Science Nation

Imagine watching the World Cup or the Super Bowl in 3-D in the comfort of your own home. That option may be available sooner than you think. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian and his team at the University of Arizona are working to make next-generation holograms possible. The researchers foresee the day, possibly within the next decade, when laser-generated holograms will be transmitted anywhere in the world, in real time. Transmitting a video rate hologram takes an enormous amount of bandwidth and power--think 10,000 times the rates for high-definition television. At the Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN), the vision is to create transformative technologies for optical access networks that can do just that--transmit huge amounts of data to a broad population anywhere, at any time. The broader impacts of CIAN's research could be felt in almost every home. Ultra-high data bandwidth and cost effective services could contribute to business innovation, improve educational opportunities, enhance distribution of medical services, minimize the environmental impact from infrastructure and pollution, enable new and varied entertainment opportunities, and increase overall national security, just to name a few possibilities.

Scientists at the Bioinspired Soft Materials Center at Brandeis University are using fundamentally new approaches to study bioinspired soft materials, with the ultimate goal of developing new materials for artificial muscles, self-pumping fluids and self-healing materials. The center is among the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSECs) supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It provides a multidisciplinary education for students in physics, chemistry and biology that will contribute to the workforce at the research frontiers and also contribute to the needs of emerging biomaterials industries.

These city kids from Boston may not look like conventional farmers, but they're spending part of their summer getting their hands dirty--or more like wet! They're learning how to build solar-powered hydroponic systems that grow organic vegetables without soil. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Boston College educator Mike Barnett and his team developed the Urban Hydrofarmers Project to engage students in math and science through hydroponic farming and green energy technology. And, because the teens sell what they grow at farmers' markets, the students get to experience green entrepreneurship.

It's often a butterfly's wings that capture our attention, but scientists at Clemson University are intrigued with another part of the butterfly called the proboscis. It's an elongated tube-shaped, sucking mouthpart that the insect can uncoil, similar to the way an elephant uncoils its trunk. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), materials scientist Kostya Kornev, biologist Peter Adler and their team at Clemson University are studying the evolution of the proboscis, its biomechanical properties and the physics of how it works to make synthetic fibers with similar properties. And, this is no simple sipper! It's actually two tubes that can come apart and then naturally come back together, so it's self-repairing. The proboscis can also work like a sponge, as well as a straw, and its surface properties make it self-cleaning. So there's no sticky residue after a meal. Eventually, Kornev's team wants to build a proboscis-like micro siphon--or probe. Using capillary action through channels and pores, it would suck up or dispense tiny drops of fluid. Such a device would have wide-ranging applications, such as new medical tools.

Modern society is very much defined by its access to electricity. What if researchers could advance sustainable energy technologies to the point where everyone around the world had access to clean, cheap energy sources? Richard Smalley, 1996 Nobel Prize winning chemist, called it the greatest challenge facing the world in the 21st century and coined the phrase "terawatt challenge." Researchers at the Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies (QESST) Center are hoping to meet much of the terawatt challenge with solar technology alone by vastly improving the performance of photovoltaic cells. QESST is an engineering research center supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy. Nearly a dozen universities participate in the center’s research. The center’s headquarters are at Arizona State University.

Long loathed as a threat and nuisance, the wolf population in Yellowstone National Park was essentially wiped out by the mid 1920s. That changed in 1995, when the National Park Service reintroduced wolves here, with the goal of restoring a natural predator/prey dynamic to the landscape. So, 20 years later, how has the park's ecosystem responded to the return of the wolves? That's just what Utah State University wildlife ecologist Dan MacNulty and his team want to find out. With support from NSF and working in partnership with the National Park Service, MacNulty and his team are hot on the trail of the wolves' primary prey--elk. The team is following individually marked wolves and elk to determine how and why wolf-elk interactions fluctuate over time, the effects of these fluctuations on wolf traits and vital rates, and how wolves, grizzly bears and cougars interact to influence elk mortality rates. Fuller understanding of what's happening here could translate to better predator management decisions all over the globe.

While many scientists are hard at work on "green chemistry" projects that will benefit the environment, there are a handful of researchers at the University of Arizona who are starting a trend of their own--"yellow chemistry." That's because their main ingredient is sulfur, a yellow waste product from petroleum refining and natural gas production. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), chemists Jeff Pyun and Richard Glass and a team of collaborators have mixed up a chemical recipe for sulfur-based plastic, and they've already used it to make everything from toys and lenses to a 45 record. But, ultimately, they're thinking of much bigger applications with this new class of plastics. Pyun says the annual production of sulfur is approximately 70 million tons per year, the majority of which comes from oil and gas production. While much of that is used up making sulfuric acid and fertilizer, there are still millions of tons left over. He envisions using sulfur waste to make lighter, cheaper electric car batteries capable of holding four to five times the charge we've come to expect. Because of its high refractive index and excellent mid-infrared transparency, sulfur also holds potential for optical applications, such as night vision devices, thermal monitoring sensors and medical imaging hardware.

The protective shells that have helped keep turtles around for millions of years have also kept scientists guessing about just what's going on inside. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), biologist Elizabeth Brainerd and her team at Brown University have developed X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology, or XROMM, a new technology that combines CAT scan and X-ray technology for visualizing bones and joints in motion, in both animals and humans.

From cleaning supplies to pharmaceuticals, surfactants are the compounds that make your soap bubbly, your paint spread smoothly and your medication dissolve more easily. Surfactants can be found everywhere because of their unique dispersion ability that helps lower the repulsive forces between liquids and solids or two non-mixing liquids (think oil and water).