Powerful energy storage devices of the future may trace their roots back to a research lab that cooked up ?nano-shish-kebabs? out of germanium sulfide, a semiconductor material.
Unlike the skewered meats and assorted veggies grilled on backyard barbeques, these kebabs are single, three-dimensional structures that consist of sheets of the semiconductor material grown along a nanowire. Each wire is about 100 nanometers long.
The researchers believe these combined ?heterostructures? are particularly promising for energy storage technologies such as lithium-ion batteries and next-generation supercapacitors.
?The nanowires of this heterostructure can provide efficient charge transfer for electrons and ions during the storage process and the nanosheets can provide larger surface areas that can hold more ions,? Linyou Cao, a materials scientist at North Carolina State University, told NBC News via email.
?The combined features of high surface area and efficient charge transfer is exactly what has been highly sought after for the improvement of energy storage performance.?
The use of germanium sulfide was a proof-of-concept, the team notes in a paper on the breakthrough published Sunday in the journal Nano Letters. Next, they aim to replicate the process in molybdenum sulfide, which is being eyed for energy storage applications.
The heterostructures could also be used to develop high-tech chemical sensors. Each sheet, Cao explained, can be designed to sense once specific organic compound. One heterostructure, with multiple nanosheets, could sense multiple compounds at once.
This may prove especially useful to the U.S. Army Research Office, which funded the research. ?High-throughput sensing could be used for detecting explosive species in battle fields,? Cao explained.
John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.
Working at Google is a dream job for most young people and Google is always looking for the right person to hire. Google has recently redesigned their jobs section of their web site to make it more mobile friendly, with a responsive design and a completely refreshed look.
Laszlo Bock, Google's Senior Vice President of People Operations (i.e. HR) posted on Google+ that they redesigned the jobs section of Google. He wrote:
We're hiring! Plus, we made some neat new changes to our site and G+
On the new Google jobs design, search is at the center but there is all this newly organized content for teams and roles, locations landing page and Google culture.
The new design is done nicely, in that it has a really nice responsive design look on mobile smartphones.
Jampani Manindra is producing a film titled 'College campus' under Madhamanchi creations banner with Mannava Balaji as the director.
The film is going to be a youthful college entertainer. The shooting of the movie has started recently and the songs have been recorded in Hyderabad.
The presenter of the movie, Madhamanchi Srinivas, says,"This is a different love story. The solution for the different problems, that have been faced by youth today, is shown in addition to entertainment. We have recorded the song sung by Geetha Madhuri and Deepu now. We will start the regular shooting from 15th of this month and are planning to release the movie in summer".
The director says,"We have been making the movie interestingly with new actors. The movie has 5 songs and those are sung by famous singers. We are confident of the musical success along with the success of the movie".
Harin Krishna, Revanth, Raja Sridhar, Avinash, Mythri Gowda, Thareesha, Kalpana, Priyanka etc are acting in this movie.
A spiral galaxy with a secretPublic release date: 5-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Oli Usher ousher@eso.org 49-893-200-6855 ESA/Hubble Information Centre
Despite its appearance, which looks much like countless other galaxies, Messier 106 hides a number of secrets. Thanks to this image, which combines data from Hubble with observations by amateur astronomers Robert Gendler and Jay GaBany, they are revealed as never before.
At its heart, as in most spiral galaxies, is a supermassive black hole, but this one is particularly active. Unlike the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, which pulls in wisps of gas only occasionally, Messier 106's black hole is actively gobbling up material. As the gas spirals towards the black hole, it heats up and emits powerful radiation. Part of the emission from the centre of Messier 106 is produced by a process that is somewhat similar to that in a laser - although here the process produces bright microwave radiation [1].
As well as this microwave emission from Messier 106's heart, the galaxy has another startling feature - instead of two spiral arms, it appears to have four. Although the second pair of arms can be seen in visible light images as ghostly wisps of gas, as in this image, they are even more prominent in observations made outside of the visible spectrum, such as those using X-ray or radio waves.
Unlike the normal arms, these two extra arms are made up of hot gas rather than stars, and their origin remained unexplained until recently. Astronomers think that these, like the microwave emission from the galactic centre, are caused by the black hole at Messier 106's heart, and so are a totally different phenomenon from the galaxy's normal, star-filled arms.
The extra arms appear to be an indirect result of jets of material produced by the violent churning of matter around the black hole. As these jets travel through the galactic matter they disrupt and heat up the surrounding gas, which in turn excites the denser gas in the galactic plane and causes it to glow brightly. This denser gas closer to the centre of the galaxy is tightly-bound, and so the arms appear to be straight. However, the looser disc gas further out is blown above or below the disc in the opposite direction from the jet, so that the gas curves out of the disc producing the arching red arms seen here.
Despite carrying his name, Messier 106 was neither discovered nor catalogued by the renowned 18th century astronomer Charles Messier. Discovered by his assistant, Pierre Mchain, the galaxy was never added to the catalogue in his lifetime. Along with six other objects discovered but not logged by the pair, Messier 106 was posthumously added to the Messier catalogue in the 20th century.
Amateur astronomer Robert Gendler retrieved archival Hubble images of M 106 to assemble a mosaic of the centre of the galaxy. He then used his own and fellow astrophotographer Jay GaBany's observations of M 106 to combine with the Hubble data in areas where there was less coverage, and finally, to fill in the holes and gaps where no Hubble data existed.
The centre of the galaxy is composed almost entirely of Hubble data taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 detectors. The outer spiral arms are predominantly HST data colourised with ground-based data taken by Gendler's and GaBany's 12.5-inch and 20-inch telescopes, located at very dark remote sites in New Mexico, USA.
Gendler was a prizewinner in the recent Hubble's Hidden Treasures image processing competition. Another prizewinner, Andr van der Hoeven, entered a different version of Messier 106, combining Hubble and NOAO data.
###
Notes
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
[1] Lasers work when light stimulates emission of more light from a cloud of excited gas, with the original light in effect being amplified (the word laser is an acronym for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation). The centre of M106 harbours a similar phenomenon called a maser (short for microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation), in which microwave radiation, which is at longer wavelengths than visible light, is emitted. Note that unlike man-made lasers, which are designed to produce a narrow beam, astronomical masers shine in all directions.
Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and R. Gendler (for the Hubble Heritage Team). Acknowledgment: J. GaBany, A van der Hoeven
Links
Images of Hubble: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/category/spacecraft/
Robert Gendler: http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/
Contacts
Oli Usher
Hubble/ESA
Garching bei Mnchen, Germany
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
A spiral galaxy with a secretPublic release date: 5-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Oli Usher ousher@eso.org 49-893-200-6855 ESA/Hubble Information Centre
Despite its appearance, which looks much like countless other galaxies, Messier 106 hides a number of secrets. Thanks to this image, which combines data from Hubble with observations by amateur astronomers Robert Gendler and Jay GaBany, they are revealed as never before.
At its heart, as in most spiral galaxies, is a supermassive black hole, but this one is particularly active. Unlike the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, which pulls in wisps of gas only occasionally, Messier 106's black hole is actively gobbling up material. As the gas spirals towards the black hole, it heats up and emits powerful radiation. Part of the emission from the centre of Messier 106 is produced by a process that is somewhat similar to that in a laser - although here the process produces bright microwave radiation [1].
As well as this microwave emission from Messier 106's heart, the galaxy has another startling feature - instead of two spiral arms, it appears to have four. Although the second pair of arms can be seen in visible light images as ghostly wisps of gas, as in this image, they are even more prominent in observations made outside of the visible spectrum, such as those using X-ray or radio waves.
Unlike the normal arms, these two extra arms are made up of hot gas rather than stars, and their origin remained unexplained until recently. Astronomers think that these, like the microwave emission from the galactic centre, are caused by the black hole at Messier 106's heart, and so are a totally different phenomenon from the galaxy's normal, star-filled arms.
The extra arms appear to be an indirect result of jets of material produced by the violent churning of matter around the black hole. As these jets travel through the galactic matter they disrupt and heat up the surrounding gas, which in turn excites the denser gas in the galactic plane and causes it to glow brightly. This denser gas closer to the centre of the galaxy is tightly-bound, and so the arms appear to be straight. However, the looser disc gas further out is blown above or below the disc in the opposite direction from the jet, so that the gas curves out of the disc producing the arching red arms seen here.
Despite carrying his name, Messier 106 was neither discovered nor catalogued by the renowned 18th century astronomer Charles Messier. Discovered by his assistant, Pierre Mchain, the galaxy was never added to the catalogue in his lifetime. Along with six other objects discovered but not logged by the pair, Messier 106 was posthumously added to the Messier catalogue in the 20th century.
Amateur astronomer Robert Gendler retrieved archival Hubble images of M 106 to assemble a mosaic of the centre of the galaxy. He then used his own and fellow astrophotographer Jay GaBany's observations of M 106 to combine with the Hubble data in areas where there was less coverage, and finally, to fill in the holes and gaps where no Hubble data existed.
The centre of the galaxy is composed almost entirely of Hubble data taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 detectors. The outer spiral arms are predominantly HST data colourised with ground-based data taken by Gendler's and GaBany's 12.5-inch and 20-inch telescopes, located at very dark remote sites in New Mexico, USA.
Gendler was a prizewinner in the recent Hubble's Hidden Treasures image processing competition. Another prizewinner, Andr van der Hoeven, entered a different version of Messier 106, combining Hubble and NOAO data.
###
Notes
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
[1] Lasers work when light stimulates emission of more light from a cloud of excited gas, with the original light in effect being amplified (the word laser is an acronym for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation). The centre of M106 harbours a similar phenomenon called a maser (short for microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation), in which microwave radiation, which is at longer wavelengths than visible light, is emitted. Note that unlike man-made lasers, which are designed to produce a narrow beam, astronomical masers shine in all directions.
Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and R. Gendler (for the Hubble Heritage Team). Acknowledgment: J. GaBany, A van der Hoeven
Links
Images of Hubble: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/category/spacecraft/
Robert Gendler: http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/
Contacts
Oli Usher
Hubble/ESA
Garching bei Mnchen, Germany
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 5-Feb-2013
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