Lifeboat Foundation

Soft robots, medical devices, and wearable devices have permeated our daily lives. KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) researchers have developed a fluid switch using ionic polymer artificial muscles that operates at ultra-low power and produces a force 34 times greater than its weight. Fluid switches control fluid flow, causing the fluid to flow in a specific direction to invoke various movements.

KAIST announced on the 4th of January that a research team under Professor IlKwon Oh from the Department of Mechanical Engineering has developed a soft fluidic switch that operates at ultra-low voltage and can be used in narrow spaces.

The results have been published in Science Advances (“Polysulfonated Covalent Organic Framework as Active Electrode Host for Mobile Cation Guests in Electrochemical Soft Actuator”).

Electricity could be used to enhance a specific chemical reaction in the synthesis of prospective medicinal drugs.

As the world moves away from gas towards electricity as a greener power source, the to-do list goes beyond cars. The vast global manufacturing network that makes everything from our batteries to our fertilizers needs to flip the switch, too.

A study from UChicago chemists found a way to use electricity to boost a type of chemical reaction often used in synthesizing new candidates for pharmaceutical drugs.

Continue reading “Using electricity, scientists find promising new method of boosting chemical reactions” »

In fields such as physics and engineering, partial differential equations (PDEs) are used to model complex physical processes to generate insight into how some of the most complicated physical and natural systems in the world function.

To solve these difficult equations, researchers use high-fidelity numerical solvers, which can be very time consuming and computationally expensive to run. The current simplified alternative, data-driven surrogate models, compute the goal property of a solution to PDEs rather than the whole solution. Those are trained on a set of data that has been generated by the high-fidelity solver, to predict the output of the PDEs for new inputs. This is data-intensive and expensive because complex physical systems require a large number of simulations to generate enough data.

In a new paper, “Physics-enhanced deep surrogates for partial differential equations,” published in December in Nature Machine Intelligence, a new method is proposed for developing data-driven surrogate models for complex physical systems in such fields as mechanics, optics, thermal transport, fluid dynamics, physical chemistry, and climate models.

New Compounds for Organometallic Chemistry – Sandwich Complexes in the Form of Rings Are Kept Together by Their Own Energy.

Sandwich compounds are special chemical compounds used as basic building blocks in organometallic chemistry. So far, their structure has always been linear. Recently, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Marburg were the first to make stacked sandwich complexes form a nano-sized ring. Physical and other properties of these cyclocene structures will now be further investigated.

Evolution of Sandwich Complexes.

Laboratory “copilots” and automated labs are AI’s latest contribution to speeding up the development of new drugs, chemicals and materials. Why it matters: Scientific discovery itself must speed up if the world is to address its challenges — from climate change to personalized treatments for cancer — fast enough to make a difference. In scientific research, “manual effort is not scalable,” writes Microsoft Health Futures’ Hoifung Poon in the…

A low carbon abundance in planetary atmospheres could be a signature of habitability. Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere say that astronomers’ best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence, rather than the presence, of a chemical feature in their atmospheres.

The researchers propose that if a terrestrial planet has substantially less CO₂ in its atmosphere compared to other planets in the same system, it could be a sign of liquid water — and possibly life — on that planet’s surface.

What’s more, this new signature is within the sights of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). While scientists have proposed other signs of habitability, those features are challenging if not impossible to measure with current technologies. The team says this new signature, of relatively depleted carbon dioxide, is the only sign of habitability that is detectable now.

Computational Chemistry.

AI chemist performs complex experiments based on plain text prompts.

On its first try, the technology could successfully replicate work that won a Nobel prize.

University of Chicago scientists have developed a way to improve chemical reactions in drug manufacturing using electricity. This breakthrough in electrochemistry, enhancing efficiency and sustainability, opens new avenues in green chemical production. Credit: SciTechDaily.com.

As the world moves away from gas towards electricity as a greener power source, the to-do list goes beyond cars. The vast global manufacturing network that makes everything from our batteries to our fertilizers needs to flip the switch, too.

A study from UChicago chemists found a way to use electricity to boost a type of chemical reaction often used in synthesizing new candidates for pharmaceutical drugs.

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and Dresden University of Technology have unraveled the water adsorption mechanism in certain microporous materials—so-called hierarchical metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)—while probing them on the atomic scale.

Discovered only about 25 years ago, their special properties quickly led to a reputation as “miracle materials”—which, as it turned out, can even harvest water from air. The researchers describe how the material achieves this in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“These very special materials are highly porous solids made of metals or metal-oxygen clusters which are connected in a modular way by pillars of organic chemicals. This 3D arrangement leads to networks of cavities reminiscent of the pores of a kitchen sponge. It is precisely these cavities that we are interested in,” says Dr. Ahmed Attallah of HZDR´s Institute of Radiation Physics.