Tag: Materials

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Air-Gen-Ku by James Penha

tension from thin air
moisture poring dynamo
teensy as thin hair

by James Penha

Scientists have invented a tiny (I mean tiny!) generator that processes our air’s humidity through nanopores so as to create, in effect, a perfectly clean battery that continuously produces electricity. The news knocked me out; I had to knock out a sciku.

Further reading
‘Scientists find way to make energy from air using nearly any material’, 2023, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/05/26/harvest-energy-thin-air/

‘Generic Air-Gen Effect in Nanoporous Materials for Sustainable Energy Harvesting from Air Humidity’, 2023, X. Liu,  H. Gao,  L. Sun &  J. Yao, Advanced Materials, https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202300748

Author Bio
Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry. You can find out more about James’ poetry on his website https://jamespenha.com and catch up with him on Twitter @JamesPenha

Enjoyed James’ sciku? Check out more of his sciku here: ‘Quantumku‘, ‘DNAncient’ and ‘If a Tree Talks in a Forest’.

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An Evening in the Lab by Dr Bhavin Siritanaratkul

In mid-2021 The Sciku Project teamed up with the Literature and Science Hub at the University of Liverpool to run the ‘Research in Verse Poetry Competition’, open to staff and postgraduate research students across the university to submit poems about their research subject. The competition saw poems addressing all sorts of topics, ranging from gravity to slavery to life in the lab.

Dr Bhavin Siritanaratkul’s poem ‘An Evening in the Lab’ was praised by the judges as a notable entry:

An evening in the lab

Quiet corridors, empty desks
The light patter of rain
Graphs on my screen, a tangle of lines
A fog on my brain

Discarded reactions, black lumps of carbon
The products of my labour
Wrong trends, unequal sums
This week’s experiments, a failure

Replace elements, reroute gas lines
New patterns and ideas converge
Remake electrodes, repeat measurements
A hazy plan, outlines emerge

Darkened skies, unyielding rain
But gone was my sorrow
Lightened steps, a clear mind
Decision made, new experiments tomorrow!

Background

My research is in the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide, with the dream to use renewable electricity to convert carbon dioxide back to valuable fuels and chemicals. The poem was written while I was looking for a break in the evening when none of my experiments were working.

Dr Bhavin Siritanaratkul is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liverpool with a focus on carbon dioxide reduction. You can connect with him on Twitter here: @BhavinSiri

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Attachment

muscles need iron
so do mussels it appears
such sticky anchors

Iron is an essential element for almost all living organisms. The majority of iron in mammals is found in red blood cells (haemoglobin) and muscle cells (myoglobin), supporting the transport, storage and release of oxygen. In humans, iron deficiency is the most common nutritional deficiency in the world and can lead to iron-deficiency anaemia, symptoms of which include fatigue, headaches, weakness, angina, breathlessness, complications during pregnancy and delayed growth in infants and children.

Iron is also important for many animals, utilised to help strengthen hard materials such as rodent teeth or the carbonate armour of some gastropods. Yet iron can be found in soft biological materials too, including the sticky anchors that mussels use to attach to rocks and the threads that connect those adhesives to the mussels’ inner tissues.

To investigate the importance of iron in mussel anchors, Hamada et al. (2020) varied seawater iron levels in a controlled environment and examined adhesive thread samples from Blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) which had been living in the water for 3 days. The researchers measured thread strength by securing the entire length of the threads and measuring how much force was required to pull them until the adhesive failed.

Adhesive strength increased as the iron level of the water increased until an optimal amount was reached, after which the adhesive strength declined. Examination of the plaques themselves also revealed differences in morphology, including colour and microstructural features, arising from the different iron levels of the water.

The results confirm that iron is a key component of how mussels anchor themselves to rocks and demonstrate how changing ocean chemistry might affect these molluscs in the future.

Further reading: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c02392

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Shrimp molting by Prof Hortense Le Ferrand

Hiding, weak and soft,
Mantis Shrimp matures and grows,
Preparing attack.

by Prof Hortense Le Ferrand

The Mantis Shrimp is an extraordinary animal in many ways. One of its striking features is its dactyl club: this is a biomaterial that is so hard and tough that it uses it to dismantle crabs and break seashells. But the Mantis Shrimp also grows by molting: during this process, it discards its club, and builds a new one.

In the paper by Amini et al (2019), the club of the Mantis was dissected during its maturation, from day zero to one month. It was observed that a thin membrane, initially folded into a cavity at the centre of the “old” club got inflated, before slowly being converted into the hard deadly appendage. The Mantis remained hidden in its nest until the biomineralization completed and the extraordinary mechanical properties of the club got recovered.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1816835116

Dr Hortense Le Ferrand is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. Hortense’s interests are on the fabrication and design of novel materials and systems inspired by nature. Check out her earlier sciku ‘Closing the Trap’ here.

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Oh ketchup packet!

Oh ketchup packet!

How to get the last sauce out?

Hydrocarbon films!

 

Waste from packaging where food products can’t be completely extracted builds up. Now research by Mukherjee et al (2018) suggests a solution might be at hand. The researchers found that hydrocarbon-based polymer films can be stably impregnated with vegetable oils. The resulting material is slippery and durable, ideal for the inside of packaging to reduce food sticking and waste.

Whilst this sounds high-tech the researchers were actually inspired by the pitcher plant which uses a slippery coating on its leaves to capture visiting insects.

Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-29823-7

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Snakeskin secrets

Learning from nature:

Snakeskin secrets revealing

lessons in friction.

 

The natural world has inspired engineering and design in countless ways. Now researchers are looking at snakeskins in an attempt to better understand an understudied engineering area: friction.

Abdel-Aal (2018) summarises findings from 40 species of snake to understand how the textural traits of snake skin compare to the standard features of textured industrial surfaces. This exploratory framework could subsequently lead to new, nature-inspired smart surfaces.

Original paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmbbm.2017.11.008

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Bright baubles

Bright baubles – the toys

of our childhood. What dangers

lurk behind your joys?

 

Toys have to be versatile – they need to be interesting, fun, tough and safe. Plenty of toys are collector’s items, sold in second-hand stores or passed onto the next generation. Yet some plastic toys may have a hidden danger.

Turner (2018) analysed used plastic toys using x-ray fluorescence spectrometry. Hazardous elements, including lead, barium, bromine, cadmium and selenium, were found to be present in many of the toys. Among the worst offenders were Lego bricks from the 1970s which had high levels of cadmium (particularly the colours red and yellow), reflecting manufacturing processes at the time of production. Happily toy production is a lot safer nowadays.

Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b04685

 

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Closing the trap by Dr Hortense Le Ferrand

A feather falling –

hungry inert soul wakes up,

snaps, closing the trap.

The Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is a carnivorous plant that performs one of the fastest movements in the flora: when an insects touches the hairs inside the leaves of the trap, it closes in a few milliseconds.

Inspired by the plants and its internal microstructure, a team of researchers from ETH Zürich and Purdue University have developed a composite material mimicking the Venus leaf and able to change shape as fast as the plant (Schmied & Le Ferrand et al, 2017).

Thanks to the good match between the theoretical simulations and the experimental results, their method opens new avenues for the creation of autonomous and fast robotic devices.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-3190/aa5efd

Dr Hortense Le Ferrand is a postdoctoral fellow at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. Hortense’s interests are on the fabrication and design of novel materials and systems inspired by nature. Check out her other scku ‘Shrimp molting’ here.