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Some electronics can bend, twist and stretch in wearable displays, biomedical applications and soft robots. While these devices’ circuits have become increasingly pliable, the batteries and supercapacitors that power them are still rigid. Now, researchers in ACS’ Nano Letters report a flexible supercapacitor with electrodes made of wrinkled titanium carbide — a type of MXene nanomaterial — that maintained its ability to store and release electronic charges after repetitive stretching.

One major challenge stretchable electronics must overcome is the stiff and inflexible nature of their energy storage components, batteries and supercapacitors. Supercapacitors that use electrodes made from transitional metal carbides, carbonitrides or nitrides, called MXenes, have desirable electrical properties for portable flexible devices, such as rapid charging and discharging. And the way that 2D MXenes can form multi-layered nanosheets provides a large surface area for energy storage when they’re used in electrodes. However, previous researchers have had to incorporate polymers and other nanomaterials to keep these types of electrodes from breaking when bent, which decreases their electrical storage capacity. So, Desheng Kong and colleagues wanted to see if deforming a pristine titanium carbide MXene film into accordion-like ridges would maintain the electrode’s electrical properties while adding flexibility and stretchability to a supercapacitor.

The researchers disintegrated titanium aluminum carbide powder into flakes with hydrofluoric acid and captured the layers of pure titanium carbide nanosheets as a roughly textured film on a filter. Then they placed the film on a piece of pre-stretched acrylic elastomer that was 800% its relaxed size. When the researchers released the polymer, it shrank to its original state, and the adhered nanosheets crumpled into accordion-like wrinkles.

Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed COVID-19 vaccine candidates that can take the heat. Their key ingredients? Viruses from plants or bacteria.

The new fridge-free COVID-19 vaccines are still in the early stage of development. In mice, the vaccine candidates triggered high production of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. If they prove to be safe and effective in people, the vaccines could be a big game changer for global distribution efforts, including those in rural areas or resource-poor communities.

“What’s exciting about our vaccine technology is that is thermally stable, so it could easily reach places where setting up ultra-low temperature freezers, or having trucks drive around with these freezers, is not going to be possible,” said Nicole Steinmetz, a professor of nanoengineering and the director of the Center for Nano-ImmunoEngineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

The robots can tumble up slopes.

A new study investigates tiny tumbling soft robots that can be controlled using rotating magnetic fields. The technology could be useful for delivering drugs to the nervous system. In this latest study, researchers put the robots through their paces and showed that they can climb slopes, tumble upstream against fluid flow and deliver substances at precise locations to neural tissue.

Would you let a tiny MANiAC travel around your nervous system to treat you with drugs? You may be inclined to say no, but in the future, “magnetically aligned nanorods in alginate capsules” (MANiACs) may be part of an advanced arsenal of drug delivery technologies at doctors’ disposal. A recent study in Frontiers in Robotics and AI is the first to investigate how such tiny robots might perform as drug delivery vehicles in neural tissue. The study finds that when controlled using a magnetic field, the tiny tumbling soft robots can move against fluid flow, climb slopes and move about neural tissues, such as the spinal cord, and deposit substances at precise locations.

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This novel material was made using a process that the team developed called a “float assembly method.” The float assembly takes advantage of the Marangoni effect, which occurs in two liquid phases with different surface tensions. When there is a gradient in surface tension, a Marangoni flow is generated away from the region with lower surface tension towards the region with higher surface tension. This means that dropping a liquid with lower surface tension on the water surface lowers the surface tension locally, and the resulting Marangoni flow causes the dropped liquid to spread thinly across the surface of the water.

The nanomembrane is created using a float assembly method which consists of a three-step process. The first step involves dropping a composite solution, which is a mixture of metal nanowires, rubber dissolved in toluene, and ethanol, on the surface of the water. The toluene-rubber phase remains above the water due to its hydrophobic property, while the nanowires end up on the interface between the water and toluene phases. The ethanol within the solution mixes with the water to lower the local surface tension, which generates Marangoni flow that propagates outward and prevents the aggregation of the nanowires. This assembles the nanomaterials into a monolayer at the interface between water and a very thin rubber/solvent film. In the second step, the surfactant is dropped to generate a second wave of Marangoni flow which tightly compacts the nanowires. Finally, in the third step, the toluene is evaporated and a nanomembrane with a unique structure in which a highly compacted monolayer of nanowires is partially embedded in an ultrathin rubber film is obtained.

Its unique structure allows efficient strain distribution in ultrathin rubber film, leading to excellent physical properties, such as a stretchability of over 1,000%, and a thickness of only 250 nm. The structure also allows cold welding and bi-layer stacking of the nanomembrane onto each other, which leads to a metal-like conductivity over 100,000 S/cm. Furthermore, the researchers demonstrated that the nanomembrane can be patterned using photolithography, which is a key technology that is widely used for manufacturing commercial semiconductor devices and advanced electronics. Therefore, it is expected that the nanomembrane can serve as a new platform material for skin electronics.

University of Houston researchers are reporting a breakthrough in the field of materials science and engineering with the development of an electrochemical actuator that uses specialized organic semiconductor nanotubes (OSNTs).

Currently in the early stages of development, the actuator will become a key part of research contributing to the future of robotic, bioelectronic and biomedical science.

“Electrochemical devices that transform electrical energy to mechanical energy have potential use in numerous applications, ranging from soft robotics and micropumps to autofocus microlenses and bioelectronics,” said Mohammad Reza Abidian, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the UH Cullen College of Engineering. He’s the corresponding author of the article “Organic Semiconductor Nanotubes for Electrochemical Devices,” published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, which details the discovery.

Researchers have made a tiny camera, held together with ‘molecular glue’ that allows them to observe chemical reactions in real time.

The device, made by a team from the University of Cambridge, combines tiny semiconductor nanocrystals called quantum dots and gold nanoparticles using molecular glue called cucurbituril (CB). When added to water with the molecule to be studied, the components self-assemble in seconds into a stable, powerful tool that allows the real-time monitoring of chemical reactions.

The camera harvests light within the semiconductors, inducing electron transfer processes like those that occur in photosynthesis, which can be monitored using incorporated gold nanoparticle sensors and spectroscopic techniques. They were able to use the camera to observe chemical species which had been previously theorized but not directly observed.

Delta Galil Industries, Ltd., a textile manufacturer of branded and private label apparel, is setting up a strategic partnership with Israeli startup Sonovia, a maker of textiles with sustainable and antimicrobial properties, to pilot the use of new fabrics for its product lines. Under the agreement, Sonovia and its machinery manufacturing partner, Brückner Textile Machinery, will install an ultrasonic fabric-finishing applicator at Delta Galil’s innovation center in Karmiel, Israel, to pilot the application of new, eco-responsible fabric finishes offering antimicrobial and anti-odor protection and other traits to products Delta manufactures for its global customers. Delta Galil Industries, founded in 1,975 is a maker of men and women’s underwear, bras, socks, baby clothing, leisurewear and nightwear. The brands it supplies its products for include Schiesser, Eminence, Athena and PJ Salvage. To date, Sonovia has developed two applications for its technology: an anti-bacterial, anti-odor and anti-viral application, and a spray to make textiles water-repellent.

The Ramat Gan, Israel-based startup, founded in2013by Shay Herchcovici and Joshua Herchcovici, uses a patented nanotechnology process developed at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University to embed particles, compounds, and molecules of desired properties directly into textiles, creating a fabric that retains its properties through multiple washings.

The company’s partnership with Delta Galil “constitutes a significant landmark” in Sonovia’s path to commercialize its technology and strengthens Delta Galil’s position as a specialist in high-performance, sustainable manufacturing innovation, the statement said.

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A hair-like protein hidden inside bacteria serves as a sort of on-off switch for nature’s “electric grid,” a global web of bacteria-generated nanowires that permeates all oxygen-less soil and deep ocean beds, Yale researchers report in the journal Nature. “The ground beneath our feet, the entire globe, is electrically wired,” said Nikhil Malvankar, assistant professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at the Microbial Sciences Institute at Yale’s West Campus and senior author of the paper. “These previously hidden bacterial hairs are the molecular switch controlling the release of nanowires that make up nature’s electrical grid.”

Almost all living things breathe oxygen to get rid of excess electrons when converting nutrients into energy. Without access to oxygen, however, soil bacteria living deep under oceans or buried underground over billions of years have developed a way to respire by “breathing minerals,” like snorkeling, through tiny protein filaments called nanowires.

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Summary: Researchers have discovered a new molecule that could increase the ultra-fast decision-making capabilities of computers. The simple molecule provides a new electronic circuit element in which complex logic is encoded in nanoscale material properties.

Source: University of Limerick.

An international team of scientists including researchers at University of Limerick in Ireland has discovered a new molecule that could further increase ultra-fast decision making in computers.