“Whoever thinks science isn’t fun must have never heard of Legos. The colorful construction toy has been used before as a cellular teaching tool. But these days, even researchers working in the nanoscale world get to play around a little.

Johns Hopkins engineers are now using Lego to visualize what is (or might be) happening on scales much too small to see with the naked eye or even to watch dynamically with a microscope. Specifically, they are building blown-up models of a lab-on-a-chip to watch and test the dynamics at work in those minuscule machines.”

Continue reading at PopSci.com

Popularity: 3% [?]

“Since 2006, about 30 percent of the commercial honeybee population has died off due to Colony Collapse Disorder. Though many theories have emerged about the causes of CCD since it first began ravaging honeybee populations, a study released this week has identified the first molecular marker of the disorder.

Researchers from the University of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Agriculture used information compiled through the Honeybee Genome Project to compare gene expressions in healthy bees with CCD-affected bees. They discovered large quantities of fragmented ribosomal RNA in CCD-affected bees. These fragments were found in the healthy bees, too — they are apparently products of the damage repair mechanism in insects in general — but they’re present to a much greater extent in CCD-affected bees.”

Continue reading at PopSci.com

Popularity: 1% [?]

“Traditional color printing — whether done with an inkjet, laser or silkscreen — requires a page to be laid out with several different inks in various colors to produce a full color image. But Korean engineers have developed a different process using a single nanoparticle-imbued ink, which could produce color prints in fractions of a second.

The new ink, called M-Ink by its developers, creates colors by changing its physical structure rather than by having a unique pigment. Like many colors in the natural world (the iridescence of a butterfly’s wing, for example) the same M-Ink can appear as different colors depending on the way light reflects off of its structural patterns. Magnetic nanoparticles in the ink can be manipulated to arrange themselves in different ways, instantly creating any color in the visual spectrum.”

Continue reading at PopSci.com

Popularity: unranked [?]

“MIT engineers have developed a cheap, compact robotic fish that can go where no man (or underwater vehicle) has been able to go before. The pint-sized robofish, developed by Kamal Youcuf-Toumi and Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado, could potentially be used to detect underwater environmental pollutants and inspect submerged boats and oil and gas pipes. Another plus is that they don’t smell.”

Continue reading at Inhabitat.com

Popularity: unranked [?]

Australian Scientists Develop World’s Most Efficient Solar Cell

“The race for the world’s most efficient solar power cell is forever played out in fractions of percentages. The latest victory comes from scientists at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who have concocted a multi-cell combination that converts 43% of sunlight into electricity, besting the previous record of 42.7%!”

Inhabitat

Spray-On Solar Cells Energize Almost Any Surface

“Bulky and expensive photovoltaic panels are so 2008. What does the future look like? Entire buildings, rooftops and even windows spray-painted with revolutionary nanoparticle inks that channel solar power into a thin, semi-transparent and relatively inexpensive medium.”

Via – Inhabitat

Popularity: unranked [?]