Group items tagged

flakes are soluble in liquids and easily produced in bulk

The discovery

could be a boon in the cleanup of contaminated sites like the Fukushima nuclear plants

could also cut the cost of hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") for oil and gas recovery and help reboot American mining of rare earth metals

Graphene oxide's large surface area defines its capacity to adsorb toxins

high retention properties are not surprising

What is astonishing is the very fast kinetics of sorption, which is key

the collaboration took root when

a graduate student

graduate student in Kalmykov's group, met at a conference several years ago.

researchers focused on removing radioactive isotopes of the actinides and lanthanides – the 30 rare earth elements in the periodic table – from liquids, rather than solids or gases

Naturally occurring radionuclides are also unwelcome in fracking fluids that bring them to the surface in drilling operations

When groundwater comes out of a well and it's radioactive above a certain level, they can't put it back into the ground

Companies have to ship contaminated water to repository sites around the country at very large expense

The ability to quickly filter out contaminants on-site would save a great deal of money

even greater potential benefits for the mining industry

Environmental requirements have "essentially shut down U.S. mining of rare earth metals, which are needed for cell phones

China owns the market because they're not subject to the same environmental standards

this technology offers the chance to revive mining here, it could be huge

capturing radionuclides does not make them less radioactive, just easier to handle

Where you have huge pools of radioactive material, like at Fukushima, you add graphene oxide and get back a solid material from what were just ions in a solution

Then you can skim it off and burn it

Graphene oxide burns very rapidly and leaves a cake of radioactive material you can then reuse

The low cost and biodegradable qualities of graphene oxide should make it appropriate for use in permeable reactive barriers, a fairly new technology for in situ groundwater remediation,

Medical School researchers demonstrate for the first time that hair cells can be regenerated in an adult mammalian ear by using a drug to stimulate resident cells to become new hair cells

resulting in partial recovery of hearing in mouse ears damaged by noise trauma

This finding holds great potential for future therapeutic application that may someday reverse deafness in humans.

This is the first demonstration of hair cell regeneration in an adult mammal

"It could mean that our mathematical description of the universe has been oversimplified-and that would represent a serious difficulty and a serious increase in complexity,"

Since 1982 it has been known that quasars tend to group together in clumps or 'structures' of surprisingly large sizes, forming large quasar groups or LQGs.

the LQG which is so significant in size it also challenges the Cosmological Principle: the assumption that the universe, when viewed at a sufficiently large scale, looks the same no matter where you are observing it from.

The modern theory of cosmology is based on the work of Albert Einstein, and depends on the assumption of the Cosmological Principle

he Principle is assumed but has never been demonstrated observationally 'beyond reasonable doubt'.

the Milky Way, is separated from its nearest neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, by about 0.75 Megaparsecs (Mpc) or 2.5 million light-years.

Whole clusters of galaxies can be 2-3 Mpc

LQGs can be 200 Mpc or more across.

Based on the Cosmological Principle and the modern theory of cosmology, calculations suggest that astrophysicists should not be able to find a structure larger than 370 Mpc.

newly discovered LQG however has a typical dimension of 500 Mpc.

it is elongated, its longest dimension is 1200 Mpc (or 4 billion light years)

some 1600 times larger than the distance from the Milky Way to Andromed