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    Scientists re-create a legendary golden fabric from clam waste

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    Shimmering like spun gold, sea silk fabric is so lustrous that some believe it inspired the Greek legends of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece. For centuries, artisans in the Mediterranean have passed down the art of spinning the silk, which comes from the beardlike tufts of the giant clam Pinna nobilis. But the clam’s endangered species status has made it hard to keep the tradition alive.

    Now, scientists have re-created the legendary fabric using discarded parts of Atrina pectinata, a related clam species farmed extensively in South Korea for food. They’ve also identified the precise molecular structure and formation behind sea silk’s everlasting golden hue, the researchers report July 29 in Advanced Materials. More

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      in Physics

      The best way to cook an egg, according to science

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      When egg prices are hard-boiling your temper, it’s important to make sure that each egg you make is the best it can possibly be. But when your egg white is cooked, your egg yolk is often still a runny mess. Once the yolk is cooked, the white is rubbery. The solution is a method of periodic cooking, researchers report February 6 in Communications Engineering. And true eggcellence, they say, requires only boiling water, slightly warm water, an egg — and 32 minutes of patience.

      The challenge of cooking an egg is that the yolk and the albumen — or white — have different compositions, says Emilia Di Lorenzo, a chemical engineer at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. The result is that the proteins in each part of the egg denature — or fall apart — at different temperatures. Yolk proteins cook at 65° Celsius, while those in the white cook at 85° C. More

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      in Physics

      Starchy nanofibers shatter the record for world’s thinnest pasta

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      The world record for the thinnest pasta has been shattered, though the new, narrow noodles are better suited to wound dressings than the dinner table.

      From white flour, researchers made starch-rich nanofibers that are about 370 nanometers thick, on average — or about two hundredths the thickness of a human hair. The nano-noodles could be used in biodegradable bandages, chemist Adam Clancy and colleagues reported October 30 in Nanoscale Advances.

      To make the noodle “dough,” the scientists mixed the flour with formic acid, a liquid that helps uncoil the long starch molecules in the flour. “Normally, if you want to cook starch, then you use water and heat to break up the tight packing of starch,” says Clancy, of University College London. “We do that chemically with formic acid. So we effectively pickle it instead of cooking it.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Physics

      A materials scientist seeks to extract lithium from untapped sources

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      Electric vehicles promise to help wean us off of fossil fuels, but they introduce a new problem: how to get enough of the lithium that EV batteries require (SN: 5/7/19).

      Materials scientist Chong Liu of the University of Chicago has some ideas. Existing technology can extract lithium only from sources with highly concentrated ions, like hard rocks or underground deposits of salty water called brines. Not only will those sources not be enough to meet demand, but mining them also comes with environmental consequences (SN: 3/15/22). More

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      in Physics

      Jurassic Park’s amber-preserved dino DNA is now inspiring a way to store data 

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      Sometimes science fiction does inspire science research. À la Jurassic Park’s entombed mosquito, scientists have developed a method to store DNA in an amberlike material and still extract it easily hours later. This storage method is cheaper and faster than existing options, the researchers report in the June Journal of the American Chemical Society.

      If you want to store information for a very long time, possibly forever, DNA is the way to do it, says James Banal, a chemist at MIT and technical director of a biotechnology company called Cache DNA, headquartered in San Carlos, Calif. DNA stores the genetic information of millions of organisms, but it can potentially be used to store any kind of information, including digital data such as text, photos, videos and more (SN: 10/2/19). More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Physics

      Artificial intelligence helped scientists create a new type of battery 

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      In the hunt for new materials, scientists have traditionally relied on tinkering in the lab, guided by intuition, with a hefty serving of trial and error.

      But now a new battery material has been discovered by combining two computing superpowers: artificial intelligence and supercomputing. It’s a discovery that highlights the potential for using computers to help scientists discover materials suited to specific needs, from batteries to carbon capture technologies to catalysts. 

      Calculations winnowed down more than 32 million candidate materials to just 23 promising options, researchers from Microsoft and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, or PNNL, report in a paper submitted January 8 to arXiv.org. The team then synthesized and tested one of those materials and created a working battery prototype. More

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      in Heart

      This ‘thermal cloak’ keeps spaces from getting either too hot or cold

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      If you’ve ever burned your hands on a car steering wheel, you know how hot the inside of a car can get on a summer day. But a new fabric could one day help cars and other objects stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

      Researchers created a prototype of the fabric, which acts as a “thermal cloak” that keeps the space underneath it from getting too hot or too cold. The cloak, described in the July 11 Device, doesn’t require an external power source, which could reduce energy consumption associated with heating and cooling (SN: 9/28/18).

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      Globally, heating and cooling make up 38 percent of energy use in buildings and 12 percent of total energy consumption. Materials like this thermal cloak could help keep us comfortable during heat waves while reducing carbon dioxide emissions associated with electricity used in temperature control, says Aaswath Raman, an applied physicist at UCLA who was not involved in the study.

      In the new study, Kehang Cui, an engineer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and colleagues built the cloak using two layers. The outer layer is made of white silica fibers that reflect visible light, coated with hexagonal boron nitride, a ceramic material that reflects ultraviolet light and helps dissipate heat. Together, the silica fibers and boron nitride reflect 96 percent of the sunlight that hits the fabric. At the same time, the outer layer absorbs heat from the surrounding area and emits that energy as infrared light, which also lowers the temperature under the cloak through a process called radiative cooling.

      Though the outer layer keeps the space under the cloak cooler for longer than an uncovered area, the cloaked space slowly warms up throughout the day. The inner layer, made of aluminum foil, keeps the space warm at night by trapping some of that heat inside, similar to an insulating survival blanket.

      The researchers tested the cloak material’s durability under several extreme conditions. They baked the fabric at 800° Celsius, just about hot enough to melt table salt. They also exposed it to extreme cold by dunking it in liquid nitrogen, subjected it to the same amount of vibration as a rocket launch, doused it in acid and blasted it with fire from a butane torch — all with virtually no changes to the material’s structure or performance. This extreme durability might lend itself to use in spacecraft or extraterrestrial environments, the team says.

      To see the fabric in action, Cui and colleagues built a full-size prototype cloak and tested it on an electric car. On a summer day in Shanghai, the cloak kept the car at about 23° C — up to 8 degrees C lower than the outside temperature and 28 degrees C lower than the inside of an uncloaked car. The cloak also kept the car about 5 degrees C warmer than the outside air on a winter night.

      The cloak “definitely shows the capability of saving energy, but the next step is that we want to demonstrate it in even larger-scale field tests [such as rooftops] to see the impact on our daily lives,” Cui says. More

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      in Physics

      A vegan leather made of dormant fungi can repair itself

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      Imagine if a ripped leather jacket could repair itself instead of needing to be replaced.

      This could one day be a reality, if the jacket is fashioned from fungus, researchers report April 11 in Advanced Functional Materials. The team made a self-healing leather from mushrooms’ threadlike structures called mycelium, building on past iterations of the material to allow it to fix itself.

      Mycelium leather is already an emerging product, but it’s produced in a way that extinguishes fungal growth. Elise Elsacker and colleagues speculated that if the production conditions were tweaked, the mycelium could retain its ability to regrow if damaged.

      That novel approach could offer inspiration to other researchers trying to get into the mycelium leather market, says Valeria La Saponara, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of California, Davis.

      Elsacker, a bioengineer now at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and her colleagues first grew mycelium in a soup rich in proteins, carbohydrates and other nutrients. A skin formed on the surface of the liquid, which the scientists scooped off, cleaned and dried to make a thin, somewhat fragile leather material. They used temperatures and chemicals mild enough to form the leather but leave parts of the fungus functional. Left dormant were chlamydospores, little nodules on the mycelium that can spring back to life and grow more mycelium when conditions are prime.

      After punching holes in the leather, the researchers doused the area in the same broth used to grow it to revive the chlamydospores. The mycelium eventually regrew over the punctures. Once healed, the hole-punched areas were just as strong as undamaged areas — however, the repairs were visible from one side of the leather.

      Chlamydospores are little nodules on fungi’s threadlike mycelium that can spring back to life. They’re dormant in the punctured leather (left). With the right nutrients, the chlamydospores reanimated and the leather healed itself (middle), but the tiny patches are still slightly visible in the repaired leather (right).E. Elsacker et al/Advanced Functional Materials, 2023

      The technique could potentially go beyond a proof-of-concept and into commercialization in the next decade, says study coauthor Martyn Dade-Robertson, codirector of the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment in Newcastle upon Tyne. But first, the team will need to make the leather stronger and determine how to control the chlamydospores’ growth. Otherwise, he says, someone could “walk out in the rain, and then all of a sudden find that [their] jacket is growing, or perhaps [has] mushrooms popping out of it.”  More