Of all the ways to charge your smartphone, you wouldn’t think petting it would be one. A team of researchers, however, has developed a way to use friction to give power to your dying phone. It’s simple, it’s inexpensive, and best of all, it would require hardly any effort at all on your part.

The technology, developed by Zhong Lin Wang and his team at the Georgia Institute of Technology, works when a plastic called polyethylene terephthalate rubs against a layer of metal. It’s sort of like when you rub your socks across the carpet and then touch someone on the skin to shock them – except this time the phenomenon is being used for good rather than evil.

When the two materials are rubbed against one another, they create friction which in turn creates a current that can be harnessed to charge a phone’s battery. Microscopic structures were added to the materials to give them much more surface area and thus create more friction. In the study, the nanogenerator had a power output density of 300 Watts per square meter, which is enough to light 1000 LED bulbs simply by stamping one foot.

The principle known as triboelectricity is the basis of the technology, where a charge, similar to static electricity, is produced when two materials are rubbed together – but this doesn’t have to take place in an obvious outward manner. Motions besides stroking or rubbing such as pressing, tapping, swiping, or even the simple bouncing of the phone in your pocket as you walk could charge it. The team hopes will eventually have more broad applications in the alternative energy world, particularly in powering implanted medical devices such as pacemakers.

The post Power Petting: Using Friction to Charge Mobile Devices first appeared on Gajitz.

Artists have made impressive works of art with some pretty bizarre materials, but this set of minuscule characters blows them all away. The 107 letters, numbers and pictures – including some pretty silly smileys – were created by researchers at Harvard University from the building blocks of life: DNA. Each finished character is just 64 nanometers by 103 nanometers.

The researchers created these impressive little characters by effectively “unzipping” the familiar double helix shape of DNA. This turned them into a sort of ultra-tiny building block that was then used to arrange strands of DNA into specific shapes. The result is fun and kind of silly, but there is a very serious side to this project. It could be used to create molecular-scale medications and other devices that could dramatically enhance science and medicine.

The post Nano-Origami: Tiny Character Set Created From DNA Strands first appeared on Gajitz.

Imagine contracting an illness, getting sick, taking medicine and getting well – all without knowing that anything is happening at all. That is the promise of NASA’s revolutionary Biocapsules: tiny carbon nanotube structures that are inserted just under the skin to release medicine into the body when needed. The Biocapsules will sense when something is wrong with the body and release the appropriate medicine cells to combat the problem. With an unlimited lifespan and a huge storage capacity, the Biocapsules could keep diabetics healthy without the need for insulin shots for years.

The Biocapsules were, of course, invented for astronauts. On long space missions there are no hospitals in the event of illness, so the Biocapsule is meant to be a self-regulated implanted “doctor.” If an astronaut, for example, is hit with a mega-dose of space radiation (one of the biggest health concerns on a space mission), the Biocapsule would detect the danger and deploy the correct medicine to counteract any ill effects.

That doesn’t do us a whole lot of good here on Earth, of course, but NASA has other plans for us. The Biocapsule could be used to deliver insulin to diabetics, even keeping an eye on the patient’s blood sugar so no self-monitoring is necessary. With each capsule potentially containing millions of cells, diabetics could receive one implant and be finished with insulin shots forever.

The post The Doctor is In (Your Skin): Incredible Medicine Implants first appeared on Gajitz.

Despite moving toward a paper-free society, we still use paper fairly often in our daily lives. And to be honest, paper isn’t that great. It’s easily ruined by something as simple as a coffee spill and can spread disease by virtue of its tendency to transmit bacteria and other nasty things. But if we could apply new technology to the very old material, perhaps it could be revitalized. The Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa, Italy has created a nanoparticle coating that could be applied to individual paper molecules to make paper antibacterial, waterproof, magnetic and even fluorescent.

The process works by creating an itty-bitty “shell” around each fiber of the paper. The new properties of the paper depend on which nanoparticles are used: silver for antibacterial and iron oxide for magnetic, for example. After the polymer is applied to the paper fibers, the paper continues to act like normal paper. You can write and print on it, fold it up, even recycle it just like always. The antibacterial paper could be an incredible advancement for food packaging, and other enhancements could help create more secure currency or protect important documents.

The post Nanotechnology Makes Paper Into Waterproof Super-Paper first appeared on Gajitz.

Having cancer is hard enough, but often the treatment is just as bad as – if not worse than – the disease itself. In the interest of treating certain types of cancer more safely and with less radiation than current methods, Ohio State University astronomers Sultana Nahar and Anil Pradhan have looked to the stars for a novel solution. The researchers were looking at black holes to study how chemical elements react to radiation around black holes and in stars. They do this by watching how radiation is emitted from and absorbed by these elements.

As they watched computer models of heavy metals reacting with radiation, they realized that the metals throw off low-energy electrons when they are hit with a small dose of X-rays. Believe it or not, this could be huge news for cancer sufferers. The connection comes from those low-energy electrons. If this process took place inside a human body, the ejected electrons could easily destroy cancer cells. If an implant containing platinum nanoparticles were placed at the site of a malignant tumor and then hit with a small, focused dose of X-rays, the tumor would be easily obliterated.

The patient wouldn’t have to suffer through traditional radiation or chemotherapy and the treatment, in theory, would be just as effective. The healthy cells surrounding the tumor would be left unharmed. Although there is plenty more research to be done on this concept, the team is hopeful that they have stumbled upon a revolutionary cancer treatment. They have built a proof-of-concept machine that shows how the electron-freeing process works, but

The post Help From the Stars: Black Hole Radiation = Cancer Therapy first appeared on Gajitz.