Credit: INRS
A research team from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) has developed a process for the electrolytic treatment of wastewater that degrades microplastics at the source. The results of this research have been published in the
Environmental Pollution journal.
Wastewater can carry high concentrations of microplastics into the environment. These small particles of less than 5 mm can come from our clothes, usually as microfibers. Professor Patrick Drogui, who led the study, points out there are currently no established degradation methods to handle this contaminant during wastewater treatment. Some techniques already exist, but they often involve physical separation as a means of filtering pollutants. These technologies do not degrade them, which requires additional work to manage the separated particles.
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Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University jointly with colleagues from the University of Lille (Lille, France) synthetized a new material based on reduced graphene oxide (rGO) for supercapacitors, energy storage devices. The rGO modification method with the use of organic molecules, derivatives of hypervalent iodine, allowed obtaining a material that stores 1.7 times more electrical energy. The research findings are published in
Electrochimica Acta academic journal (IF: 6,215; Q1).
Photo: modified rGO supercapacitor electrodes
A supercapacitor is an electrochemical device for storage and release of electric charge. Unlike batteries, they store and release energy several times faster and do not contain lithium.
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IMAGE: (a) Illustration of the structure of a nanodiamond quantum sensor coated with a pyrogenic polymer, and how it operates as a hybrid nanoheater/thermometer. (b) Electron microscope image of hybrid sensors.. view more
Credit: Osaka University
Osaka, Japan - A team of scientists from Osaka University, The University of Queensland, and the National University of Singapore s Faculty of Engineering used tiny nanodiamonds coated with a heat-releasing polymer to probe the thermal properties of cells. When irradiated with light from a laser, the sensors acted both as heaters and thermometers, allowing the thermal conductivity of the interior of a cell to be calculated. This work may lead to a new set of heat-based treatments for killing bacteria or cancer cells.
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IMAGE: a, Zero-index PhC slab without BICs. A photonic dipole mode forming the zero index results in out-of-plane radiation, dramatically increasing the propagation loss of the material. b, Zero-index PhC slab. view more
Credit: by Tian Dong, Jiujiu Liang, Philip Camayd-Muñoz, Yueyang Liu, Haoning Tang, Shota Kita, Peipei Chen, Xiaojun Wu, Weiguo Chu, Eric Mazur, and Yang Li
A refractive index of zero induces a wave vector with zero amplitude and undefined direction. Therefore, light propagating inside a zero-index medium does not accumulate any spatial phase advance, resulting in perfect spatial coherence. Such coherence brings several potential applications, including arbitrarily shaped waveguides, phase-mismatch-free nonlinear propagation, large-area single-mode lasers, and extended super radiance. A promising platform to achieve these applications is an integrated Dirac-cone material that features an impedance-matched zero index. However, although this pla
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IMAGE: The device processing for the double-clamped GaN bridge resonator on Si substrate:
(1) The as-grown GaN epitaxial film on Si substrate. Except for the AlN buffer layer, no strain removal layer is. view more
Credit: Liwen Sang
Liwen Sang, independent scientist at International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science (also JST PRESTO researcher) developed a MEMS resonator that stably operates even under high temperatures by regulating the strain caused by the heat from gallium nitride (GaN).
High-precision synchronization is required for the fifth generation mobile communication system (5G) with a high speed and large capacity. To that end, a high-performance frequency reference oscillator which can balance the temporal stability and temporal resolution is necessary as a timing device to generate signals on a fixed cycle. The conventional quartz resonator as the oscillator has the poor integration capability an