A new durable, biodegradable plastic breaks down in seawater, offering a potential solution to microplastic pollution.
This material, based on supramolecular structures, can be tailored for different uses and is fully recyclable, enhancing its environmental benefits.
New Sustainable Plastic
A new framework that embeds electrons in a surrounding bath captures nonlocal correlation effects that are relevant to metals, semiconductors, and correlated insulators.
Searching for new types of superconductors, magnets, and other useful materials is a bit like weaving a tapestry with threads of many different colors. The weaver selects a short-range (local) pattern for how the individual threads intertwine and at the same time chooses colors that will give an overall (nonlocal) mood. A materials scientist works in a similar way, mixing atoms instead of threads, trying to match the motion of their electrons—their correlations—on both local and nonlocal scales. Doing so by trial-and-error synthesis is time intensive and costly, and therefore numerical simulations can be of huge help. To contribute to bridging computations to material discovery, Jiachen Li and Tianyu Zhu from Yale University have developed a new approach that treats local and nonlocal electronic correlations on an equal footing [1] (Fig. 1). They demonstrated their method by accurately predicting the photoemission spectra of several representative materials.
Researchers led by Takuzo Aida at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) have developed a new durable plastic that won’t pollute our oceans. The new material is as strong as conventional plastics and biodegradable, but what makes it special is that it breaks down in seawater. The new plastic is therefore expected to help reduce harmful microplastic pollution that accumulates in oceans and soil and eventually enters the food chain.
The experimental findings are published Nov 22 in Science.
Scientists have been trying to develop safe and sustainable materials that can replace traditional plastics, which are non-sustainable and harm the environment. While some recyclable and biodegradable plastics exist, one big problem remains. Current biodegradable plastics like PLA often find their way into the ocean where they cannot be degraded because they are water insoluble. As a result, microplastics—plastic bits smaller than 5 mm—are harming aquatic life and finding their way into the food chain, including our own bodies.
Located a staggering 160,000 light-years from us, the star WOH G64 was imaged thanks to the impressive sharpness offered by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). The new observations reveal a star puffing out gas and dust in the last stages before it becomes a supernova.
“For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way,” says Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile.
“We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star,” says Ohnaka, the lead author of a study reporting the observations published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion.”
The fashion world is buzzing about a new material that’s changing the game: mushroom leather. Made from mycelium, this innovative textile is taking the industry by storm, offering a sustainable and stylish alternative to traditional leather.
But it’s not just about looking good — this fungal fashion movement is about embracing a more eco-conscious and cruelty-free approach to clothing production.
What makes mushroom leather so remarkable? It all starts with mycelium, the thread-like, dense cellular structure that forms the vegetative part of a fungus.
Graphene, particularly in its purest form, has long been considered a promising material for developing spintronic devices. These devices leverage the intrinsic angular momentum (i.e., spin), as opposed to the charge, of electrons to transmit and process data.
GE Research has proposed transformational material solutions to potentially enable a gas turbine blade alloy-coating system capable of operating at a turbine inlet temperature of 1800 °C for more than 30,000 hours. GE aims to develop a niobium (Nb)-based alloy that can operate at 1,300 °C (2372 °F), coating system consisting of a novel oxidation resistant bond coat compatible with the new Nb-based alloy, and thermal barrier coating for improved durability that can operate at 1700 °C (3092 °F) and a scalable manufacturing process for producing internally cooled gas turbine blades with the new alloy. Application of the new technologies to existing combined cycle gas turbines in the U.S. could increase the thermal efficiency by approximately 7%.
Our bodies divest themselves of 60 billion cells every day through a natural process of cell culling and turnover called apoptosis.
These cells — mainly blood and gut cells — are all replaced with new ones, but the way our bodies rid themselves of material could have profound implications for cancer therapies in a new approach developed by Stanford Medicine researchers.
They aim to use this natural method of cell death to trick cancer cells into disposing of themselves. Their method accomplishes this by artificially bringing together two proteins in such a way that the new compound switches on a set of cell death genes, ultimately driving tumor cells to turn on themselves. The researchers describe their latest such compound in a paper published Oct. 4 in Science.
MIT physicists have taken a key step toward solving the puzzle of what leads electrons to split into fractions of themselves. Their solution sheds light on the conditions that give rise to exotic electronic states in graphene and other two-dimensional systems.
The new work is an effort to make sense of a discovery that was reported earlier this year by a different group of physicists at MIT, led by Assistant Professor Long Ju. Ju’s team found that electrons appear to exhibit “fractional charge” in pentalayer graphene—a configuration of five graphene layers that are stacked atop a similarly structured sheet of boron nitride.
Ju discovered that when he sent an electric current through the pentalayer structure, the electrons seemed to pass through as fractions of their total charge, even in the absence of a magnetic field.
Sending an object to another star is still the stuff of science fiction. But some concrete missions could get us at least part way there. These “interstellar precursor missions” include a trip to the solar gravitational lens point at 550 AU from the sun—farther than any artificial object has ever been, including Voyager.
To get there, we’ll need plenty of new technologies, and a recent paper presented at the 75th International Astronautical Congress in Milan this month looks at one of those potential technologies—electric propulsion systems, otherwise known as ion drives.
The paper aimed to assess when any existing ion drive technology could port a large payload on one of several trajectories, including a trip around Jupiter, one visiting Pluto, and even one reaching that fabled solar gravitational lens. To do so, they specified an “ideal” ion drive with characteristics that enabled optimal values for some of the system’s physical characteristics.
