Chameleon-Like Material Spiked With Boron Comes Closer To Mimicking Brain Cells
In a new study, Texas A&M researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering describe a new material that comes close to mimicking how brain cells perform computations.
Each waking moment, our brain processes a massive amount of data to make sense of the outside world. By imitating the way the human brain solves everyday problems, neuromorphic systems have tremendous potential to revolutionize big data analysis and pattern recognition problems that are a struggle for current digital technologies.
But for artificial systems to be more brain-like, they need to replicate how nerve cells communicate at their terminals, called the synapses.
Texas A&M AgriLife Research and the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, TEES, were recently awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study and develop super-repellent and anti-fouling surfaces for foods.
The grant will be used in their collaboration to help ensure the safety of fresh food products, benefiting both consumers and the produce industry.
“There is a need to reduce those outbreaks associated with microbial contamination that may take place in different operations along the fresh produce chain,” said Dr. Luis Cisneros-Zevallos, AgriLife Research food scientist in College Station and co-principal investigator for the project. “The surfaces we are designing avoid cross-contamination and reduce the risk of biofilm formation.”
“In recent years, we have developed various types of nanotechnology-based coating with an intriguing combination of surface texture and chemistry to inhibit and prevent the attachment of microorganisms on plastics, metals, ceramic and glass at the laboratory scale,” said Dr. Mustafa Akbulut, TEES chemical engineer in College Station and principal investigator for the project.
A redesigned metastable phase of vanadium pentoxide (V2O5) shows extraordinary performance as a cathode material for magnesium batteries. The graphic compares the conventional (right) and metastable structures of V2O5.
Credit: Justin Andrews, Texas A&M University
–
A team of scientists, led by Texas A&M University, USA, chemist Sarbajit Banerjee, has discovered a metal-oxide magnesium battery cathode material, that could be used to produce batteries that promise higher density of energy storage on top of transformative advances in safety, cost and performance in comparison to their ubiquitous lithium-ion (Li-ion) counterparts.
The team’s solution relies on a redesigned form of an old Li-ion cathode material, vanadium pentoxide, which they proved is capable of reversibly inserting magnesium ions. They reconfigured the atoms to provide a different pathway for the magnesium ions to travel along, which creates a viable cathode material in which they can readily be inserted and extracted during discharging and charging of the battery.
This is achieved by limiting the location of the magnesium ions to relatively uncomfortable atomic positions by design, based on the way the vanadium pentoxide is made – a property known as metastability. This metastability helps prevent the magnesium ions from getting trapped within the material and promotes complete harvesting of their charge-storing capacity with negligible degradation of the material after many charge-recharge cycles.
The development could be a turning point in the field as it highlights the inherent advantages of using more imaginative, metastable materials like this new form of vanadium pentoxide.
