Graphene Nanocomposite Foam Material Harvests Water from Air

Researchers in China have demonstrated a graphene nanocomposite foam-based water harvesting system to harvest water from air. The team reports their findings in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (“Superelastic Graphene Nanocomposite for High Cycle-Stability Water Capture-Release under Sunlight”).

Only 30% of all freshwater on the planet is not locked up in ice caps or glaciers (not for much longer, though). Of that, some 20% is in areas too remote for humans to access and of the remaining 80% about three-quarters comes at the wrong time and place – in monsoons and floods – and is not always captured for use by people. The remainder is less than 0.08 of 1% of the total water on the planet (read more: “Nanotechnology and water treatment“)

An abundance of water equivalent to about 10% of the total freshwater in lakes exists in the earth atmosphere, which can be a non-negligible freshwater resource to fight against the water shortage.

That’s where the graphene nanocomposite foam comes in: The foam realizes water harvesting through a capture-release cycle:

1) the capture process is composed of moisture adsorption from air by lithium chloride (LiCl) and water preservation by poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and

2) the release relies on the solar-to-thermal transformer, reduced graphene oxide (rGO), to facilitate evaporation. In addition, polyimide is employed as a substrate material for the purpose of 3D porous structure formation and mechanical property enhancement.

Photograph, schematic diagram, and SEM images of the graphene nanocomposite foam. (a) Photograph of the graphene nanocomposite foam. (b) Schematic diagram of the graphene nanocomposite foam. Foam was prepared through a three-step process: freeze-drying, thermal annealing, and hydrophilic treatment. rGO/PI nanosheet, as the basic unit, can achieve the water harvesting capture-release cycle without additional energy input. (c) SEM image presents a porous structure of the rGO/PI foam without hydrophilic treatment. (d) Magnified SEM image of the rGO/PI foam without hydrophilic treatment to show a relatively smooth surface of the nanosheet. (e) SEM image of the graphene nanocomposite foam after hydrophilic treatment. (f) Magnified SEM image of the hydrophilic rGO/PI foam with bumped nanostructures. (g) Schematic diagram of the water vapor capture-release cycle. LiCl and PVA were responsible for the water capture and water storage, respectively. Adsorbed water was stored as crystallized water in LiCl hydrates and the free water molecules were restrained by hydroxyl groups on PVA through the hydrogen bond, which led to the transformation of the nanosheet from dry status to wet status. Opposite procedure, from wet status to dry status, was realized by the rGO converting the solar energy to thermal energy to facilitate water evaporation under irradiation. (Reprinted with permission by American Chemical Society) (click on image to enlarge)

The as-fabricated foam can adsorb water up to 2.87 g per gram in 24 hours at a relative humidity of 90% and a temperature of 30°C, and release almost all the uptake water when it is exposed under a flux of 1 sun (1000 W per square meter, equal to the light intensity of natural sunlight) for 3 hours.

At the same time, the functional foam shows superelasticity, lightweight, and remarkable reusability, thus revealing its possibility to practical use.

The researchers write that, even though the rGO/PI nanocomposite foam can harvest freshwater from air, it is essential to enhance water harvesting efficiency.

“Another big challenge impedes the water harvesting system utilization to explore a more cost-effective way to prepare the products,” they conclude. “Though the three-step synthesis method and the composition of the foam have been optimized, it is still necessary to reduce the cost and increase the fabrication efficiency. Meanwhile, environmentally friendly materials are recommended, which would take the water harvesting system one step further to commercial application and large-scale production.”

By Michael Berger – Nanowerk

Sources

Bo Chen^†‡, Xue Zhao^†‡, and Ya Yang*^†‡§ 

^† CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Beijing Key Laboratory of Micro-Nano Energy and Sensor, Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, P. R. China

^‡ School of Nanoscience and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, P. R. China

^§ Center on Nanoenergy Research, School of Physical Science and Technology, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi 530004, P. R. China

MIT: Nanoparticles take a “Fantastic, (magnetic) Voyage” – Helping Drug-Delivery Nanoparticles Reach Their Targets (with Video)

MIT engineers have designed a magnetic microrobot that can help push drug-delivery particles into tumor tissue (left). They also employed swarms of naturally magnetic bacteria to achieve the same effect (right). Image courtesy of the researchers.

Tiny robots powered by magnetic fields could help drug-delivery nanoparticles reach their targets.

MIT engineers have designed tiny robots that can help drug-delivery nanoparticles push their way out of the bloodstream and into a tumor or another disease site. Like crafts in “Fantastic Voyage” — a 1960s science fiction film in which a submarine crew shrinks in size and roams a body to repair damaged cells — the robots swim through the bloodstream, creating a current that drags nanoparticles along with them.

The magnetic microrobots, inspired by bacterial propulsion, could help to overcome one of the biggest obstacles to delivering drugs with nanoparticles: getting the particles to exit blood vessels and accumulate in the right place.

“When you put nanomaterials in the bloodstream and target them to diseased tissue, the biggest barrier to that kind of payload getting into the tissue is the lining of the blood vessel,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the senior author of the study.

“Our idea was to see if you can use magnetism to create fluid forces that push nanoparticles into the tissue,” adds Simone Schuerle, a former MIT postdoc and lead author of the paper, which appears in the April 26 issue of Science Advances.

In the same study, the researchers also showed that they could achieve a similar effect using swarms of living bacteria that are naturally magnetic. Each of these approaches could be suited for different types of drug delivery, the researchers say.

Tiny robots

Schuerle, who is now an assistant professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), first began working on tiny magnetic robots as a graduate student in Brad Nelson’s Multi-scale Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich. When she came to Bhatia’s lab as a postdoc in 2014, she began investigating whether this kind of bot could help to make nanoparticle drug delivery more efficient.

In most cases, researchers target their nanoparticles to disease sites that are surrounded by “leaky” blood vessels, such as tumors. This makes it easier for the particles to get into the tissue, but the delivery process is still not as effective as it needs to be.

The MIT team decided to explore whether the forces generated by magnetic robots might offer a better way to push the particles out of the bloodstream and into the target site.

The robots that Schuerle used in this study are 35 hundredths of a millimeter long, similar in size to a single cell, and can be controlled by applying an external magnetic field. This bio-inspired robot, which the researchers call an “artificial bacterial flagellum,” consists of a tiny helix that resembles the flagella that many bacteria use to propel themselves. These robots are 3-D-printed with a high-resolution 3-D printer and then coated with nickel, which makes them magnetic.

To test a single robot’s ability to control nearby nanoparticles, the researchers created a microfluidic system that mimics the blood vessels that surround tumors. The channel in their system, between 50 and 200 microns wide, is lined with a gel that has holes to simulate the broken blood vessels seen near tumors.

Using external magnets, the researchers applied magnetic fields to the robot, which makes the helix rotate and swim through the channel. Because fluid flows through the channel in the opposite direction, the robot remains stationary and creates a convection current, which pushes 200-nanometer polystyrene particles into the model tissue. These particles penetrated twice as far into the tissue as nanoparticles delivered without the aid of the magnetic robot.

This type of system could potentially be incorporated into stents, which are stationary and would be easy to target with an externally applied magnetic field. Such an approach could be useful for delivering drugs to help reduce inflammation at the site of the stent, Bhatia says.

Bacterial swarms

The researchers also developed a variant of this approach that relies on swarms of naturally magnetotactic bacteria instead of microrobots. Bhatia has previously developed bacteria that can be used to deliver cancer-fighting drugs and to diagnose cancer, exploiting bacteria’s natural tendency to accumulate at disease sites.

For this study, the researchers used a type of bacteria called Magnetospirillum magneticum, which naturally produces chains of iron oxide. These magnetic particles, known as magnetosomes, help bacteria orient themselves and find their preferred environments.

The researchers discovered that when they put these bacteria into the microfluidic system and applied rotating magnetic fields in certain orientations, the bacteria began to rotate in synchrony and move in the same direction, pulling along any nanoparticles that were nearby. In this case, the researchers found that nanoparticles were pushed into the model tissue three times faster than when the nanoparticles were delivered without any magnetic assistance.

This bacterial approach could be better suited for drug delivery in situations such as a tumor, where the swarm, controlled externally without the need for visual feedback, could generate fluidic forces in vessels throughout the tumor.

The particles that the researchers used in this study are big enough to carry large payloads, including the components required for the CRISPR genome-editing system, Bhatia says. She now plans to collaborate with Schuerle to further develop both of these magnetic approaches for testing in animal models.

The research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Branco Weiss Fellowship, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Electric Car Price Tag Shrinks Along With Battery Cost – Updated ‘Crossover Point’ – 2022

Big things, small packages. Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

Every year, Bloomberg NEF’s advanced transport team builds a bottom-up analysis of the cost of purchasing an electric vehicle and compares it to the cost of a combustion-engine vehicle of the same size. The crossover point — when electric vehicles become cheaper than their combustion-engine equivalents — will be a crucial moment for the EV market. All things being equal, upfront price parity makes a buyer’s decision to buy an EV a matter of taste, style or preference — but not, for much longer, a matter of cost.

Every year, that crossover point gets closer. In 2017, a Bloomberg NEF analysis forecast that the crossover point was in 2026, nine years out. In 2018, the crossover point was in 2024 — six years (or, as I described it then, two lease cycles) out.

The crossover point, per the latest analysis, is now 2022 for large vehicles in the European Union. For that, we can thank the incredible shrinking electric vehicle battery, which isn’t so much shrinking in size as it is shrinking — dramatically — in cost.

Analysts have for several years been using a sort of shorthand for describing an electric vehicle battery: half the car’s total cost. That figure, and that shorthand, has changed in just a few years. For a midsize U.S. car in 2015, the battery made up more than 57 percent of the total cost. This year, it’s 33 percent. By 2025, the battery will be only 20 percent of total vehicle cost.

My colleague Nikolas Soulopoulos, author of the research note, provided further insights. The first is that he expects electric vehicle chassis and body costs to drop slightly, while those same costs will rise modestly for combustion vehicles “as a result of light-weighting and other measures to help comply with emissions targets.”

Second, Soulopoulos expects bigger cost improvements in the electric powertrain, as “large-volume manufacturing is only now beginning for such parts.” By 2030, costs for motors, inverters and power electronics could be 25 to 30 percent lower than they are today.

The incredible shrinking electric vehicle battery doesn’t just mean cheaper electric passenger cars. It also means all sorts of other vehicles that weren’t previously practical to electrify now are — and beyond proof-of-concept scale, too.

One example: Komatsu Ltd. has just announced a small all-electric excavator. The company’s rationale is worth reading:

Equipped with an in-house developed new charger, high-voltage converter and other devices, it offers excavation performance on par with the internal combustion model of the same power output, while achieving zero exhaust gas emissions and a dynamic reduction in noise levels. It is an environment and people-friendly machine. Komatsu expects a wider range of applications for this machine, including construction work near hospitals or schools or in residential areas, where contractors have conventionally paid special attention to exhaust gas and noise during work, as well as inside tunnels or buildings.

There are new electric vehicles at sea as well. Stena Line plans to install batteries in one of its car ferries between Sweden and Denmark, rolling out its battery systems incrementally. The first, a 1 megawatt-hour battery, will power the ship when it is maneuvering in port. The next, a 20 megawatt-hour battery, will provide power for port operations and “about 10 nautical miles” beyond. The final, a 50 megawatt-hour battery, will provide 50 nautical miles’ worth of power. “As both the size and cost of batteries decrease, battery operation becomes a very exciting alternative to traditional fuels for shipping, as emissions to air can be completely eliminated,” says Stena Line’s CEO Niclas Martensson.

Smaller EV batteries will soon be flying, too. Harbour Air Ltd., which operates 42 planes in 12 short routes in British Columbia, is adding an electric plane to its fleet. “The intent is to eventually convert the entire fleet,” says founder and CEO Greg McDougall, who offers a familiar rationale for his optimism: Ranges and capabilities “are changing very rapidly with the development of the battery technology.”

McDougall’s company is seeking approval for his plans ahead of today’s battery economics in anticipation of what’s coming. “We don’t want to be trying to get through the regulatory process after it becomes more economically viable; we want to do it now,” he says.

 

Nathaniel Bullard is a Bloomberg NEF energy analyst, covering technology and business model innovation and system-wide resource transitions.

 

 

Chinese electric car maker BYD reports 632% jump in profits … “Taking Tesla to the Wood Shed”

Electric car maker BYD is speeding ahead of Tesla with respect to profitability.

The Chinese company today (April 28) reported a 632% jump in profits in the first quarter from a year ago. Days earlier, the US car company led by Elon Musk announced one of its worst quarters ever.

BYD is the world’s largest electric vehicle maker (membership), though its brand isn’t widely recognized outside of China. It started out as a battery maker about 25 years ago and transitioned into the car business a little more than a decade ago, making both conventional fossil fuel-powered cars and “new energy vehicles.”

The success of its first mass-produced hybrid caught the attention of legendary US investor Warren Buffett, who in 2008 bought a 10% stake in BYD for $230 million. That investment seems to be really paying off right now.

There is increased demand for electric vehicles in China, BYD says, and it expects continued growth. The company’s profits rose to about 750 million yuan ($111 million) in the first quarter, compared to 102 million yuan a year ago. BYD sold 73,172 new energy vehicles (pdf) in the quarter, up 147% from the same period a year ago.  

Including conventional fuel cars, it sold 73,172 vehicles in the quarter, up 5% from last year. The company is now selling more electric vehiclesthan conventional cars.

“New energy vehicles are expected to continue to sell well in the second quarter, and new energy vehicle sales and revenues continue to maintain strong growth,” the company’s latest stock exchange filing reports.

According to Reuters, BYD expects to sell 655,000 cars in 2019, and will account for a substantial portion of the 1.6 million electric vehicle total that China’s Association of Automobile Manufacturers predicts will be sold this year.

In stark contrast to this positive news for BYD, its US rival Tesla lost nearly $700 million in the first quarter. It attributed over $120 million in losses to a higher return rate than expected after it raised prices for the Model S and Model X.

In its quarterly earnings call, Tesla chief financial officer Zachary Kirkhorn described the first quarter as “one of the most complicated… in the history of the company.”

Beyond its faltering quarterly profits, Tesla also had some bad news in China to contend with recently.

Last week, a video that circulated widely on Chinese social media showed a parked Tesla Model S abruptly caching fire in Shanghai, where the company plans to build its first overseas factory. Earlier in the month, a parked Tesla in the US also caught fire.

The two electric vehicle makers do have something in common, however. Tesla and BYD both plan to expand into each other’s markets. China is the world’s largest car market, and the US comes second.

Read More: BYD Sold Over 28,000 EVs In January — Will China See Over 50% Sales Growth Again This Year? — #CleanTechnica Report

A new battery for EV’s that lasts 1 million Miles – Coming Next Year – Tesla CEO Elon Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that the automaker is working on a new battery pack to come out next year which will last 1 million miles.

When talking about the economics of Tesla’s future fleet of robotaxis at the Tesla Autonomy Event yesterday, Musk emphasized that the vehicles need to be durable in order for the economics to work:

“The cars currently built are all designed for a million miles of operation. The drive unit is design, tested, and validated for 1 million miles of operation.”

Tesla says it will roll out robotaxis in U.S. next year

But the CEO admitted that the battery packs are not built to last 1 million miles.

Just a week ago, Musk said that they built Model 3 to last as long as a commercial truck, a million miles, and the battery modules should last between 300,000 miles and 500,000 miles.

At the time, he also said that Tesla plans to provide battery module replacements.

Now, Musk added that there’s a new Tesla battery pack coming that will last as long as the rest of the vehicles:

“The new battery pack that is probably going to production next year is designed explicitly for 1 million miles of operation.”

The CEO said that they are optimizing every aspect of the cars, including the tires, in order to achieve minimal maintenance to create an “hyper-efficient” electric robotaxi.

Read More: Tesla acquires robots company to accelerate car production

Electrek’s Take

With Tesla still being relatively young for an automaker, we have a limited set of data to look into the longevity of Tesla’s vehicles.

Early data about Tesla battery degradation show less than 10% reduction in energy capacity after over 160,000 miles, but that’s about all we have.

It’s pretty good, but 1 million miles is a whole new level.

We know that Tesla has been focusing its battery research on longevity for a while now.

Earlier this year, we reported on Tesla’s battery research group led by Jeff Dahn in Halifax applying for a patent that describes a new battery cell chemistry that would result in faster charging and discharging, better longevity, and even lower cost.

The battery technology that Tesla is trying to get through its acquisition of Maxwell could also potentially result in longevity improvements.

Read More About Maxwell: Tesla’s newly acquired battery tech could result in more power, longer range, and more durability

What CEO EM is saying now might be the result of some of those recent advancements in battery technology starting to be implemented by Tesla.

Cornell University: RESEARCHERS CREATE MATERIAL WITH “ARTIFICIAL METABOLISM”

Scientists just got one step closer to creating living machines — or at least machines that mimic biological life as we know it.

A new biomaterial built in a Cornell University bioengineering lab uses synthetic DNA to continuously and autonomously organize, assemble, and restructure itself in a process so similar to how biological cells and tissues grow that the researchers are calling “artificial metabolism,” according to researchpublished in Science Robotics last week.

 We Can Regrow It

It’s clear that the scientists are dancing around the idea of creating lifelike machinery. They stop short of straight-up claiming that their metabolizing biomaterial is alive, but the research begins by coyly listing the characteristics of life that the material exhibits — self-assembly, organization, and metabolism.

We are introducing a brand-new, lifelike material concept powered by its very own artificial metabolism,” Cornell engineer Dan Lui said in a university-published press release. “We are not making something that’s alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before.”

Worming Along

The biomaterial mimics a biological organism’s endless metabolic cycle of taking in energy and replacing old cells. When placed in a nutrient-rich environment, the material grew in the direction of the raw materials and food it needed to thrive — not unlike how a developing brain’s neurons grow out in the direction of specific molecules.

Meanwhile, the material also let its tail end die off and decay, giving the appearance of a constantly-regrowing slime mold traveling around toward food.

While the little bio-blob isn’t alive, it does appear to move and grow like a living thing, suggesting that scientists are blurring the line between life and machine more and more.

READ MORE: FORGET ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; THINK ARTIFICIAL LIFE[Hackaday]

More on biomaterials: Scientists Manipulated a Material for Robots That Grows Like Human Skin

Scientists Use Near-Infrared Light and Injected DNA Nanodevice to Guide Stem Cells to a Wound – Accelerating the Healing Process

Researchers can guide stem cells (like those in the illustration above) to an injury by using near-infrared light and an injected DNA nanodevice. (Image credit: Juan Gaertner/Shutterstock.com)

Imagine physicians having a remote control that they could employ to drive a patient’s own cells to a wound to accelerate the healing process.

Such a device is still away from reality, however, scientists have described in the ACS journal Nano Letters of having taken a key initial step: They employed near-infrared light and an injected DNA nanodevice to direct stem cells to a wound, which helped in the regrowth of muscle tissue in mice.

Complex signaling pathways synchronize cellular activities like proliferation, movement, and even death. For instance, when signaling molecules attach to proteins known as receptor tyrosine kinases on a cell’s surface, they stimulate the receptors to pair up and phosphorylate each other. This process can trigger other proteins that eventually result in a cell moving or growing.

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Hong-Hui Wang, Zhou Nie, and partners doubted if they could set up a nanodevice to cells that would rewire this system, activating the receptors by near-infrared light rather than signaling molecules. The scientists opted for near-infrared as it can penetrate living tissues, in contrast to visible or ultraviolet light. The group aimed a receptor tyrosine kinase known as MET, which is important for wound healing.

The scientists developed a DNA molecule that can attach to two MET receptors at the same time, binding them together and stimulating them. In order to make the system responsive to light, the researchers linked multiple copies of the DNA sequence to gold nanorods. On irradiating near-infrared light, the nanorods get heated up and release the DNA so that it could trigger the receptors.

The scientists introduced the DNA-bound gold nanorods into mice at the injured area and illuminated a near-infrared light on the mice for a few minutes. After three days, more muscle stem cells had moved to the wound in treated mice when compared to those in untreated mice. The treated mice also exhibited improved signs of muscle regeneration in comparison to control mice.

The researchers acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Science and Technology Major Project, the Young Top-Notch Talent for Ten Thousand Talent Program, the Keypoint Research and Invention Program of Hunan Province, and the National Institutes of Health.

 

 

Computer scientists create reprogrammable molecular computing system – “Nano DNA Apps”

 

“Biology is proof that chemistry is inherently information-based and can store information that can direct algorithmic behavior at the molecular level,” he says.

Computer scientists at Caltech have designed DNA molecules that can carry out reprogrammable computations, for the first time creating so-called algorithmic self-assembly in which the same “hardware” can be configured to run different “software.”

In a paper published in Nature on March 21, a team headed by Caltech’s Erik Winfree (PhD ’98), professor of computer science, computation and neural systems, and bioengineering, showed how the DNA computations could execute six-bit algorithms that perform simple tasks. The system is analogous to a computer, but instead of using transistors and diodes, it uses molecules to represent a six-bit binary number (for example, 011001) as input, during computation, and as output. One such algorithm determines whether the number of 1-bits in the input is odd or even, (the example above would be odd, since it has three 1-bits); while another determines whether the input is a palindrome; and yet another generates random numbers.

 

“Think of them as nano apps,” says Damien Woods, professor of computer science at Maynooth University near Dublin, Ireland, and one of two lead authors of the study. “The ability to run any type of software program without having to change the hardware is what allowed computers to become so useful. We are implementing that idea in molecules, essentially embedding an algorithm within chemistry to control chemical processes.”

The system works by self-assembly: small, specially designed DNA strands stick together to build a logic circuit while simultaneously executing the circuit algorithm. Starting with the original six bits that represent the input, the system adds row after row of molecules–progressively running the algorithm.

 

Modern digital electronic computers use electricity flowing through circuits to manipulate information; here, the rows of DNA strands sticking together perform the computation. The end result is a test tube filled with billions of completed algorithms, each one resembling a knitted scarf of DNA, representing a readout of the computation. The pattern on each “scarf” gives you the solution to the algorithm that you were running. The system can be reprogrammed to run a different algorithm by simply selecting a different subset of strands from the roughly 700 that constitute the system.

 

“We were surprised by the versatility of programs we were able to design, despite being limited to six-bit inputs,” says David Doty, fellow lead author and assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis.

“When we began experiments, we had only designed three programs. But once we started using the system, we realized just how much potential it has. It was the same excitement we felt the first time we programmed a computer, and we became intensely curious about what else these strands could do. By the end, we had designed and run a total of 21 circuits.”

 

The researchers were able to experimentally demonstrate six-bit molecular algorithms for a diverse set of tasks. In mathematics, their circuits tested inputs to assess if they were multiples of three, performed equality checks, and counted to 63. Other circuits drew “pictures” on the DNA “scarves,” such as a zigzag, a double helix, and irregularly spaced diamonds.

Probabilistic behaviors were also demonstrated, including random walks, as well as a clever algorithm (originally developed by computer pioneer John von Neumann) for obtaining a fair 50/50 random choice from a biased coin.

 

Both Woods and Doty were theoretical computer scientists when beginning this research, so they had to learn a new set of “wet lab” skills that are typically more in the wheelhouse of bioengineers and biophysicists.

“When engineering requires crossing disciplines, there is a significant barrier to entry,” says Winfree. “Computer engineering overcame this barrier by designing machines that are reprogrammable at a high level–so today’s programmers don’t need to know transistor physics. Our goal in this work was to show that molecular systems similarly can be programmed at a high level, so that in the future, tomorrow’s molecular programmers can unleash their creativity without having to master multiple disciplines.”

“Unlike previous experiments on molecules specially designed to execute a single computation, reprogramming our system to solve these different problems was as simple as choosing different test tubes to mix together,” Woods says. “We were programming at the lab bench.”

Although DNA computers have the potential to perform more complex computations than the ones featured in the Nature paper, Winfree cautions that one should not expect them to start replacing the standard silicon microchip computers. That is not the point of this research.

“These are rudimentary computations, but they have the power to teach us more about how simple molecular processes like self-assembly can encode information and carry out algorithms. Biology is proof that chemistry is inherently information-based and can store information that can direct algorithmic behavior at the molecular level,” he says.

 

Diverse and robust molecular algorithms using reprogrammable DNA self-assembly

Damien Woods, David Doty, Cameron Myhrvold, Joy Hui, Felix Zhou, Peng Yin & Erik Winfree
Naturevolume 567, pages366–372 (2019)

 

Israeli scientists ‘print’ world’s first 3D heart with human tissue | The Jerusalem post

A team of Tel Aviv University researchers revealed the heart, which was made using a patient’s own cells and biological materials.
— Read on m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-scientists-print-first-3D-heart-586902/amp

Genesis Nanotech – ICYMI – Our Top 3 Blog Posts (as picked by you) This Week

#1

MIT Review: Borophene (not graphene) is the new wonder material that’s got everyone excited

#2

China made an artificial star that’s 6 times (6X) as hot as our sun … And it could be the future of energy

 

#3

Graphene Coating Could Help Prevent Lithium Battery Fires

 

Read/ Watch More …

Genesis Nanotech – Watch a Presentation Video on Our Current Project

Nano Enabled Batteries and Super Capacitors

Tenka Energy, Inc. Building Ultra-Thin Energy Dense SuperCaps and NexGen Nano-Enabled Pouch & Cylindrical Batteries – Energy Storage Made Small and POWERFUL!