News in brief: molecules/matter and energy

Clear slime busters, batteries, invisibility Cloak 3-and more in this week's newsWeb edition: Sunday, July 31, 2011

Breaking up is hard to Goo
Scientists have hit on several of the compounds to weaken the rigid mucus that occurs most often in breeds many patients by fibrosis of the lung. Slime is usually Sticky traps and blanket which helps clear inhaled particles, but they guys by fibrosis, fibrous bundle BED allow slime dense, thick and strong clear it. Two extracts from alginate, a primary ingredient in algal cell walls, disturb the mucous tissue interactions, Catherine Nordgård and Kurt Draget University Norwegian report, science and technology in the upcoming Biomacromolecules. Associations can be useful to modify the mucus in the respiratory tract and beyond — Rachel Ehrenberg

Bats filter out clutter
Like the students of universities echolocating bats can tolerate the clutter. Big brown bat trick evolved to ignore the potentially confusing acoustic leaves and trees, in pursuing its prey through foliage is dense. By recording conversations trained bats, complicated frequency and audio copies, Mary Bates Brown University and colleagues found that bats filter out certain sounds like human beings, by ignoring the distractions in their peripheral vision. Bats Ignore echo returning from objects on a page or a long distance, which seem to be missing in the higher frequencies. This technique, reported in July 29 Science, could be useful for designing better sonar technology. — Devin Powell

3-invisibility cloak
Newest invisibility Cloak to hide the object 3D seen from any direction. Previous cloaks carpet can hide just the something is sitting on the surface, like a bump on a log. David Rainwater and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin introduced the new Mask tubes with a diameter of 1.25 centimetres, out of plasmonic metamaterials — synthetic structures with wobbly electrons on the surface that bend electromagnetic radiation in unusual ways. This new Mask plasmonic manipulates the ovens, but the concepts should keep for as well as infrared and optical wavelengths researchers report online 19 July on arXiv.org. — Devin Powell

Transparent lithium-ion battery
New battery lithium ion is a transparent step towards making mobile phones, e-readers and other electronic devices fully transparent. While scientists already have transparent circuits, batteries remained opaque czlonowych. That's because the electrodes must be thick to store energy. Created Yuan Yang and colleagues at the University of Stanford new electrode out of strips of material large enough for the eye to see, arranged in a grid like Tic-Tac-Toe. Flexible prototype is 60 percent transparent. Its energy density — the amount of energy is stored in a given volume — only 3% of that of a typical cell phone batteries, but can theoretically be increased by a factor of 10, researchers report in the upcoming PNAS. — Devin Powell

Found in: matter and energy and molecules

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