Seen and heard
Weird and wonderful stories from the world of physics
Taking a tiger’s pulse
How do you monitor a lion’s breathing rate or take a tiger’s pulse? With great difficulty, one would imagine. But a team at the University of South Australia has now developed a way to perform these routine health checks using a high-resolution digital camera. Until now, monitoring the vital signs of wild animals required specialized equipment and usually involved disturbing them or their environment. This new approach will save the animals the stress of an anaesthetic – and presumably will greatly lower the stress of zookeepers and veterinarians too (Sensors 10.3390/s19245445). The researchers filmed animals at Adelaide Zoo – including a giant panda, African lion, Sumatran tiger, orangutan, koala, red kangaroo and a little blue penguin – for three minutes from up to 40 m away. By detecting tiny movements in the abdominal-thoracic region, they could record heart and breathing signals from all the animals without any physical contact and without disrupting their daily routine.
Peppermint-flavoured polymers
Peppermint oil and walnut aroma are something you would expect to find in baking – so you might be surprised that researchers in South Korea have used them to create perovskite solar cells. The food additives could eliminate the need for the toxic solvents that are currently used to process polymers during the manufacture of the devices. Taiho Park and Junwoo Lee at Pohang University of Science and Technology developed a new type of polymer that can be dissolved by either walnut aroma or peppermint oil. Solar cells made using walnut aroma performed better than those made using peppermint oil. The new polymer has the extra benefit of providing a better physical seal between the solar cell and its environment. This prevents toxic lead from leaking out and moisture from leaking in.
Blood levitation
Researchers from Canada and the US are levitating human blood to detect disease – in this case, opioid addiction. When separated using magnetic levitation, plasma proteins with different densities levitate to different heights and become identifiable. Optical images of the levitated plasma proteins can help identify whether a patient has the possibility of getting a disease. In addition, analysis of the levitated proteins revealed remarkable differences between the plasma of healthy individuals and patients with opioid use disorders (Advanced Healthcare Materials 10.1002/adhm.201901608). “We compared the differences between healthy proteins and diseased proteins to set benchmarks,” explains Sepideh Pakpour from the University of British Columbia. “With this information and the plasma levitation, we were able to accurately detect rare proteins that are only found in individuals with opioid addictions.” The team is excited about the possibility of developing a portable and accurate disease detection tool.
Gold-plated pantyhose
“Smart” textiles are a hot topic in materials science right now, with researchers in various organizations striving to combine light-emitting displays with flexible substrates. Now, scientists in Canada have found a truly fabulous solution: gold-coated tights, or pantyhose as they’re known in North America. Yunyun Wu, a PhD student in Tricia Carmichael’s materials-chemistry group at the University of Windsor, was out shopping for fabrics for her research when she realized that sheer fabrics would make a great platform for the transparent conductor in light-emitting devices. This led the group to choose pantyhose as “an ideal material” upon which to build their electrodes. The researchers employed a metal-deposition technique called electroless nickel-immersion gold metallization to coat their pantyhose with gold film. Afterwards, they used the still-stretchy material to create light-emitting textiles emblazoned with a smiley-face emoji and a digital-clock-like display. The next step, they say, is to develop correspondingly flexible energy-storage components that can keep their 10-denier light-emitters going strong until the wearer decides to switch them off.