First Paperless Public Library of World BiblioTech opened in USA

First Paperless public Library of the World BiblioTech was opened in the USA State of Texas on 4 February 2014. The traditional libraries have been replaced with high-tech gadgets that cater to both adults and children.

Registered residents of the Texas will be able to access over tens of thousands of titles from e-readers for free.

According to its website, the 1.5 million dollar BiblioTech currently has 600 e-readers, 200 pre-loaded enhanced e-readers for children, and 48 computer stations, 10 laptops and 40 tablets to use on-site.

Paperless technology will also help to manage funds. The team members aren’t tied up re-shelving, filing and categorising.

They spend most of their time providing one-on-one instruction with visitors, teaching people how to use devices and how to source materials. It’s a more interactive library experience.

Replacement costs have also been factored in to the project. Thefts can be easily prevented as devices cannot access the internet once they leave the library.

 Traditional libraries require much larger load-tolerances in construction due to the weight of materials, so are more costly to build. Book collections also require environmental controls that are costly to maintain.

Talking Cars Unveiled: USA may soon made it mandatory by 2017

USA may soon allow the talking cars to be mandatory by 2017. The announcement was made on 4 February 2014 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the US.

Talking cars is the communication technology which enables cars to send out location, speed and direction data 10 times a second.

The new vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology cars will be able to communicate with each other. This will help towards preventing tens of thousands of crashes every year.

Approval follows a test project that begun in 2012 in which vehicles equipped with wireless devices were used to warn drivers about specific hazards such as an impending collision at a blind intersection, or a vehicle stopped ahead.

Cars will also be able to communicate with infrastructure like stop signs and traffic lights, and with motorcyclists, bicyclists and even pedestrians with specially equipped smart phones. That data will enable the cars to warn drivers to slow down, brake, turn on their windshield wipers or not to change lanes.

The technology can help avert rear-end, lane change, and intersection crashes. But the systems do not include automatic braking or steering.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and safety advocates have pushed to make cars safer so passengers would be more likely to survive crashes.

Automakers seem largely on board with the technology, which would add about $100 to $300 to the cost of a car.

The full transition from current vehicle fleet to a connected fleet will take at least 10 years.

Scientist discovered Method to curb greenhouse gases

Scientists discovered a new method to convert harmful greenhouse gases into chemicals which can produce synthetic fuels on 2 February 2014.

A team of researchers at the University of Delaware has developed a highly selective catalyst capable of electrochemically converting carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) to carbon monoxide with 92 percent efficiency. The carbon monoxide then can be used to develop useful chemicals.

It was found that when a nano-porous silver electrocatalyst was used, it was 3000 times more active than polycrystalline silver, a catalyst commonly used in converting carbon dioxide to useful chemicals.

Silver is considered a promising material for a carbon dioxide reduction catalyst because of it offers high selectivity approximately 81 percent and because it costs much less than other precious metal catalysts. Additionally, because it is inorganic, silver remains more stable under harsh catalytic environments.

The exceptionally high activity is likely due to the UD-developed electrocatalyst’s extremely large and highly curved internal surface, which is approximately 150 times larger and 20 times intrinsically more active than polycrystalline silver.

The active sites on the curved internal surface required a much smaller than expected voltage to overcome the activation energy barrier needed drive the reaction.

To validate whether their findings were unique, the researchers compared the UD-developed nano-porous silver catalyst with other potential carbon dioxide electrocatalysts including polycrystalline silver and other silver nanostructures such as nanoparticles and nanowires.

The research team’s work is supported through funding from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund and University of Delaware Research Foundation.

Green House gases

A greenhouse gas (sometimes abbreviated GHG) is a gas in an atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range. This process is the fundamental cause of the greenhouse effect.

The primary greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. Greenhouse gases greatly affect the temperature of the Earth; without them, Earth's surface would average about 33 °C colder, which is about 59 °F below the present average of 14 °C (57 °F).

Natural 3-D Counterpart to Graphene Discovered: New Form of Quantum Matter

"A 3DTDS is a natural three-dimensional counterpart to graphene with similar or even better electron mobility and velocity," says Yulin Chen, a physicist with Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) when he initiated the study that led to this discovery, and now with the University of Oxford. "Because of its 3D Dirac fermions in the bulk, a 3DTDS also features intriguing non-saturating linear magnetoresistance that can be orders of magnitude higher than the materials now used in hard drives, and it opens the door to more efficient optical sensors."

Chen is the corresponding author of a paper in Science reporting the discovery. The paper is titled "Discovery of a Three-dimensional Topological Dirac Semimetal, Na3Bi." Co-authors were Zhongkai Liu, Bo Zhou, Yi Zhang, Zhijun Wang, Hongming Weng, Dharmalingam Prabhakaran, Sung-Kwan Mo, Zhi-Xun Shen, Zhong Fang, Xi Dai and Zahid Hussain.

Two of the most exciting new materials in the world of high technology today are graphene and topological insulators, crystalline materials that are electrically insulating in the bulk but conducting on the surface. Both feature 2D Dirac fermions (fermions that aren't their own antiparticle), which give rise to extraordinary and highly coveted physical properties. Topological insulators also possess a unique electronic structure, in which bulk electrons behave like those in an insulator while surface electrons behave like those in graphene.

"The swift development of graphene and topological insulators has raised questions as to whether there are 3D counterparts and other materials with unusual topology in their electronic structure," says Chen. "Our discovery answers both questions. In the sodium bismuthate we studied, the bulk conduction and valence bands touch only at discrete points and disperse linearly along all three momentum directions to form bulk 3D Dirac fermions. Furthermore, the topology of a 3DTSD electronic structure is also as unique as those of topological insulators."

The discovery was made at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), a DOE national user facility housed at Berkeley Lab, using beamline 10.0.1, which is optimized for electron structure studies. The collaborating research team first developed a special procedure to properly synthesize and transport the sodium bismuthate, a semi-metal compound identified as a strong 3DTDS candidate by co-authors Fang and Dai, theorists with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

At ALS beamline 10.0.1, the collaborators determined the electronic structure of their material using Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES), in which x-rays striking a material surface or interface cause the photoemission of electrons at angles and kinetic energies that can be measured to obtain a detailed electronic spectrum.

"ALS beamline 10.0.1 is perfect for exploring new materials, as it has a unique capability whereby the analyzer is moved rather than the sample for the ARPES measurement scans," Chen says. "This made our work much easier as the cleaved sample surface of our material sometimes has multiple facets, which makes the rotating-sample measurement schemes typically employed for ARPES measurements difficult to carry out."

Sodium bismuthate is too unstable to be used in devices without proper packaging, but it triggers the exploration for the development of other 3DTDS materials more suitable for everyday devices, a search that is already underway. Sodium bismuthate can also be used to demonstrate potential applications of 3DTDS systems, which offer some distinct advantages over graphene.

"A 3DTDS system could provide a significant improvement in efficiency in many applications over graphene because of its 3D volume," Chen says. "Also, preparing large-size atomically thin single domain graphene films is still a challenge. It could be easier to fabricate graphene-type devices for a wider range of applications from 3DTDS systems."

In addition, Chen says, a 3DTDS system also opens the door to other novel physical properties, such as giant diamagnetism that diverges when energy approaches the 3D Dirac point, quantum magnetoresistance in the bulk, unique Landau level structures under strong magnetic fields, and oscillating quantum spin Hall effects. All of these novel properties can be a boon for future electronic technologies. Future 3DTDS systems can also serve as an ideal platform for applications in spintronics.

This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Science Foundation of China.

Researchers Invent 'Sideways' Approach to 2-D Hybrid Materials

The study, published in the journal Science, could enable the use of new types of 2-D hybrid materials in technological applications and fundamental research.

By rethinking a traditional method of growing materials, the researchers combined two compounds -- graphene and boron nitride -- into a single layer only one atom thick. Graphene, which consists of carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal, honeycomb-like rings, has attracted waves of attention because of its high strength and electronic properties.

"People call graphene a wonder material that could revolutionize the landscape of nanotechnology and electronics," ORNL's An-Ping Li said. "Indeed, graphene has a lot of potential, but it has limits. To make use of graphene in applications or devices, we need to integrate graphene with other materials."

One method to combine differing materials into heterostructures is epitaxy, in which one material is grown on top of another such that both have the same crystalline structure. To grow the 2-D materials, the ORNL-UT research team directed the growth process horizontally instead of vertically.

The researchers first grew graphene on a copper foil, etched the graphene to create clean edges, and then grew boron nitride through chemical vapor deposition. Instead of conforming to the structure of the copper base layer as in conventional epitaxy, the boron nitride atoms took on the crystallography of the graphene.

"The graphene piece acted as a seed for the epitaxial growth in two-dimensional space, so that the crystallography of the boron nitride is solely determined by the graphene," UT's Gong Gu said.

Not only did the team's technique combine the two materials, it also produced an atomically sharp boundary, a one-dimensional interface, between the two materials. The ability to carefully control this interface, or "heterojunction," is important from an applied and fundamental perspective, says Gu.

"If we want to harness graphene in an application, we have to make use of the interface properties, since as Nobel laureate Herbert Kroemer once said 'the interface is the device,'" Li said. "By creating this clean, coherent, 1-D interface, our technique provides us with the opportunity to fabricate graphene-based devices for real applications."

The new technique also allows researchers to experimentally investigate the scientifically intriguing graphene-boron nitride boundary for the first time.

"There is a vast body of theoretical literature predicting wonderful physical properties of this peculiar boundary, in absence of any experimental validation so far," said Li, who leads an ORNL effort to study atomic-level structure-transport relationships using the lab's unique four-probe scanning tunneling microscopy facility. "Now we have a platform to explore these properties."

The research team anticipates that its method can be applied to other combinations of 2-D materials, assuming that the different crystalline structures are similar enough to match one another.

Ultra-Thin Flexible Transparent Electronics Can Wrap Around a Hair

Niko Münzenrieder submerges a ficus leaf in water containing pieces of a shiny metallic membrane. Using tweezers, he carefully moves one of these pieces on to the leaf of the houseplant. On lifting the leaf, the film sticks to it like glue. The post-doctoral researcher is demonstrating the special characteristics of this electronic component in the form of an ultra-thin membrane, which he has helped to develop. "These new thin-film transistors adhere to a wide range of surfaces and adapt perfectly," explains the physicist.

In Professor Gerhard Tröster's Electronics Lab, scientists have been researching flexible electronic components, such as transistors and sensors, for some time now. The aim is to weave these types of components into textiles or apply them to the skin in order to make objects 'smart', or develop unobtrusive, comfortable sensors that can monitor various functions of the body.

Supple but functional

The researchers have now taken a big step towards this goal and their work has recently been published in the journal Nature Communications. With this new form of thin-film technology, they have created a very flexible and functional electronics.

Within a year, Münzenrieder, together with Giovanni Salvatore, has developed a procedure to fabricate these thin-film components. The membrane consists of the polymer parylene, which the researchers evaporate layer by layer into a conventional two-inch wafer. The parylene film has a maximum thickness of 0.001 mm, making it 50 times thinner than a human hair. In subsequent steps, they used standardised methods to build transistors and sensors from semiconductor materials, such as indium gallium zinc oxide, and conductors, such as gold. The researchers then released the parylene film with its attached electronic components from the wafer.

An electronic component fabricated in this way is extremely flexible, adaptable and -- depending on the material used for the transistors -- transparent. The researchers confirmed the theoretically determined bending radius of 50 micrometers during experiments in which they placed the electronic membrane on human hair and found that the membrane wrapped itself around the hair with perfect conformability. The transistors, which are less flexible than the substrate due to the ceramic materials used in their construction, still worked perfectly despite the strong bend.

Smart contact lens measures intraocular pressure

Münzenrieder and Salvatore see 'smart' contact lenses as a potential area of application for their flexible electronics. In the initial tests, the researchers attached the thin-film transistors, along with strain gauges, to standard contact lenses. They placed these on an artificial eye and were able to examine whether the membrane, and particularly the electronics, could withstand the bending radius of the eye and continue to function. The tests showed, in fact, that this type of smart contact lens could be used to measure intraocular pressure, a key risk factor in the development of glaucoma.

However, the researchers must still overcome a few technical obstacles before a commercially viable solution can be considered. For instance, the way in which the electronics are attached to the contact lens has to be optimised to take into account the effects of the aqueous ocular environment. In addition, sensors and transistors require energy, albeit only a small amount, which currently has to be provided from an external source. "In the lab, the film can be easily connected to the energy supply under a microscope. However, a different solution would need to be found for a unit attached to the actual eye," says Münzenrieder.

Professor Tröster's laboratory has already attracted attention in the past with some unusual ideas for wearable electronics. For example, the researchers have developed textiles with electronic components woven into them and they have also used sensors to monitor the bodily functions of Swiss ski jumping star Simon Ammann during his jumps.

Shining light through skin to diagnose malaria

Researchers in the U.S. have come up with a way to rapidly diagnose malaria simply by shining brief pulses of light from a laser through the skin.

“This method is distinct from all previous diagnostic approaches, which all rely upon using a needle to obtain blood, require reagents to detect the infection, and are time- and labour-consuming,” noted the scientists in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Rugged and inexpensive microlasers exist that could be modified to create portable devices capable of operating in harsh conditions. Non-medical personnel would be able to operate these devices and obtain a diagnosis in seconds, according to their paper.

Such a device was under development, said Rice University’s Dimtri O. Lapotko, the senior author of the paper, in an email.

When a malaria parasite invades red blood cells, it gorges on the haemoglobin those cells contain. Haemoglobin is the molecule that helps carry oxygen to all parts of the body. The parasite turns the iron-containing haeme component, which can be toxic for the organism, into an insoluble pigment, haemozoin.

The technique developed by Dr. Lapotko and his colleagues relies on detecting the haemozoin in red blood cells. They achieve this by using a narrow band of near-infrared light that is strongly absorbed by haemozoin but not haemoglobin.

A brief pulse of light in this band from a low-power laser heated up the tiny particles of haemozoin, causing a “vapour nanobubble” to form in the fluid around each particle. These bubbles expand explosively and then collapse with a characteristic sound that could be picked up with an ultrasound sensor.

The scientists demonstrated the technique in animal trials using malaria-infected mice.

A probe that carried an optical fibre as well as an ultrasound sensor was clamped to the ear of the mice so that laser light could be shone at a surface blood vessel and the resulting sounds recorded.

The device was able to accurately pick out infected animals, even when only about one in a million red blood cells carried the parasite, their paper reported.

The first trials of the technology in humans was expected to begin in early 2014 at Houston where Rice University is based, according to a University press release quoting Dr. Lapotko.

“It is a fantastic technique” but has an important limitation, observed Vinod Prakash Sharma, who was founder director of the National Institute of Malaria Research in New Delhi.

The method would be unable to distinguish between two species of the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax, that cause malaria in India. Treatment depended on which parasite was infecting a patient.

The technique described in the PNAS paper would therefore have to be combined with ways of discriminating between the two, Dr. Sharma told this correspondent.

Moreover, haemozoin may persist in the blood even after the parasite has been cleared, remarked V. Arun Nagaraj, Ramanunjan Fellow at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. With this technique, a previously-infected individual who had another bout of fever from some other cause might potentially be misdiagnosed as having malaria.