the highest CCC ever reported for any carbon-based fibers,” Kono said. “Copper still has better resistivity by an order of magnitude, but we have the advantage that carbon fiber is light. So if you divide the CCC by the mass, we win.”

Kono plans to further investigate and explore the fiber’s multifunctional aspects, including flexible optoelectronic device applications.

Pasquali suggested the thread-like fibers are light enough to deliver power to aerial vehicles. “Suppose you want to power an unmanned aerial vehicle from the ground,” he mused. “You could make it like a kite, with power supplied by our fibers. I wish Ben Franklin were here to see that!”

Pasquali and his team’s latest research can be found here,

High-Ampacity Power Cables of Tightly-Packed and Aligned Carbon Nanotubes by Xuan Wang, Natnael Behabtu, Colin C. Young, Dmitri E. Tsentalovich, Matteo Pasqua, & Junichiro Kono. Advanced Functional Materials, Article first published online: 13 FEB 2014 DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201303865

© 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This study is behind a paywall.