Particles defy gravity, float upstream | Physics | Science News

Particles defy gravity, float upstream | Physics | Science News: Shinbrot set up two tanks side-by-side and elevated one of them, with water flowing down through a channel to bridge the 1-centimeter height gap. Sure enough, within seconds of adding chalk and mate tea to the bottom tank, particles began climbing up the channel to contaminate the upper tank.

Shinbrot’s experiments led him to the conclusion that Altshuler’s team had also reached: The particles overcome gravity and the current thanks to a property of water called surface tension.

A Snapshot of the Inside of an Atom - ScienceNOW

A Snapshot of the Inside of an Atom - ScienceNOW: ...the team first fired two lasers at hydrogen atoms inside a chamber, kicking off electrons at speeds and directions that depended on their underlying wave functions. A strong electric field inside the chamber guided the electrons to positions on a planar detector that depended on their initial velocities rather than on their initial positions. So the distribution of electrons striking the detector matched the wave function the electrons had at the moment they left their hydrogen nuclei behind. The apparatus displays the electron distribution on a phosphorescent screen as light and dark rings, which the team photographed using a high-resolution digital camera.

'Artificial leaf' gains the ability to self-heal damage and produce energy from dirty water

'Artificial leaf' gains the ability to self-heal damage and produce energy from dirty water: The device, however, actually is a simple catalyst-coated wafer of silicon, rather than a complicated reproduction of the photosynthesis mechanism in real leaves. Dropped into a jar of water and exposed to sunlight, catalysts in the device break water down into its components, hydrogen and oxygen...


"Self-healing enables the artificial leaf to run on the impure, bacteria-contaminated water found in nature," Nocera said. "We figured out a way to tweak the conditions so that part of the catalyst falls apart, denying bacteria the smooth surface needed to form a biofilm. Then the catalyst can heal and re-assemble."

UEA scientists mimic nature in �800,000 renewable energy project - University of East Anglia (UEA)

UEA scientists mimic nature in �800,000 renewable energy project - University of East Anglia (UEA): “Light absorption by the green chlorophyll pigments generates an energised electron that is directed, along chains of metal centres, to catalysts that make sugars.

“We will build a system for artificial photosynthesis by placing tiny solar-panels on microbes. These will harness sunlight and drive the production of hydrogen, from which the technologies to release energy on demand are well-advanced.

“We imagine that our photocatalysts will prove versatile and that with slight modification they will be able to harness solar energy for the manufacture of carbon-based fuels, drugs and fine chemicals.”

ScienceShot: Building the Smallest Possible Ice Crystal - ScienceNOW

ScienceShot: Building the Smallest Possible Ice Crystal - ScienceNOW: So to calculate the minimum number of molecules needed to make an ice lattice, a team of researchers shone infrared lasers on clusters of water molecules containing between 80 and 500 molecules. The team paid particular attention to how much energy the clusters absorbed from the lasers between the wavelengths of 2.63 micrometers and 3.57 micrometers—the range in which the oxygen-hydrogen bonds in water continually stretch and shrink. A particular peak of energy absorption occurred at a wavelength of about 3.125 micrometers—denoting the spectral characteristic of ice—and only appeared for clusters containing more than 275 water molecules...

Nano-Engineered Bioconstructs Perform Photosynthesis Faster Than Nature Does | Popular Science

Nano-Engineered Bioconstructs Perform Photosynthesis Faster Than Nature Does | Popular Science: Researchers led by Carolyn Lubner at Penn State worked with a cyanobacterium called Synechococcus and another bacterium, Clostridium acetobutylicum. In nature, photosynthetic organisms use light-capturing enzymes nicknamed Photosystem I and II, which absorb light and excite electrons to a higher energy state. Another enzyme called FNR then uses these electrons to produce an energy-storage molecule. This molecule is used to make sugars to keep the organism alive, and that's your basic photosynthesis process.
Lubner et al replaced the FNR enzyme with a hydrogenase enzyme, which combines electrons with hydrogen ions to make molecular hydrogen (instead of a sugar-producing system). Then they used this enzyme to stitch together iron-based terminals of a Photosystem I enzyme from each of the bacteria. This stitch served as a molecular wire, easily and quickly transferring electrons. The researchers doped it with vitamin C, which served as the electron feedstock.
The result was a high-throughput hydrogen-producing system — electron flow was more than twice as high as the bacteria’s individual rates, the authors say.

Pair claim they have turned hydrogen to metal

Pair claim they have turned hydrogen to metal: when they put a sample of hydrogen in a alumina-epoxy gasket that they put inside of a diamond anvil cell, an arrangement that allowed them to test the opacity via laser and the electrical resistance using electrodes, they found that without heating or cooling and at a pressure of 220GPa, the sample clouded to the point of becoming opaque and began to demonstrate an ability to conduct electricity...
...the procedure clearly can make hydrogen conductive at room temperature, which means it could conceivably turn out to be that elusive superconductor that scientists the world over have been searching for.

Artificial Hydrogen Tests Quantum Theory: Scientific American

Artificial Hydrogen Tests Quantum Theory: Scientific American: "To make the ultra-light isotope, they swapped the proton with a positively charged muon, which has just 11% of the mass of a proton. And to make ultra-heavy hydrogen, they replaced one of the electrons in a helium atom with a negative muon.

Helium has two electrons, two protons and two neutrons. But because it is more massive than an electron, the negative muon orbits the nucleus much more closely, masking the positive charge of one of the protons. In effect, the atom becomes a hydrogen-like composite: a 'nucleus' made of the existing two-proton, two-neutron nucleus and the muon, orbited by the remaining electron. It has a mass of a little over four times that of hydrogen."