Technology to recycle all type of plastics without using water

Traditionally, plastic recycling processes involve using a lot of water. In order to avoid this waste, Ak Inovex from Mexico developed a new green technology that doesn't require liquids, and has the capacity to process materials such as styrofoam, polystyrene and ABS (Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) using the same type of customizable machinery.

The technology developed by Marco Adame, founder of Ak Inovex, can process more than 90 percent of any type of plastic, avoids water waste and reduces production costs by half without reducing the quality of the pellets (small beads of recycled plastic) by avoiding stages with severe changes in temperature.
Marco Adame said than the original process of obtaining recycled beads involves washing and then grinding plastic containers. However, this type of plastic has the distinction of being hygroscopic (when it comes in contact with water it retains moisture at a molecular level), so it has to be dehydrated so it can be crystallized; this involves applying heat at 180º C and then cooling the material with water.
However, the development of AK Inovex performs all this process without water, so it goes directly to the formation of recycled beads. As a result the energy consumption is reduced by half, and also the physical space required to perform the operation is less because the system is smaller. Similarly the production of pellets is of better quality, a situation that makes the recycling process more profitable.
"Ak Inovex has a pending patent registration of the three technologies that integrate the development, which are responsible for cooling the plastic through contact with special walls and form the plastic beads," the founder of the company explained.
The advantage of this technology is its ability to process any type of plastic, such as styrofoam, polystyrene, PET and ABS; the difference lies in the mechanism, because there is a special piece for each type of material. The production capacity of plastic beads is of two tons and the team is currently working on increasing it to ten.
For next year, the company wants to change its business strategy and add an ecological washing machine for plastics that uses a special biodetergent, which will reduce the cost of operation even more.
Marco Adame commented that during their participation in the Cleantech Challenge Mexico, a contest to promote the development of green companies, he had contact with the ALINSA group, which is engaged in the manufacture of environmentally friendly cleaning products using biodegradable chemicals.
After the competition, the two companies started talking and joined efforts with the aim of integrating the ecological washing machine system using degradable plastic substances in less than 28 days without affecting the environment, hence replacing lye, which is the current substance used for washing the materials.

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The above story is based on materials provided by Investigación y Desarrollo. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

New half-light half-matter quantum particles created

Prospects of developing computing and communication technologies based on quantum properties of light and matter may have taken a major step forward thanks to research by City College of New York physicists led by Dr. Vinod Menon.

In a pioneering study, Professor Menon and his team were able to discover half-light, half-matter particles in atomically thin semiconductors (thickness ~ a millionth of a single sheet of paper) consisting of two-dimensional (2D) layer of molybdenum and sulfur atoms arranged similar to graphene. They sandwiched this 2D material in a light trapping structure to realize these composite quantum particles.
"Besides being a fundamental breakthrough, this opens up the possibility of making devices which take the benefits of both light and matter," said Professor Menon.
For example one can start envisioning logic gates and signal processors that take on best of light and matter. The discovery is also expected to contribute to developing practical platforms for quantum computing.
Dr. Dirk Englund, a professor at MIT whose research focuses on quantum technologies based on semiconductor and optical systems, hailed the City College study.
"What is so remarkable and exciting in the work by Vinod and his team is how readily this strong coupling regime could actually be achieved. They have shown convincingly that by coupling a rather standard dielectric cavity to exciton-polaritons in a monolayer of molybdenum disulphide, they could actually reach this strong coupling regime with a very large binding strength," he said.
Professor Menon's research team included City College PhD students, Xiaoze Liu, Tal Galfsky and Zheng Sun, and scientists from Yale University, National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) and Ecole Polytechnic -Montreal (Canada).
The study was funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory's Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation through the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center -- Center for Photonic and Multiscale Nanomaterials.

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The above story is based on materials provided by City College of New York. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Xiaoze Liu, Tal Galfsky, Zheng Sun, Fengnian Xia, Erh-chen Lin, Yi-Hsien Lee, Stéphane Kéna-Cohen, Vinod M. Menon. Strong light–matter coupling in two-dimensional atomic crystals. Nature Photonics, 2014; 9 (1): 30 DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2014.304

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Using light to understand the brain | sci-english.blogspot.com

Neurons in the cortex of a mouse express proteins enabling the 'reading' and 'writing' of electrical activity. Six neurons arranged in the shape of a smiling face were simultaneously activated with light. The response of those neurons is color coded in green, indicating the successful activation of this neuronal pattern of activity. This experiment was performed during the acquisition of experimental data seeking to understand how patterns of activity propagate in the cortex | sci-english.blogspot.com

UCL researchers have developed an innovative way to understand how the brain works by using flashes of light, allowing them to both 'read' and 'write' brain signals.

The new technique, described in Nature Methods, combines two cutting-edge technologies for reading and writing electrical activity in the brain. First, genetically encoded activity sensors enable neuroscientists to engineer nerve cells to visibly light up when they are active. Expressing light-sensitive proteins in the same nerve cells then allows these cells to be activated with flashes of light. By combining these two techniques, the team was able to both observe and control brain activity in mice.
"Combining reading and writing of activity in the same neurons in the intact brain could revolutionize how neuroscientists can interact with and understand brain activity," explains Professor Michael Hausser (UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research), senior author of the study. "One of the best things about having an extended conversation with someone is that you can really get to know them. With time, their responses can give you a feel for the key questions to ask in order to understand their character. Just as we combine specific words into sentences that elicit a reply from someone we talk to, we used light to activate specific combinations of nerve cells in the intact brain and record how the other cells respond. In this way, we hope to be able to ask the brain questions and, from its answers, better understand how it works."
To activate multiple brain cells simultaneously, the researchers split up the incoming beam of light using a holographic technique to direct smaller beamlets to individual cells of their choosing. The team selected a group of neurons in the cortex that are specifically responsive to the sensation of touch, reliably activating them while recording the flashes of activity in both the activated neurons and in hundreds of neighbouring neurons. This allowed them to 'interrogate' the circuit in a precise way, activating selected brain cells in different patterns and measuring how the circuit responds.
These experiments could be repeated in the same sets of neurons in the same animals over days and even weeks, allowing an extended 'conversation' with the circuit. In future, the team hope that by replacing a physical stimulus with precise, holographically controlled brain activity, the 'neural code' of sensory perception can be cracked.
"We are very excited to use this technology to probe the basis of how groups of neurons and ultimately the brain stores and processes information from the world around us," says first author Dr Adam Packer (UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research). "This work provides a new way for neuroscientists to have a long-term and engaging conversation with the cerebral cortex in the brain of a mouse. Crucially, since the methods of both recording and activation rely on light, this technique is flexible and non-invasive."
The nature of the 'conversation' depends only on where and when the researchers choose to point the light. Insights gained using this approach will be useful not only for understanding the 'neural code', but also for understanding how neural activity goes awry in neurological conditions such as autism and dementia.

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The above story is based on materials provided by University College London. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Adam M Packer, Lloyd E Russell, Henry W P Dalgleish, Michael Häusser. Simultaneous all-optical manipulation and recording of neural circuit activity with cellular resolution in vivo. Nature Methods, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.3217

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NASA finds good news on forests and carbon dioxide | sci-english.blogspot.com

A new NASA study suggests that tropical forests absorb more atmospheric carbon dioxide than is absorbed by forests in Alaska, Canada and Siberia | sci-english.blogspot.com

A new NASA-led study shows that tropical forests may be absorbing far more carbon dioxide than many scientists thought, in response to rising atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas. The study estimates that tropical forests absorb 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of a total global absorption of 2.5 billion -- more than is absorbed by forests in Canada, Siberia and other northern regions, called boreal forests.

"This is good news, because uptake in boreal forests is already slowing, while tropical forests may continue to take up carbon for many years," said David Schimel of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Schimel is lead author of a paper on the new research, appearing online in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
Forests and other land vegetation currently remove up to 30 percent of human carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. If the rate of absorption were to slow down, the rate of global warming would speed up in return.
The new study is the first to devise a way to make apples-to-apples comparisons of carbon dioxide estimates from many sources at different scales: computer models of ecosystem processes, atmospheric models run backward in time to deduce the sources of today's concentrations (called inverse models), satellite images, data from experimental forest plots and more. The researchers reconciled all types of analyses and assessed the accuracy of the results based on how well they reproduced independent, ground-based measurements. They obtained their new estimate of the tropical carbon absorption from the models they determined to be the most trusted and verified.
"Until our analysis, no one had successfully completed a global reconciliation of information about carbon dioxide effects from the atmospheric, forestry and modeling communities," said co-author Joshua Fisher of JPL. "It is incredible that all these different types of independent data sources start to converge on an answer."
The question of which type of forest is the bigger carbon absorber "is not just an accounting curiosity," said co-author Britton Stephens of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado. "It has big implications for our understanding of whether global terrestrial ecosystems might continue to offset our carbon dioxide emissions or might begin to exacerbate climate change."
As human-caused emissions add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, forests worldwide are using it to grow faster, reducing the amount that stays airborne. This effect is called carbon fertilization. "All else being equal, the effect is stronger at higher temperatures, meaning it will be higher in the tropics than in the boreal forests," Schimel said.
But climate change also decreases water availability in some regions and makes Earth warmer, leading to more frequent and larger wildfires. In the tropics, humans compound the problem by burning wood during deforestation. Fires don't just stop carbon absorption by killing trees, they also spew huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere as the wood burns.
For about 25 years, most computer climate models have been showing that mid-latitude forests in the Northern Hemisphere absorb more carbon than tropical forests. That result was initially based on the then-current understanding of global air flows and limited data suggesting that deforestation was causing tropical forests to release more carbon dioxide than they were absorbing.
In the mid-2000s, Stephens used measurements of carbon dioxide made from aircraft to show that many climate models were not correctly representing flows of carbon above ground level. Models that matched the aircraft measurements better showed more carbon absorption in the tropical forests. However, there were still not enough global data sets to validate the idea of a large tropical-forest absorption. Schimel said that their new study took advantage of a great deal of work other scientists have done since Stephens' paper to pull together national and regional data of various kinds into robust, global data sets.
Schimel noted that their paper reconciles results at every scale from the pores of a single leaf, where photosynthesis takes place, to the whole Earth, as air moves carbon dioxide around the globe. "What we've had up till this paper was a theory of carbon dioxide fertilization based on phenomena at the microscopic scale and observations at the global scale that appeared to contradict those phenomena. Here, at least, is a hypothesis that provides a consistent explanation that includes both how we know photosynthesis works and what's happening at the planetary scale."
NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.
For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in the last year, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow

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Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. David Schimel, Britton B. Stephens, Joshua B. Fisher. Effect of increasing CO₂ on the terrestrial carbon cycle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014; 201407302 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1407302112

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A New Understanding of How to Trap Light | sci-english.blogspot.com

Plot of radiative quality factor as a function of wave vector for a photonic crystal slab. At five positions, this factor diverges to infinity, corresponding to special solutions of Maxwell equations called bound states in the continuum. These states have enough energy to escape to infinity but remain spatially localized.

A newly published study from MIT reveals the mechanism responsible for trapping the light, showing that this trapped state is much more stable than had been thought.
Researchers at MIT who succeeded last year in creating a material that could trap light and stop it in its tracks have now developed a more fundamental understanding of the process. The new work — which could help explain some basic physical mechanisms — reveals that this behavior is connected to a wide range of other seemingly unrelated phenomena.
The findings are reported in a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, co-authored by MIT physics professor Marin Soljačić; postdocs Bo Zhen, Chia Wei Hsu, and Ling Lu; and Douglas Stone, a professor of applied physics at Yale University.
Light can usually be confined only with mirrors, or with specialized materials such as photonic crystals. Both of these approaches block light beams; last year’s finding demonstrated a new method in which the waves cancel out their own radiation fields. The new work shows that this light-trapping process, which involves twisting the polarization direction of the light, is based on a kind of vortex — the same phenomenon behind everything from tornadoes to water swirling down a drain.
In addition to revealing the mechanism responsible for trapping the light, the new analysis shows that this trapped state is much more stable than had been thought, making it easier to produce and harder to disturb.
“People think of this [trapped state] as very delicate,” Zhen says, “and almost impossible to realize. But it turns out it can exist in a robust way.”
In most natural light, the direction of polarization — which can be thought of as the direction in which the light waves vibrate — remains fixed. That’s the principle that allows polarizing sunglasses to work: Light reflected from a surface is selectively polarized in one direction; that reflected light can then be blocked by polarizing filters oriented at right angles to it.
But in the case of these light-trapping crystals, light that enters the material becomes polarized in a way that forms a vortex, Zhen says, with the direction of polarization changing depending on the beam’s direction.
Because the polarization is different at every point in this vortex, it produces a singularity — also called a topological defect, Zhen says — at its center, trapping the light at that point.
Hsu says the phenomenon makes it possible to produce something called a vector beam, a special kind of laser beam that could potentially create small-scale particle accelerators. Such devices could use these vector beams to accelerate particles and smash them into each other — perhaps allowing future tabletop devices to carry out the kinds of high-energy experiments that today require miles-wide circular tunnels.
The finding, Soljačić says, could also enable easy implementation of super-resolution imaging (using a method called stimulated emission depletion microscopy) and could allow the sending of far more channels of data through a single optical fiber.
“This work is a great example of how supposedly well-studied physical systems can contain rich and undiscovered phenomena, which can be unearthed if you dig in the right spot,” says Yidong Chong, an assistant professor of physics and applied physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who was not involved in this research.
Chong says it is remarkable that such surprising findings have come from relatively well-studied materials. “It deals with photonic crystal slabs of the sort that have been extensively analyzed, both theoretically and experimentally, since the 1990s,” he says. “The fact that the system is so unexotic, together with the robustness associated with topological phenomena, should give us confidence that these modes will not simply be theoretical curiosities, but can be exploited in technologies such as microlasers.”
The research was partly supported by the U.S. Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
Publication: Bo Zhen, et al., “Topological Nature of Optical Bound States in the Continuum,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 257401, 18 December 2014; doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.257401
PDF Copy of the Study: Topological nature of bound states in the radiation continuum
Source: David L. Chandler, MIT News
Image: Courtesy of the researchers

New Half-Light Half-Matter Quantum Particles

A newly published study details how a team of researchers were able to discover half-light, half-matter particles in atomically thin semiconductors.
Prospects of developing computing and communication technologies based on quantum properties of light and matter may have taken a major step forward thanks to research by City College of New York physicists led by Dr. Vinod Menon.
In a pioneering study, Professor Menon and his team were able to discover half-light, half-matter particles in atomically thin semiconductors (thickness ~ a millionth of a single sheet of paper) consisting of two-dimensional (2D) layer of molybdenum and sulfur atoms arranged similar to graphene. They sandwiched this 2D material in a light trapping structure to realize these composite quantum particles.
“Besides being a fundamental breakthrough, this opens up the possibility of making devices which take the benefits of both light and matter,” said Professor Menon.
For example one can start envisioning logic gates and signal processors that take on best of light and matter. The discovery is also expected to contribute to developing practical platforms for quantum computing.
Dr. Dirk Englund, a professor at MIT whose research focuses on quantum technologies based on semiconductor and optical systems, hailed the City College study.
“What is so remarkable and exciting in the work by Vinod and his team is how readily this strong coupling regime could actually be achieved. They have shown convincingly that by coupling a rather standard dielectric cavity to exciton–polaritons in a monolayer of molybdenum disulphide, they could actually reach this strong coupling regime with a very large binding strength,” he said.
Professor Menon’s research team included City College PhD students, Xiaoze Liu, Tal Galfsky and Zheng Sun, and scientists from Yale University, National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) and Ecole Polytechnic – Montreal (Canada).
The study appears in the January issue of the journal Nature Photonics. It was funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation through the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center – Center for Photonic and Multiscale Nanomaterials.
Publication: Xiaoze Liu, et al., “Strong light–matter coupling in two-dimensional atomic crystals,” Nature Photonics 9, 30–34 (2015); doi:10.1038/nphoton.2014.304
Source: City College of New York
Image: City College of New York

Scientists Shed New Light on How ‘Microbial Dark Matter’ Might Cause Disease | sci-english.blogspot.com

At left, the tight physical association between TM7x cells and XH001. At right, TM7x cells (red) attach to the surface of XH001 (white) | sci-english.blogspot.com

A landmark discovery reveals new insights on the biological, ecological and medical importance of TM7, and could lead to better understanding of other elusive bacteria.
One of the great recent discoveries in modern biology was that the human body contains 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. But much of that bacteria is still a puzzle to scientists.
It is estimated by scientists that roughly half of bacteria living in human bodies is difficult to replicate for scientific research — which is why biologists call it “microbial dark matter.” Scientists, however, have long been determined to learn more about these uncultivable bacteria, because they may contribute to the development of certain debilitating and chronic diseases.
For decades, one bacteria group that has posed a particular challenge for researchers is the Candidate Phylum TM7, which has been thought to cause inflammatory mucosal diseases because it is so prevalent in people with periodontitis, an infection of the gums.
Now, a landmark discovery by scientists at the UCLA School of Dentistry, the J. Craig Venter Institute and the University of Washington School of Dentistry has revealed insights into TM7’s resistance to scientific study and to its role in the progression of periodontitis and other diseases. Their findings shed new light on the biological, ecological and medical importance of TM7, and could lead to better understanding of other elusive bacteria.
The team’s findings are published online in the December issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“I consider this the most exciting discovery in my 30-year career,” said Dr. Wenyuan Shi, a UCLA professor of oral biology. “This study provides the roadmap for us to make every uncultivable bacterium cultivable.”
The researchers cultivated a specific type of TM7 called TM7x, a version of TM7 found in people’s mouths, and found the first known proof of a signaling interaction between the bacterium and an infectious agent called Actinomyces odontolyticus, or XH001, which causes mucosal inflammation.
“Once the team grew and sequenced TM7x, we could finally piece together how it makes a living in the human body,” said Dr. Jeff McLean, acting associate professor at the University of Washington School of Dentistry. “This may be the first example of a parasitic long-term attachment between two different bacteria — where one species lives on the surface of another species gaining essential nutrients and then decides to thank its host by attacking it.”
To prove that TM7x needs XH001 to grow and survive, the team attempted to mix isolated TM7x cells with other strains of bacteria. Only XH001 was able to establish a physical association with TM7x, which led researchers to believe that TM7x and XH001 might have evolved together during their establishment in the mouth.
What makes TM7x even more intriguing are its potential roles in chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, vaginal diseases and periodontitis. The co-cultures collected in this study allowed researchers to examine, for the first time ever, the degree to which TM7x helps cause these conditions.
“Uncultivable bacteria presents a fascinating ‘final frontier’ for dental microbiologists and are a high priority for the NIDCR research portfolio,” said Dr. R. Dwayne Lunsford, director of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research’s microbiology program. “This study provides a near-perfect case of how co-cultivation strategies and a thorough appreciation for interspecies signaling can facilitate the recovery of these elusive organisms. Although culture-independent studies can give us a snapshot of microbial diversity at a particular site, in order to truly understand physiology and virulence of an isolate, we must ultimately be able to grow and manipulate these bacteria in the lab.”
It was previously known that XH001 induces inflammation. But by infecting bone marrow cells with XH001 alone and then with the TM7x/XH001 co-culture, the researchers also found that inflammation was greatly reduced when TM7x was physically attached to XH001. This is the only known study that has provided evidence of this relationship between TM7 and XH001.
The researchers plan to further study the unique relationship between TM7X and XH001 and how they jointly cause mucosal disease. Their findings could have implications for potential treatment and therapeutics.
Other collaborators on the study were Drs. Xuesong He, Renate Lux and Anna Edlund of the UCLA School of Dentistry; Shibu Yooseph, Adam Hall and Karen Nelson of the Venter Institute; Su-Yang Liud and Genhong Cheng of the UCLA department of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics; Pieter Dorresteine of UC, San Diego; Eduardo Esquenazi of Sirenas Marine Discovery; and Ryan Hunter of the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Shi is part-time chief science officer at C3 Jian, Inc., which has licensed technologies from the University of California Regents that could be indirectly related to this research project.
The work was supported in part by the NIH’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (grants 1R01DE023810-01, 1R01DE020102 and 1R01DE021108, and T90 training award DE022734) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (grant 1R01GM095373).
Publication: Xuesong He, et al., “Cultivation of a human-associated TM7 phylotype reveals a reduced genome and epibiotic parasitic lifestyle,” PNAS, 2014; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1419038112
Source: Brianna Aldrich, UCLA News
Image: Batbileg Bor/UCLA and Ryan Hunter/University of Minnesota