When raindrops turn into rolling sandballs

Amazing stuff!

We still do not even understand water very well, but numerous scientists and demagogues claim anthropogenic climate change/global warming like charlatans! Medieval superstition still continuous at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century!

"Discovery suggests raindrops can be up to 100 times more erosive than once thought"

"When a raindrop hits the ground, it explodes like a tiny bomb, carving out a tiny crater that sends soil and sand grains flying. Now, scientists report a previously unknown—and even more erosive—behavior. Under certain conditions, raindrops can bounce and then roll down a slope, picking up sand as they go ... The sand-covered balls transport up to 100 times more sediment downhill than drops that don’t roll, a fact that could help make more realistic computer models of soil erosion and land change. ..."

From the significance and abstract:

"Significance

Raindrops do not just splash—they can roll, gather, and grow. While erosion is often thought to begin and end the moment a raindrop hits the ground, we found that the story continues: On sloped, dry soil, raindrops can roll downhill like tiny snowballs, picking up grains along the way and forming what we call “sandballs.” This process greatly amplifies the amount of soil a single drop can move—by up to ten times—revealing a powerful and previously overlooked erosion mechanism. Understanding how water and soil interact at this scale can help improve models of landscape change, soil loss, and agriculture. It may also inspire innovations in fields like bioengineering, food processing, and snow and soft matter physics.

Abstract

In the water cycle, erosion begins with the entrainment of soil by raindrops. The discrete, discontinuous, and three-phase nature of raindrop erosion—at the boundary of fluid and granular mechanics—makes this problem particularly challenging, compared to better-studied sediment transport by river and wind currents.

Past research has emphasized particle entrainment by raindrop splash at impact. Here, we report lab and field observations, that uncover a surprisingly rich and efficient postimpact phase. Raindrops impacting a dry, sloping, granular bed spontaneously form “sandballs;” drops of dense suspensions that can grow in mass to a jammed state by sediment entrainment, as they roll downhill like snowballs and magnify soil erosion.

Careful control of drop conditions reveals two stable sandball morphologies: peanut-like shapes linked to hydrodynamic instabilities and toroidal forms that undergo mechanical locking from extreme sediment loading, which have potential implications for related problems in bioengineering, pharmaceuticals, and snow physics."

Watch these raindrops turn into rolling ‘sandballs’ | Science | AAAS

Sandball genesis from raindrops (no public access)

Radical DNA-detecting device is 100 times more sensitive than others

Good news!

"The compact, portable, inexpensive device incorporates a graphene transistor to which all the DNA strands in a sample are tethered. When those strands are exposed to an alternating electric field, they oscillate in place. If the sensor detects the unique oscillation frequency which is already known to be produced by the target DNA, it lets the user know that the DNA is present in the sample. ..."

"... That’s where this method is different. The test sample is put within an alternating electric field. Then, “We let the DNA dance,” he says. “When the strands of DNA dance, they have a specific oscillation frequency.” Researchers can then read samples to see if there is a molecule moving in a way that matches the movement of the target DNA and easily distinguish it from different movement patterns. This even works when there is a very low concentration of the target DNA.

This new method has huge implications for speeding up disease detection. First, because it is so sensitive, diagnoses can happen at earlier stages of a disease progression, which can greatly impact health outcomes.
Also, this method takes minutes, not days, weeks or months, because it’s all electric. ..."

From the significance and abstract:

"Significance

Miniaturized, high-precision DNA analysis holds significant potential for advancing biotechnology development and enabling applications in diagnostics, healthcare, and drug discovery. DNA detection using all-electronic devices offers a promising pathway to unlock this potential. However, existing all-electronic methods are prone to limited specificity and detection limit due to interference from nonspecific electrostatic and electrochemical interactions induced by prevalent charged species in solutions. To address this challenge, we drive nanostructural DNA strands, tethered to a graphene transistor, to oscillate in an alternating electric field. We find that the resulting transistor-current spectral characteristics are resistant to the interference interactions, leading to ultrahigh specificity and a detection limit improved by two orders of magnitude compared to existing methods.

Abstract

Electronic detection of DNA oligomers offers the promise of rapid, miniaturized DNA analysis across various biotechnological applications. However, known all-electrical methods, which solely rely on measuring electrical signals in transducers during probe–target DNA hybridization, are prone to nonspecific electrostatic and electrochemical interactions, subsequently limiting their specificity and detection limit. Here, we demonstrate a nanomechanoelectrical approach that delivers ultra-robust specificity and a 100-fold improvement in detection limit. We drive nanostructural DNA strands tethered to a graphene transistor to oscillate in an alternating electric field and show that the transistor-current spectra are characteristic and indicative of DNA hybridization. We find that the inherent difference in pliability between unpaired and paired DNA strands leads to the spectral characteristics with minimal influence from nonspecific electrostatic and electrochemical interactions, resulting in high selectivity and sensitivity. Our results highlight the potential of high-performance DNA analysis based on miniaturized all-electronic settings."

Radical DNA-detecting device is 100 times more sensitive than others (secondary news source)

Bioengineering Breakthrough Increases Dna Detection Sensitivity By 100 Times (primary news source) University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers discover letting small amounts of DNA ‘dance’ can speed disease detection

Nanomechanoelectrical approach to highly sensitive and specific label-free DNA detection

This device detects DNA with a 100-fold greater sensitivity than traditional methods using an alternating electric current.

Mechanochemical breakthrough unlocks cheap, safe, powdered hydrocarbons and possibly hydrogen

Amazing stuff! This could indeed be a major breakthrough and a source of huge  energy savings!

The still novel mechanochemical approach may also prove promising in other ways going forward.

Are the demagogues of the Global Warming Hoax and the Climate Change Religion paying attention! Human ingenuity is the solution not totalitarian tyrannical approaches!

"... The team has demonstrated that grinding certain amounts of certain powders with precise pressure levels of certain gases can trigger a mechanochemical reaction that absorbs the gas into the powder and stores it there, giving you what's essentially a solid-state storage medium that can hold the gases safely at room temperature until they're needed. The gases can be released as required, by heating the powder up to a certain point. ...

The process is repeatable ...
This process, for example, could separate hydrocarbon gases out from crude oil using less than 10% of the energy that's needed today. "Currently, the petrol industry uses a cryogenic process," ... "Several gases come up together, so to purify and separate them, they cool everything down to a liquid state at very low temperature, and then heat it all together. Different gases evaporate at different temperatures, and that's how they separate them out." ... Distillation as a whole is responsible for a massive 10-15% of global energy use. ...
Different gases ... are absorbed at different milling intensities, gas pressures and time periods. Once the first gas is absorbed into the powder, it can be removed, and the process can be re-run with a different set of parameters to trap and store the next gas. Likewise, some gases are released from the powders at higher temperatures than others, offering a second way to separate gases if they're stored together. ..."

From the abstract:

"Light hydrocarbon olefin and paraffin gas mixtures are produced during natural gas or petrochemical processing. The petrochemical industry separates hydrocarbon gas mixtures by using an energy-intensive cryogenic distillation process, which accounts for 15% of global energy consumption. The development of a new energy-saving separation process is needed to reduce the energy consumption. In this research, we develop a green and low energy mechanochemical separation process in which boron nitride (BN) powders were ball milled at room temperature in the atmosphere of an alkyne or olefin and paraffin mixture gas. BN selectively adsorbs a much greater quantity of alkyne and olefin gas over paraffin gases, and thus the paraffin gas is purified after the ball milling process. The adsorbed olefin gas can be recovered from the BN via a low-temperature heating process. The mechanochemical process produces extremely high uptake capacities of alkyne and olefin gases in the BN (708 cm3/g for acetylene (C2H2) and 1048 cm3/g for ethylene (C2H4)) respectively. To the best of our knowledge, assisted by ball milling, BN nanosheets have achieved the highest uptake capacities for alkyne/olefin gases, which are superior to all other materials reported so far. Chemical analysis reveals that large amounts of olefin gases were quasi-chemically adsorbed on the in-situ formed BN nanosheets via C–N bond formation, whereas small amount of paraffin gases was physically adsorbed on BN nanoparticles. This scalable mechanochemical process has great potential as an industrial separation method and can realize substantial energy savings."

Mechanochemical breakthrough unlocks cheap, safe, powdered hydrogen

Tech breakthrough could make oil refineries greener, hydrogen safer Deakin University researchers have made a breakthrough that could help address one of the biggest barriers preventing the widespread adoption of hydrogen energy - safe storage and transport.

Superb storage and energy saving separation of hydrocarbon gases in boron nitride nanosheets via a mechanochemical process (no public access)

Powerful new adhesive stays strong from freezing to boiling temperatures

Amazing stuff! This what I call a true superglue!

"... The new adhesive belongs to a class known as supramolecular adhesives, which are made up of molecular components specially designed to self-assemble into strong bonds during curing. One is a ring-shaped molecule called a crown ether, which can wrap around the second component, a small protein produced by bacteria. ...
The team tested it out by gluing steel plates together, and found that they could withstand up to 22 Megapascals of shearing force. Most impressively, that strength worked not only at room temperature but anywhere from -196 °C (-320.8 °F) up to 200 °C (392 °F). It proved promising on other materials as well, and even worked underwater. ...
The tight bond drives water out of the protein, which means that when the temperature drops no ice crystals can form and crack open the material, as often happens with other glues. This could also help explain why it works underwater. ..."

From the abstract:

"A crown-ether-protein adhesive was synthesized by host–guest molecular engineering. The internal dynamic molecular interactions endow the adhesives with extraordinary adhesion performance over a wide temperature range from −196 to 200 °C. Extremely strong adhesion, long-lasting adhesion, and biomedical sealing have been achieved. This work offers a promising molecular engineering strategy to fabricate robust supramolecular adhesives for applications under extreme conditions.

The inherently tenuous adhesion strength and limited environmental tolerance of supramolecular adhesives severely restrict their application scenarios. It is challenging for the development of robust adhesives with extreme temperature tolerance. Herein, we report a new type of temperature-resistant crown-ether-protein (CEP) adhesive by harnessing synergistic host–guest molecular interactions between engineered crown ether and protein building blocks. The outputs of CEP adhesive demonstrate ultrahigh shearing adhesion strength of ≈22 MPa over a wide temperature range from −196 to 200 °C, superior to other established supramolecular or polymeric adhesives. The temperature-induced phase transition and internal bound water stabilized the system and led to superb adhesion under extreme conditions. Thus, this work pioneers a molecular engineering approach for the generation of adhesives with tailored applications in extreme settings."

Powerful new adhesive stays strong from freezing to boiling temperatures

Molecular Engineered Crown-Ether-Protein with Strong Adhesion over a Wide Temperature Range from −196 to 200 °C (no public access)