Gearfuse

Scientists at General Electric’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, NY have developed a way to repel water off of metals through a treatment using superhydrophobicity properties. This is big news and is set to change the way we develop new products.

Superhydrophobic metals open up many new applications, says Jeffrey Youngblood, a professor of materials engineering at Purdue University. “Metallic structures are more robust and can survive in harsher environments, allowing for their use in applications where plastic is infeasible, [such as in] planes, trains, automobiles, heavy machinery, and engines,” Youngblood says.

So essentially, you could keep water off a ship, out of an airplane’s engines and so on with this new superhydrophobic metal. GE will no doubt profit to no end from this discovery.

Bonus: Did you notice “hydro” and “phobic”? Super afraid of water, essentially. I suppose those six Latin classes I took paid off.

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Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien and Japan’s Osamu Shimomura discovered and successfully developed a fluorescent protein found in jellyfish. Jellyfish will glow under blue and ultraviolet light because of this protein which the three scientists have become known for.

It might not sound like much, but this jellyfish protein has been widely used to study the spread of cancer, how brain cells develop and bacterial growth. Still don’t think it’s a big deal?

The academy compared the impact of the protein on science to the invention of the microscope, saying that for the past decade the protein has been ‘a guiding star for biochemists, biologists, medical scientists and other researchers’.

Yes, this is a big deal.

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Everyday scientists are creating new ways to develop the things we take for granted. Eliminating the problematic ways of creating plastic with oil or gas, scientists of Genomatica Inc. have formed strains of bacteria which produce plastic.

This is great news as this bacteria requires little more than sugar and water to produce butanediol, the compound used to manufacture many things such as plastic, fibers or pharmaceuticals.  Genomatica predicts that within the year, this energy-efficient process will cost less than the current processes used to create plastic.

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