Tyre that converts Heat into Work

The world demands Energy, and energy from everything that is what our future is all about and the one who can produce Energy will be at top of chart. Something similar happened this week in Geneva International Auto Show where tyre manufacturer Goodyear introduced a new concept of energy generation from the tyres.

A traditional car gets its power from engine which in turn rotates the wheels but a new concept tyre introduced by Goodyear named BHO3 which would use all the heat energy which it gets from various sources like sunlight, friction to convert it into useful or mechanical work,  which could be considered as a tyre full of surprises.

Goodyear is interested in producing energy directly from the tires, harvesting their heat energy with its BHO3 concept tire. According to Goodyear, while the car is sitting idle, the BHO3 tires would start to warm as sunlight hits the tires and the ground beneath. (The tire will be given an ultra black coat for maximum absorption of light and heat.) The heat would be transferred to the car through thermoelectric materials just under the tire’s surface that can generate voltage as the material flexes in response to temperature changes.


And when the car is moving the friction force will come into action which would result in the increment of the temperature of the tires and the heat can be collected through the sensors. “These concept tires reimagine the role that tires may play in the future,” Joe Zekoski, Goodyear’s senior vice president and chief technical officer, said in a statement.

The company only explained about the tyres bit not about the types of materials used for collecting heat, or how it would convert it into work or how it would maintain the cooling off the superheated tyre, but one thing is sure if the tyre comes into action it could eliminate our need for gasoline

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Pen with Bio-Ink: the future of sensors

Ballpoint pens loaded with sensor-laden inks could eliminate finger pricks for diabetics, and help them test their blood glucose levels simply by drawing cartoons - or just a few dots - on their skin.

The innovative new ink could also be used to test for pollutants in the environment by drawing on leaves or on buildings' surfaces, and could help soldiers search for explosives and chemical weapons, the developers say.

The team of engineers from the University of California, San Diego, who developed the ink, used it to fill up regular, off-the-shelf ballpoint pens. The aim was to enable a new type of do-it-yourself sensor with rapid diagnostic capabilities for people with diabetes.

The ink is made from the enzymes glucose oxidase, which responds to sugar in the blood, and tyrosinase, which can help detect common pollutants known as phenols. These compounds are found in cosmetics and can be toxic at high enough concentrations.  

Charles Choi explains for IEEE Spectrum what else was needed to make the inks operate like on-demand sensors: “To make these bio-inks serve as electrodes, they added electrically conductive graphite powder. They also added: chitosan, a clotting agent used in bandages, to help the ink stick to surfaces; xylitol, a sugar substitute, to help stabilize the enzymes during chemical reactions; and biocompatible polyethylene glycol, which is used in several drug delivery applications, to help bind all these ingredients together.”

The team has described its "enzymatic ink" and do-it-yourself sensor in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.

Using their pens, they were able to draw sensors to measure glucose directly onto the wrist of a willing participant. They say this ink drawing could be “easily interfaced with a Bluetooth-enabled” device that can provide the read-out.

The researchers also used the ink to draw on and measure chemicals on leaves, and according to Choi at IEEE Spectrum, “the inks could be modified to react with many other pollutants, such as heavy metals or pesticides”.

The main purpose of the ink, and probably the most immediate impact, will be to enable multiple-use testing strips for diabetes monitoring. As the authors note in their paper, handheld glucose metres rely on single use sensor strips, and each test is expensive for the user.

They demonstrated that when applied to a flexible strip that included an electrode, their ink functioned like a sensor. When a blood drop from a pricked finger was placed on the sensor, the ink reacted and the sensor measured this reaction, accurately determining the blood sugar level.

Importantly, the researchers say their ink only needs to be wiped off for the strip to be re-used - and they say one pen-load has enough ink for 500 tests.

The authors write that the most attractive feature of their pen “is the immense freedom available to incorporate high-fidelity inexpensive sensors of any design on a wide variety of surfaces with minimal user training.”

The same team has previously developed temporary tattoos to help diabetics continuously monitor their blood-sugar levels. They say the next step is to connect the sensors wirelessly to monitoring devices and test their performance in different climatic conditions.

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Wireless Energy Transfer: It's Reality

Think of a world where you could charge your phone while moving on without any wires, the car you drive can be powered on the go, moving through the Galaxy and not worrying about the fuel all this futuristic things are going to get true very soon, Scientists in Japan have announced that they've successfully managed to transmit energy wirelessly with high accuracy,and this is not the invention that occurs daily this COULD CHANGE THE FUTURE of our energy need.

The researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced a day before yesterday that they had used microwaves to deliver 1.8 kilowatts of power - just enough to power a kettle - through the air to a receiver 55 metres away, with pinpoint accuracy, this technology had nothing to do with what we use these days to power our mobile wirelessly with the help of a magnetic field.


"This was the first time anyone has managed to send a high output of nearly two kilowatts of electric power via microwaves to a small target, using a delicate directivity control device," a spokesperson for JAXA told.

The ultimate aim of the team is to provide earth with solar energy that will be collected 36000km above earth's surface and will be transmitted to earth where it will be received by antennas. "But it could take decades before we see practical application of the technology - maybe in the 2040s or later," the spokesperson told.

"There are a number of challenges to overcome, such as how to send huge structures into space, how to construct them and how to maintain them."

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Saturn's Moon may contain sign of life

Pictorial representation of the thermal activity on Saturn's moon 

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first clear evidence that Saturn's moon Enceladus exhibits signs of present-day hydrothermal activity which may resemble that seen in the deep oceans on Earth. The implications of such activity on a world other than our planet open up unprecedented scientific possibilities.

"These findings add to the possibility that Enceladus, which contains a subsurface ocean and displays remarkable geologic activity, could contain environments suitable for living organisms," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The locations in our solar system where extreme environments occur in which life might exist may bring us closer to answering the question: are we alone in the universe."

Hydrothermal activity occurs when seawater infiltrates and reacts with a rocky crust and emerges as a heated, mineral-laden solution, a natural occurrence in Earth's oceans. According to two science papers, the results are the first clear indications an icy moon may have similar ongoing active processes.

The first paper, published this week in the journal Nature, relates to microscopic grains of rock detected by Cassini in the Saturn system. An extensive, four-year analysis of data from the spacecraft, computer simulations and laboratory experiments led researchers to the conclusion the tiny grains most likely form when hot water containing dissolved minerals from the moon's rocky interior travels upward, coming into contact with cooler water. Temperatures required for the interactions that produce the tiny rock grains would be at least 194 degrees Fahrenheit (90 degrees Celsius).

"It's very exciting that we can use these tiny grains of rock, spewed into space by geysers, to tell us about conditions on -- and beneath -- the ocean floor of an icy moon," said the paper's lead author Sean Hsu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer (CDA) instrument repeatedly detected miniscule rock particles rich in silicon, even before Cassini entered Saturn's orbit in 2004. By process of elimination, the CDA team concluded these particles must be grains of silica, which is found in sand and the mineral quartz on Earth. The consistent size of the grains observed by Cassini, the largest of which were 6 to 9 nanometers, was the clue that told the researchers a specific process likely was responsible.

On Earth, the most common way to form silica grains of this size is hydrothermal activity under a specific range of conditions; namely, when slightly alkaline and salty water that is super-saturated with silica undergoes a big drop in temperature.

"We methodically searched for alternate explanations for the nanosilica grains, but every new result pointed to a single, most likely origin," said co-author Frank Postberg, a Cassini CDA team scientist at Heidelberg University in Germany.

Hsu and Postberg worked closely with colleagues at the University of Tokyo who performed the detailed laboratory experiments that validated the hydrothermal activity hypothesis. The Japanese team, led by Yasuhito Sekine, verified the conditions under which silica grains form at the same size Cassini detected. The researchers think these conditions may exist on the seafloor of Enceladus, where hot water from the interior meets the relatively cold water at the ocean bottom.

The extremely small size of the silica particles also suggests they travel upward relatively quickly from their hydrothermal origin to the near-surface sources of the moon's geysers. From seafloor to outer space, a distance of about 30 miles (50 kilometers), the grains spend a few months to a few years in transit, otherwise they would grow much larger.

The authors point out that Cassini's gravity measurements suggest Enceladus' rocky core is quite porous, which would allow water from the ocean to percolate into the interior. This would provide a h

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Compound that captures Carbon could save the environment

Global warming is a major concern which people are aware now but for the past few decades the condition was not as serious as it is now. The world is getting warmer. Whether the cause is human activity or natural variability—and the preponderance of evidence says it’s humans—thermometer readings all around the world have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8° Celsius (1.4° Fahrenheit) since 1880. This may cause serious problems and to lower the earth temperature will ensure a safer future for our coming generation.

 A new mechanism for highly efficient CO2 uptake in carbon-capturing materials has been discovered by an international collaboration from EPFL’s Energy Center. The novel mechanism, published in Nature, offers an energy-efficient route to carbon capture. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous crystal structures made from metal nodes that are connected through organic linkers. MOFs are at the center of carbon-capturing efforts, as they are chemically tunable and can adsorb(to make something staggered on or below the surface) carbon with high efficiency.

MOFs can be used to remove the carbon form the atmosphere to the factories where various forms of carbon like Co2, CH4 gases are produced. scientists have found that inserting CO2 in a metal-amine bond of MOFs can trigger a highly efficient chain reaction of CO2 uptake. The researchers took advantage of the chemical versatility of MOFs, and were able to optimize the conditions of the chain reaction by altering the metal atoms at the nodes of the MOF’s structure.

As a result of this, the MOFs can achieve large capacities in separating CO2 from the atmosphere with only small temperature changes. Meanwhile, the energy required to regenerate MOFs following release of captured CO2 was lower than even state-of-the-art liquid amine solutions. The two most promising MOFs were based on magnesium and manganese, and were able to operate at high temperatures.

The results provide a template for designing highly efficient adsorbent materials that can remove CO2 from various gas mixtures. Compared to available technologies, this design offers advantages in terms of reduced sorbent regeneration energy and reduced materials and system costs.

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