ScienceDaily: Matter & Energy News

Scientists have revealed a single microscopic defect called a 'twin' in a soft-block copolymer using an advanced electron microscopy technique. This defect may be exploited in the future to create materials with novel acoustic and photonic properties.

As the global energy demand continues to grow along with atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), there has been a major push to adopt more sustainable and more carbon-neutral energy sources. Solar/wind power and CO2 capture - the process of capturing waste CO2 so it is not introduced into the atmosphere - are two promising pathways for decarbonization, but both have significant drawbacks.

Not all embryo transfers succeed, which gives rise to the practice of freezing extra embryos from an IVF cycle for future transfers. This allows those with at-risk fertility, due to age or treatments such as chemotherapy, to delay their transfer. Researchers introduce a standalone microfluidics system to automate the process of embryo vitrification of replacing water with cryoprotectants, which exposes embryos to a slow and constantly increasing concentration of cryoprotectants.

Wake steering is a strategy employed at wind power plants involving misaligning upstream turbines with the wind direction to deflect wakes away from downstream turbines, which consequently increases the net production of wind power at a plant. Researchers illustrate how wake steering can increase energy production for a large sampling of commercial land-based U.S. wind power plants. Several were ideal candidates.

Imagine an entire twenty storey concrete building which can store energy like a giant battery. Thanks to unique research, such a vision could someday be a reality. Researchers recently published an article outlining a new concept for rechargeable batteries - made of cement.

In the near future dyes in electric motors might indicate when cable insulation is becoming brittle and the motor needs replacing. Scientists have developed a new process that enables the dyes to be directly integrated into the insulation. By changing color, they reveal how much the insulating resin layer around the copper wires in the motor has degraded.

A new software tool will help bioinformaticians improve the quality and accuracy of their biological data, and avoid mis-assemblies. The fast, lightweight, user-friendly tool visualizes genome assemblies and gene alignments from the latest next generation sequencing technologies.