In their quest to transform mild-manered scientists into technology wielding superheroes, researchers at Cornell have created a device that could let them walk on walls.

The device uses the surface tension of water for adhesion. It’s inspired by a beetle that can stick to a leaf with 100 times its own weight. Basically you’ve got a small plate drilled with hundreds of micron-scale holes on top of a water reservoir. Current is applied to the plate via a 9-volt battery, which pushes the water up through the holes to form tiny bumps or droplets of water. The surface tension of those droplets makes the plate stick to virtually any surface. Reverse the current and the droplets retract, breaking adhesion.

It’s remarkably sticky. Researchers estimate that a one-square-inch pad would hold up to 15 pounds of weight.

Uses include shoes and gloves for walking on walls, and roll-out mats to stop bad guys in their tracks.

Link to Cornell Chronicle article

Big Oil killed the car that ran on water, Big Textiles killed the suit that never needed to be dry cleaned, and now Big Detergent is going to kill liquid glass. Made by the aptly named Nanopool corporation, liquid glass is a spray-on glasslike coating that can protect virtually anything from UV radiation, dirt, heat, bacteria, and space rays. Okay, maybe not space rays, but Nanopool claims that the stuff virtually eliminates the need for detergent.

According to an article at PhysOrg.com, the coating is almost all silicon dioxide, the main component of glass. There are no adhesives to make the spray coating stick—quantum forces bind it to whatever you spray it on. Liquid glass is also flexible and breathable, so it can be sprayed on clothing or even plants for protection.

From PhysOrg.com:

The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.

The liquid glass coating is breathable, which means it can be used on plants and seeds. Trials in vineyards have found spraying vines increases their resistance to fungal diseases, while other tests have shown sprayed seeds germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds, and coated wood is not attacked by termites. Other vineyard applications include coating corks with liquid glass to prevent “corking” and contamination of wine. The spray cannot be seen by the naked eye, which means it could also be used to treat clothing and other materials to make them stain-resistant. McClelland said you can “pour a bottle of wine over an expensive silk shirt and it will come right off”.

In the home, spray-on glass would eliminate the need for scrubbing and make most cleaning products obsolete. Since it is available in both water-based and alcohol-based solutions, it can be used in the oven, in bathrooms, tiles, sinks, and almost every other surface in the home, and one spray is said to last a year.

The miracle spray is supposed to be going on sale in the UK in the near future. No word on whether it’ll be available stateside, but I’d definitely give it a try. And hey, maybe if I spray it on myself, I’ll be virtually indestructible and I’ll finally be able to get my superhero business off the ground.

Link to PhysOrg.com article

Any scifi fan can tell you that engineering immortal killing machines is never a good idea. Still, the Pentagon’s weird science division, DARPA, wants to bioengineer “synthetic” organisms that can live forever. Oh, unless you flip the built-in and totally reliable DNA kill switch. Riiight.

They’re calling the project BioDesign and its goal is to create organisms that will live indefinitely until you issue a self-destruct-type chemical command. Of course there’s absolutely no chance the organisms will evolve a way to ignore the command, swarm, and devour all life like unstoppable cyber locusts. Nope. Not a chance.

Thankfully, the Pentagon only gave the project $6 million to play around with. It’s doubtful that such a paltry sum would be enough to overturn the most fundamental law of nature: What lives must die. Right?

Link to Wired article

If you’re going to build a swarm of nanobots to take over the world, you’ll need a lot of very tiny batteries. You could build microscopic AAs with exceedingly diminutive tools, or turn to the best nano-scale builder known: Nature. Scientists at Yale were studying how some cells turn chemical energy into electrical energy (brain cells, the cells that give electric eels their zap) when they inadvertently created synthetic cell batteries.

The simple cells are essentially lipid sacks filled with salt water and a modified protein. When two of the synthetic cells touch, they stick together. The proteins create pores between the two cells. If the two cells have different salt concentrations, positive or negative ions will pass through the pores shared wall until salt concentrations in both cells reach an equilibrium. Stick the cells with electrodes to siphon off the ions and you’ve got a microscopic battery.

Two 200-nanoliter drops of the cells in solution can deliver electricity for about 10 minutes. An 11-microleter volume can put out a charge for more than four hours.

Researchers say the cells turn chemical energy into electrical energy at about 10 percent efficiency, which is frankly pretty terrible for a battery. But it’s pretty good when compared to tiny solar cells or piezoelectric devices that generate electricity from mechanical stress.

Link to Gizmag article

Al and Ziggy

Researchers at Yale have created the first ever fully functional quantum processor. Harnessing the bizarre qualities of quantum mechanics, the processor can perform simple calculations.

Typical computers use electrons (through transistors) to compute—reading and writing information in bits. Bits have binary states; they’re either “on” or “off,” 1 or 0. Quantum computers use atoms and “qubits,” which have multiple states. Qubits can be 1, 0, 1-0, 0-1, 0+1, or 0 AND 1 simultaneously. Thus a single qubit can store much more information than a bit. Additionally, typical computers read and write numbers and solve problems sequentially. Quantum computers can read and write long strings of numbers all at once, boosting speed tremendously.

The Yale computer is made up of two artificial atoms—billions of aluminum atoms that act as a single atom—in a solid-state system. The processor is extremely unstable, capable of hanging around for only a millisecond before evaporating. Still, it’s a major breakthrough in quantum computing that will lead to more stable and capable computers in the future.

Because of their tremendous computing power and speed, quantum computers have the potential to truly revolutionize computing.

Link to TG Daily article

Batteries seem to be stuck in the days of Edison—heavy, toxic bricks that hold measly amounts of energy and wear out far too quickly. Even hallowed lithium-ion batteries are expensive and unstable. Thankfully the next generation of batteries are on the horizon, and they’re hellishly awesome.

Engineers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have revived lithium-sulphur batteries. They promise to pack three times as much power as lithium-ion batteries, and weigh much less than current power cells.

Lithium-sulphur batteries aren’t anything new. They were developed ages ago, but abandoned due to high cost, poor efficiency, and short lifespan. Charging and discharging a lithium-sulphur battery involves moving lithium ions between two electrodes within the battery. Theoretically, sulphur should be able to hold twice as many lithium ions. But sulphur is an insulator, making it difficult for electrons and ions to move freely into and out of the sulphur electrode.

The scientists at Waterloo have overcome the technical issues using a nanostructure of carbon rods. Sulphur is melted into the carbon nanostructure, giving ions much better access to the sulphur. Essentially, ions and electrons can travel down the carbon rods to reach the sulphur melted between them.

The battery is in testing phases right now, which means we’ll likely not see lithium-sulphur batteries in laptops, iPods, or electric cars for a few years.

Link to Gizmodo article

Link to Technology Review article

Québécois researchers have created solar-powered cyborg nanobots that use bacterial swarms to navigate Petri dishes.

Sylvain Martel and his team at the NanoRobotics Laboratory at the École Polytechnique de Montréal built a tiny solar-powered machine approximately 300 microns square that indirectly manipulates a swarm of bacteria that’s naturally sensitive to magnetic fields. The nanobot contains a pH sensor and a simple transmitter that sends electromagnetic pulses to an external computer. The computer reads the signals and adjusts a magnetic field to direct the bacteria. The machine is swept along in the swarm, moving from low to high pH areas in the dish.

It isn’t the researchers’ first foray into cyborg nanobot construction. They initially attached bacteria directly to the robots. But bacteria only have a lifespan of a few hours, making the symbiosis impractical. With the new method, fresh bacteria can be injected into the dish to revive the propulsion system.

The researchers say the method of propulsion could be used to guide tiny medical devices in the future.

Link to Technology Review article

Want a non-toxic battery? Ask a virus to build it. A group of scientists at MIT have genetically engineered a virus to construct the components of lithium-ion batteries without toxic solvents or chemicals. The virus, which normally infects bacteria, can build the positive and negative terminals of a battery on the molecular level.

The batteries have a the same output and capacity of current lithium-ion batteries found in everything from laptops to electric cars like the Tesla Roadster. The current prototype is a typical disc battery that can light a single LED, but the team plans to create more powerful batteries based on manganese phosphate and nickel phosphate.

The team, led by MIT materials and biological engineer Angela Belcher, tweaked the genes of the virus to coat itself with iron phosphate, then nab carbon nanotubes to create a conducting network. The resulting goop crammed into a traditional battery case and voila, vat-grown batteries.

MIT President Susan Hockfield met with President Obama to show the new technology off, and encourage federal funding for clean-energy technologies.

Link to MIT release

At long last my boyhood dreams of ripping a lamp post from the pavement and using it to play stickball with parked cars may come true. Ray Baughman, director of the Nano Tech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas has created carbon nanotube muscles that are 30 times stronger than human muscle.

They’re also fast. Natural muscles can contract a maximum 10 percent per second. The nanotube muscles can contract 40,000 percent per second. Oh, and they can withstand the -320 degree Fahrenheit temperatures of liquid nitrogen and the 2,800 degree Fahrenheit melting point of iron.

The muscles work on a simple function of physics that causes carbon nanotubes to repel each other when electrically charged. They’re as strong and stiff as diamond in one direction and as pliable as rubber in the other. 

Of course, I would need a carbon nanotube skeleton to withstand the forces these muscles generate, as well as carbon nanotube-based power cells to give me enough juice to use them. 

Link to Wired article

The automotive future is electric. But if we want to chuck fossil-fuel-chugging cars into the recycling bin, we’ll need better batteries. Two new developments in battery tech could make electric transportation feasible.

A team at the University of Maryland has developed a new breed of supercapacitor that could replace conventional batteries in electric cars. The new supercapacitors can store as much juice as the best batteries, but deliver that juice as quickly as a capacitor.

It’s a big deal, especially for electric cars. To get an electric car to burn rubber (accelerate briskly), you need a lot of current, quickly. Batteries can’t do it without the help of capacitors—the superchargers of the electrical world. Capacitors store energy on the surface of two plates separated by an insulator. They store and release electricity much faster than batteries.

The team at the University of Maryland joined forces with engineers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology to create a grid of nano capacitors. Their prototype contains more than 10 billion nano capacitors linked together with electrodes. And they did it on aluminum foil.

Gary Rubloff, a physicist at the University of Maryland, anodized (added a layer of oxide) a sheet of foil to create a uniform grid of nanopores. Using atomic layer deposition, the team filled the pores with three layers of material that mimic the conductor-insulator-conductor layout of a normal capacitor.

A kilogram of the new supercapacitor could deliver a megawatt of power—enough to power 10,000 100-watt light bulbs.

Whiz kids at MIT have also found a way to make lithium batteries speedier. Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, has drastically improved the charge and discharge rate of lithium batteries by redesigning their structure.

Everyday lithium batteries store tons of energy, but they can’t absorb or discharge it very quickly. Turns out that the slow charge/discharge rate is due to a kind of atomic traffic jam. Charged ions get gummed up traveling in and out of the battery.

Ceder and grad student Byoungwoo Kang found that they could fee up the traffic jam by engineering a beltway of material around the battery. The result is a small battery that can be charged and discharged between 10 and 20 seconds. The discovery should lead to faster-charging gadgets and quick recharges for electric vehicles.

Link to NewScientist article

Link to MIT article