Microfluidic devices can take standard medical lab procedures and condenses each down to a microchip that can balance on top of a water bottle lid. A team from Michigan Technological University, studying chemical engineering, electrical engineering and materials science, streamline the design of microfluidic devices to be see-through to observe their inner workings. Using hair-thin…
Wildfire Aerosols Remain Longer in Atmosphere Than Expected
Rising 2,225 meters into the air on an island in the Azores archipelago, Pico Mountain Observatory is an ideal place to study aerosols–particles or liquids suspended in gases–that have traveled great distances in the troposphere. The troposphere is the portion of the atmosphere from the ground to about 10 kilometers in the air. Nearly all…
Offsetting Coal Plants With Carbon Capture Would Mean Covering 89% of the U.S. in Forests
Old Mining Techniques Make a New Way to Recycle Lithium Batteries
Lei Pan’s team of chemical engineering students had worked long and hard on their research project, and they were happy just to be showing their results at the People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) competition last April in Washington, DC. What they didn’t expect was to be mobbed by enthusiastic onlookers. “We got a lot…
Liquid Cell Transmission Electron Microscopy Makes a Window into the Nanoscale
In a new paper published last week in Science Advances, a team of scientists and engineers dug into the mechanisms that degrade sample quality in liquid cell transmission electron microscopy (LC-TEM). They developed an LC-TEM device that uses multiple windows and patterned features to explore the impacts of high-energy electron bombardment on nanoparticles and sensitive biological…
Beyond Good Vibrations: New Insights into Metamaterial Magic
Metamaterials offer the very real possibility that our most far-fetched fancies could one day become real as rocks. From invisibility cloaks and perfect lenses to immensely powerful batteries, their super-power applications tantalize the imagination. That said, so far “tantalize” has been the operative word, even though scientists have been studying metamaterials for more than 15…
Measuring Volcanic Emissions from Space
Late last month, a stratovolcano in Bali named Mount Agung began to smoke. Little earthquakes trembled beneath the mountain. Officials have since evacuated thousands of people to prevent what happened when Agung erupted in 1963, killing more than 1,000 people. Before volcanoes erupt, there are often warning signs. Tiny earthquakes rarely felt by humans but…
From Greenhouse Gas to 3D Surface-Microporous Graphene
Tiny dents in the surface of graphene greatly enhances its potential as a supercapacitor. Even better, it can be made from carbon dioxide. A material scientist at Michigan Technological University invented a novel approach to take carbon dioxide and turn it into 3-D graphene with micropores across its surface. The process is the focus of…
From Greenhouse Gas to 3-D Surface-microporous Graphene
Tiny dents in the surface of graphene greatly enhances its potential as a supercapacitor. Even better, it can be made from carbon dioxide. A material scientist at Michigan Technological University invented a novel approach to take carbon dioxide and turn it into 3-D graphene with micropores across its surface. The process is the focus of a new…
3D Printing Sweeps Toy Manufacturing off the Shelves
Cheap, plastic toys–no manufacturer necessary. The 2020 toy and game market is projected to be $135 billion, and 3-D printing brings those profits home. People have scoffed that 3-D printers are simply toys themselves. But they probably didn’t realize how much money is made off playthings. Do-it-yourself (DIY) manufacturing–making goods at home with a 3-D…
Contest-winning Satellite to Be Launched into Orbit
The Aerospace Enterprise is sending off Oculus-ASR, a microsatellite launching next year as part of an Air Force mission to better track objects in space. It was January of 2011 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A team of 25 undergraduate students from Michigan Technological University, advised by mechanical engineering professor Lyon B. King, took first place…
New Fluorescent Probe Could Light Up Cancer
What if you could plaster cancer cells with glowing “Here We Are” signs, so surgeons could be confident that they’d removed every last speck of a tumor? That’s what Haiying Liu has in mind for his new fluorescent probe. “Doctors need to pinpoint cancer tissue, but that can be hard,” said Liu, a chemistry professor…
Toward Glow-In-The-Dark Tumors: New Fluorescent Probe Could Light Up Cancer
Bright Future for Energy Devices
A little sodium goes a long way. At least that’s the case in carbon-based energy technology. Specifically, embedding sodium in carbon materials can tremendously improve electrodes. A research team led by Yun Hang Hu, the Charles and Carroll McArthur Professor of materials science and engineering at Michigan Tech, created a brand-new way to synthesize sodium-embedded…