Carbon emissions from air travel could be reduced thanks to a new collaboration between engineers from the Universities of Bath and Bristol and the aerospace industry.The £1.4 million project will investigate new ways of using composite materials for wing panels in aircraft.The research, funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and aircraft manufacturers Airbus and GKN, will be using carbon fibres that are curved within flat plates to produce damage-tolerant, buckle-free structures.This will lead to substantial cost and weight savings of between 10 and 30 per cent on structural components, saving fuel and reducing CO2 emissions from the aviation industry, in turn helping reduce the impact on the environment.Dr Richard Butler is leading the University of Bath team, which includes Dr H Alicia Kim and Professor Giles Hunt. The project stems from research carried out under the ABBSTRACT consortium (Airbus, Bristol, Bath STrategic Research Alliance in Composites Technology).Professor Paul Weaver, from the Department of Aerospace Engineering and the Advanced Composites Centre for Innovation and Science (ACCIS), is leading the University of Bristol team, which includes Dr Kevin Potter and Dr Stephen Hallett.The Bristol-based team will be leading the development and manufacturing of the new carbon fibre materials, and the Bath team will be investigating different designs for the structures of wing panels to test their damage tolerance. Both teams will be using mathematical modelling techniques to optimise and test their designs.he addition of GKN to the collaboration, as one of Airbus' risk sharing partners and supplier of major wing components, creates a strong link with the manufacturing industry.Dr Butler said: "This project could really make a difference in reducing the environmental impact of air travel."We will be pushing the boundaries of composites technology and believe we can help achieve thousands of tonnes in fuel saving over the life of an aircraft."Professor Weaver added: "This exciting programme will help ensure that the UK is at the forefront of aircraft structures technology." »

MIT researchers have demonstrated the first laser built from germanium that can produce wavelengths of light useful for optical communication. It's also the first germanium laser to operate at room temperature. Unlike the materials typically used in lasers, germanium is easy to incorporate into existing processes for manufacturing silicon chips. So the result could prove an important step toward computers that move data -- and maybe even perform calculations -- using light instead of electricity. But more fundamentally, the researchers have shown that, contrary to prior belief, a class of materials called indirect-band-gap semiconductors can yield practical lasers.As chips' computational capacity increases, they need higher-bandwidth connections to send data to memory. But conventional electrical connections will soon become impractical, because they'll require too much power to transport data at ever higher rates. Transmitting data with lasers -- devices that concentrate light into a narrow, powerful beam -- could be much more power-efficient, but it requires a cheap way to integrate optical and electronic components on silicon chips.Chip assembly is a painstaking process in which layers of different materials are deposited on a wafer of silicon, and patterns are etched into them. Inserting a new material into this process is difficult: it has to be able to chemically bond to the layers above and below it, and depositing it must be possible at the temperatures and in the chemical environments suitable to the other materials. »

A team of University of Toronto chemists have made a major contribution to the emerging field of quantum biology, observing quantum mechanics at work in photosynthesis in marine algae."There's been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices," says chemistry professor Greg Scholes, lead author of a new study published in Nature. "Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis."Special proteins called light-harvesting complexes are used in photosynthesis to capture sunlight and funnel its energy to nature's solar cells -- other proteins known as reaction centres. Scholes and his colleagues isolated light-harvesting complexes from two different species of marine algae and studied their function under natural temperature conditions using a sophisticated laser experiment known as two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy. »

Australia's own distinctive red soils could play a part in the formation of the stinking swathes of blue-green algae often shovelled off east coast beaches in summer.A QUT team of scientists is taking an in-depth look at how iron, which gives our iron-rich soil its red colour, reaches water to potentially contribute to the algal blooms, which not only have a foul smell, but also make our eyes sting, cause fish kills and smother seagrass.Their research is centred on the catchment of Poona Creek on the Fraser Coast which drains into Great Sandy Strait -- a dugong sanctuary and an internationally recognised wetlands for migratory birds.Iron is known to be a component causative factor for algal blooms but the mechanism by which solid iron in soils becomes soluble and contributes to coastal algae blooms is largely unknown.That is why the team from QUT' s Institute for Sustainable Resources is taking the three-pronged approach of microbiology (biogeochemistry), geochemistry and hydrology studies to put together enough pieces of the iron jigsaw to form the basis for future research into mitigating its contribution to dangerous algal blooms. »

Antiviral drugs block influenza A viruses from reproducing and spreading by attaching to a site within a proton channel necessary for the virus to infect healthy cells, according to a research project led by Iowa State University's Mei Hong and published in the Feb. 4 issue of the journal Nature.Hong, Iowa State's John D. Corbett Professor of Chemistry and an associate scientist for the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, said the findings clarify previous, conflicting studies and should pave the way to development of new antiviral drugs against influenza viruses, including pandemic H1N1.Two papers published by Nature in 2008 came to different conclusions about where the antiviral drug amantadine binds to a flu virus and stops it from infecting a healthy cell. A paper based on X-ray studies concluded the drug attached to the lumen of the proton channel, the area inside the channel, and stopped the virus by blocking the channel. Another paper based on solution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology concluded the drug attached to the surface of the virus protein near the proton channel and stopped the virus by indirectly changing the channel structure. »

Physicists have long wondered whether hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, could be transformed into a metal and possibly even a superconductor -- the elusive state in which electrons can flow without resistance.They have speculated that under certain pressure and temperature conditions hydrogen could be squeezed into a metal and possibly even a superconductor, but proving it experimentally has been difficult. High-pressure researchers, including Carnegie's Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao, have now modeled three hydrogen-dense metal alloys and found there are pressure and temperature trends associated with the superconducting state -- a huge boost in the understanding of how this abundant material could be harnessed.The study is published in the January 25, 2010, early, on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. »

Employing some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have shown that mismatched alloys are a good match for the future development of high performance thermoelectric devices. Thermoelectrics hold enormous potential for green energy production because of their ability to convert heat into electricity.Computations performed on "Franklin," a Cray XT4 massively parallel processing system operated by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), showed that the introduction of oxygen impurities into a unique class of semiconductors known as highly mismatched alloys (HMAs) can substantially enhance the thermoelectric performance of these materials without the customary degradation in electric conductivity."We are predicting a range of inexpensive, abundant, non-toxic materials in which the band structure can be widely tuned for maximal thermoelectric efficiency," says Junqiao Wu, a physicist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and a professor with UC Berkeley's Department of Materials Science and Engineering who led this research."Specifically, we've shown that the hybridization of electronic wave functions of alloy constituents in HMAs makes it possible to enhance thermopower without much reduction of electric conductivity, which is not the case for conventional thermoelectric materials," he says. »

Researchers from Purdue University and Cummins Inc. have developed an advanced "closed-loop control" approach for preventing diesel engines from emitting greater amounts of smog-causing nitrogen oxides when running on biodiesel fuels.Operating truck engines on a blend of biodiesel and ordinary diesel fuel dramatically reduces the emission of particulate matter, or soot. However, the most modern and efficient diesel engines burning biodiesel emit up to 40 percent more nitrogen oxides at some operating conditions, and fuel economy declines by as much as 20 percent.Unlike conventional diesel, biodiesel contains oxygen, and the researchers have shown that this presence of oxygen is responsible for the majority of the higher emission of nitrogen oxides, said Gregory Shaver, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering.Another key factor is a recent innovation called exhaust gas recirculation, which reroutes exhaust back into the engine cylinders to reduce emissions. The researchers found that nitrogen oxide emissions rise by a higher percentage in engines equipped with this exhaust-recirculation technology compared with older engines that do not. However, the newer engines still emit less nitrogen oxides than the older engines. »

Not every object is food to a Venus flytrap. Like the carnivorous plant, a new material developed at Northwestern University permanently traps only its desired prey, the radioactive ion cesium, and not other harmless ions like sodium.The synthetic material, made from layers of a gallium, sulfur and antimony compound, is very a sodium-heavy solution. (The solution had concentrations similar to those in real liquid nuclear waste.)It is, in fact, cesium itself that triggers a structural change in the material, causing it to snap shut its pores, or windows, and trap the cesium ions within. The material sequesters 100 percent of the cesium ions from the solution while at the same time ignoring all the sodium ions.The results are published online by the journal Nature Chemistry."Ideally we want to concentrate the radioactive material so it can be dealt with properly and the nonradioactive water thrown away," said Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's senior author. "A new class of materials that takes advantage of the flytrap mechanism could lead to a much-needed breakthrough in nuclear waste remediation." »

Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, can speed up photons (particles of light) to seemingly faster-than-light speeds through a stack of materials by adding a single, strategically placed layer.This experimental demonstration confirms intriguing quantum-physics predictions that light's transit time through complex multilayered materials need not depend on thickness, as it does for simple materials such as glass, but rather on the order in which the layers are stacked. This is the first published study of this dependence with single photons.Strictly speaking, light always achieves its maximum speed in a vacuum, or empty space, and slows down appreciably when it travels through a material substance, such as glass or water. The same is true for light traveling through a stack of dielectric materials, which are electrically insulating and can be used to create highly reflective structures that are often used as optical coatings on mirrors or fiber optics. »