New Hope for progess to master CC

http://www.nature.com/news/obama-rekindles-climate-hopes-1.12322

Printing in Three Dimensions with Graphene GarcíaTuñon 2015 Advanced Materials Wiley Online Library

This innovation could hopfully be the long awaited leap in technology required to bring this marvelous material,graphene, from the realms of dashed dreams fulfill its multiple predicted properties and uses.   Join me in archiving this work and for rapid exploitation. NB. Its Carbon,its abundant, its economic and ecological, (eg. can be obtained from GHG -CO2!



Printing in Three Dimensions with Graphene GarcíaTuñon 2015 Advanced Materials Wiley Online Library

Where to Look for Insight-Innovation = Insight _ don't keep a good thing to yourself.

Where to Look for Insight:

Image ref. MATT CHASE

Hear the word “innovation,” and you might think of an R&D lab, a design group, or a start-up venture. But today innovators are in demand everywhere—from the factory floor to the salesroom, the IT help desk to the HR department, the employee cafeteria to the C-suite.

Innovation isn’t a department.
It’s a mindset that should permeate your entire enterprise.

No matter the venue, the feedstock for innovation is insight—an imaginative understanding of an internal or external opportunity that can be tapped to improve efficiency, generate revenue, or boost engagement. Insights can be about stakeholder needs, market dynamics, or even how your company works.

Several Fortune 500 companies have been founded on a single insight about what customers want. Starbucks brought a little bit of Italy to coffee shops. Home Depot gave do-it-yourselfers access to professional supplies. The Body Shop was built on the notion that buyers of beauty products care about humane animal-testing practices. Inside your company, insights can lead to more-efficient operations, simplified processes, or leaner structures.

Insights can be powerful, but how do you find them? Should you brainstorm with colleagues? Sift through masses of data? Simply introspect? Or carry on as usual and wait for the proverbial apple to fall on your head?

In our combined half-century of working with innovators at start-ups and within large corporations, we’ve found that the best insights tend to come from sources that can be categorized. We recognize that many people arrive at great ideas more or less serendipitously, but we nevertheless believe that it’s possible for individuals to approach innovation in a more systematic way.

On the basis of our experiences with and research into entrepreneurial ventures and product-development groups in varied industries around the world, we have outlined seven “insight channels” that can be used by would-be innovators in any function or role. They are listed below. By periodically tuning in to these channels and methodically running through them, you can focus your imagination, organize thinking, spur creativity, and find valuable ideas for growth.

Seven Insight Channels

Anomalies

Examine deviations from the norm
Do you see unexpectedly high or low revenue or share in a market or segment? Surprise performance from a business process or a company unit?

Confluence

Find macro trend intersections
What key economic, behavioral, technological, or demographic trends do you see? How are they combining to create opportunities?

Frustrations

Pinpoint deficiencies in the system
Where are customer pain points for your products, services, or solutions? Which organizational processes or practices annoy you and your colleagues?

Orthodoxies

Question conventional beliefsAre there assumptions or beliefs in your industry that go unexamined? Toxic behaviors or procedures at your company that go unchallenged?

Extremities

Exploit deviance
What can you learn from the behaviors and needs of your leading-edge or laggard customers, employees, or suppliers?

Voyages

Learn from immersion elsewhere
How are your stakeholders’ needs influenced by their sociocultural context?

Analogies

Borrow from other industries or organizations
What successful innovations do you see applied in other disciplines? Can you adapt them for your own?

Anomalies.

Businesses today are awash in data. Innovators pore over this information looking for promising ideas, but often they focus on means and averages, which lead to broad conclusions. Sometimes the real opportunities lie in the results that deviate from business as usual.

Consider an anomaly in global e-commerce. One might think that Russia, with more than 100 million middle-class consumers and 75 million internet subscribers, would be an attractive market for online retail. However, e-commerce accounts for a paltry 1.5% of total retail sales in the country. The entrepreneur Niels Tonsen recognized why: The Russian postal system is very unreliable, and few consumers have credit cards. This insight led Tonsen to create an online clothing store, Lamoda, which employs an army of couriers to deliver customers’ purchases to their homes, pick up cash on delivery, and even offer fashion advice. By providing an innovative experience that effectively brings the store, the style consultant, and the cash register to the customer’s front door, Lamoda built a very successful e-commerce business, uniquely suited to the Russian market. (See also “The CEO of Ozon on Building an e-Commerce Giant in a Cash-Only Economy,” HBR, July–August 2014.)

The smart innovator knows to notice and then follow up on surprising data. To look for anomalies, ask questions such as: Is your market share or revenue abnormally low or high in a geographical market? Are

you having unusual success with a specific customer segment? Are some of your salespeople unusually productive? Are some of your suppliers able to deliver unusually quickly? Then dig deeper. The deviant numbers may be the tip of the iceberg, hiding a valuable insight below.

Confluence.

When several trends come together, their intersection can be fertile ground for insights. For instance, the confluence of mobile telephony growth, social networking, and increasingly short attention spans has spurred the creation of social media applications including Vine, which allows the sharing of short videos; Tinder, a GPS-linked matchmaker; and Snapchat, which deletes anything sent through it from the receiver’s phone in a matter of seconds. Evan Spiegel and his Snapchat cofounders built on two more-specific social media trends: the urge to broadcast life as it happens and growing concerns over privacy. People express themselves spontaneously on Snapchat without worrying about self-censorship.

New social habits, technologies, and areas of interest are forming all the time across all facets of life. The smart innovator looks at how they fit together. Ask yourself: What are the major economic, demographic, and technological trends affecting my organization, industry, or market? How do those trends intersect? For instance, if you combine an aging population (a demographic trend) with mobile connectivity (a technology trend) and rising health care costs (an economic trend), you can mine the intersection to create services such as remote health care monitoring for seniors. Similarly, if you combine the rising costs and difficulty of sourcing talent with the widespread availability of mobile video, you can see an opportunity to create a video-based recruitment application to screen a large number of candidates at a low cost.

Frustrations.

Life’s irritations are often a terrific source of ideas. In the late 1990s Mark Vadon, a young consultant, went shopping for an engagement ring and found the experience intimidating and difficult. The system for categorizing and valuing diamonds is complicated, and eager salespeople only add to the pressure. Vadon reasoned that many other men were equally put off—an insight that led him in 1999 to found Blue Nile, an online jewelry dealer that offers useful tutorials and information on gems. Today the company is the largest online retailer of diamonds and sells some $250 million worth of engagement rings a year—more than 4% of total sales in the U.S. market.

Many people arrive at great ideas more or less serendipitously—but it’s possible for individuals to approach innovation in a more systematic way.

Vadon’s experience shows the value of paying attention to what annoys people and then fixing the problem. Put yourself in the shoes of customers, colleagues, or suppliers and ask: What’s most frustrating about your products, processes, or workplace? What bothers you personally about your business? What work-arounds do people use to get their jobs done? How could they be improved upon? Can you make customers’ lives easier or company meetings less painful? Can you reduce the hassles your suppliers face? If you feel people’s frustrations, you can find valuable innovation opportunities.

Orthodoxies.

When something has always been done the same way on your team or in your organization or industry, it’s worth asking if there’s an alternative. Traditions often block potential innovations because people are reluctant to abandon the tried-and-true. But when conditions change, so must traditions.

In the defense industry, for example, manufacturers have long focused on building expensive and sophisticated missiles, such as Raytheon’s Tomahawk, that sell for more than a million dollars; even the cheapest offerings, such as Lockheed’s Hellfire, cost upward of $100,000. These missiles are developed with customer funding (from the U.S. Department of Defense) and are custom-designed to be smart and powerful so that they can take out tanks and other large targets. But at Raytheon (a company to which Mohanbir Sawhney has provided consulting), the 25-year veteran Steve Ignat and his team recently upended that status quo.

Knowing that the United States and its allies needed cheaper, stealthier missiles to effectively target small groups of terrorists on the ground, they created a low-cost manufacturing facility (dubbed the Bike Shop) and, without even courting a single customer, used parts from existing production programs to assemble exactly those sorts of weapons. One of the missiles they built, the Griffin, is now in high demand.

Orthodoxies hide in every organization, industry, and market. To uncover them, ask yourself: What beliefs do we all hold sacred? Why do things have to be this way? What if the reverse were true? What opportunities would be opened up if we abandoned those assumptions and beliefs?

Extremities.

Businesses, appropriately, spend most of their time concerned with their mainstream stakeholders. But sometimes it is the “positive deviants,” as Oxford University’s Richard Pascale calls them, who are a rich source of ideas or insights, teaching us innovative ways to overcome incredible odds or solve seemingly intractable problems.

In May 2014 the famous Harvard law professor and activist Larry Lessig created Mayday, a political action committee to address the issue of corporate money in politics. The PAC would use community- and internet-based “crowdfunding” to raise similar amounts of money directly from citizens. As of August 25, 2014, it had raised $7.92 million from more than 55,000 contributors.

Positive deviants may be visionary customers who can help you see trends before they become mainstream. They may be manic coworkers who are passionate and don’t take no for an answer. They may be enlightened shareholders who can help shape your company’s strategy. Innovators must look at the fringes of stakeholder groups and ask: What can we learn from those who are most intense in their complaints or enthusiasm that we could apply to our company or our role?

Voyages.

When business turns stale, innovators get out of their own offices to visit “customers”—whether that means employees they manage, colleagues who rely on their work product, or the people who buy their goods and services. These “voyages” into different worlds are necessary because all behavior takes place within a rich sociocultural context; it’s impossible to understand what others are thinking when you’re sitting alone at your desk. Designers and product developers have long understood how important it is to take this anthropological approach.

A few years ago, Jennifer Hargreaves, a manager at the financial software company Intuit, was tasked with creating a new version of the company’s popular QuickBooks product for nonprofit organizations. Her first step was to volunteer at a local charity. After immersing herself in the new context—helping to manage the organization’s accounts for a few months—she noticed sharp differences between for-profit and nonprofit financial management processes. The focus was fundraising, not sales, and donors, not customers. This on-the-ground research helped her brainstorm extra features—such as the ability to track donations, pledges, and grants separately and to allocate expenses to particular initiatives or programs—for the new QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit, which she later launched to positive reviews and sales.

Anyone can make similar voyages. Learn how your stakeholders live, work, and behave. Ask yourself: What are the social, cultural, and environmental factors that affect their preferences and behaviors? How can we create solutions that respond to those factors?

Analogies.

Sometimes other teams, business units, companies, or industries have adopted useful ideas or systems that haven’t crossed the border, so to speak. Can you import innovation—even from a place that seems far removed or exotic?

Greg Lambrecht came up with his Coravin Wine Access System by co-opting ideas from the world of surgery. An MIT-trained engineer and an oenophile, he grew tired of uncorking bottles that he didn’t want to finish in one night, only to have the fine wine start to oxidize and deteriorate. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to drink just one glass while leaving the rest perfectly preserved? He knew that surgeons had started using extra-fine needles to ensure minimally invasive surgery and wondered if the same type of needles could be used to draw wine from a bottle. He tested and developed the idea over more than a decade, and despite a few setbacks, Coravin has been well reviewed and is now widely available.

We advise innovators to study a wide range of unrelated functional groups and industries to look for analogies that they can adapt to their domains. After all, innovation is not about bringing something new into the world. It’s about usefully applying something that is new to the situation, no matter the purpose for which it was invented.Our list of insight channels has evolved over the years and will no doubt continue to change and grow. Other observers could probably add a few categories of their own. But we’ve consistently found in our research and work that these seven are powerful drivers of innovation. Although they’re most commonly used by entrepreneurs, developers, and designers, they can help you in any role and any context where new thinking is required. Few people find great ideas on a blank canvas. Most of us need our imaginations channeled.

Mohanbir Sawhney (mohans@kellogg.northwestern.edu) is the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology and the director of the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, in Evanston, Illinois. They are the authors of a book on network-centric innovation (coming in October from Wharton School Publishing).

'via Blog this'

Metallic Glass hits the golf ball further and is likely to hit the global market just as hard!

"Throw a rock through a window made of silica glass, and the brittle, insulating oxide pane shatters. But whack a golf ball with a club made of metallic glass—a resilient conductor that looks like metal—and the glass not only stays intact but also may drive the ball farther than conventional clubs. In light of this contrast, the nature of glass seems anything but clear." ref., Phys.org.,newsletter, 0ct.2 014-10-18.

"A new study at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published Sept. 24 in Nature Communications, has cracked one mystery of glass to shed light on the mechanism that triggers its deformation before shattering. The study improves understanding of glassy deformation and may accelerate broader application of metallic glass, a moldable, wear-resistant, magnetically exploitable material that is thrice as strong as the mightiest steel and ten times as springy.

Whereas metals are usually crystalline, metallic glasses are amorphous in atomic structure. Amorphous metals, studied since the 1950s, have a tendency to crystallise when heated, which makes them extremely brittle. Metallic glass alloys that did not crystallise so easily were discovered at Tohoku University and Caltech in 1991 and introduced commercially in golf clubs in 2001."

How materials deform is still high on the research agenda:

"the researchers calculated how atoms move on a personal computer. To describe deformation at the atomic level, they sampled a large number of paths along which a system can evolve. Analysing the ensuing ensemble, they arrived at the statistically likely scenario."

"We unravelled the mystery of this deformation mechanism in not only the metallic glass system but also the general amorphous system," Fan said. "It's a challenging randomness problem, but from this huge model statistical result, we find [these two systems] are surprisingly governed by the same mechanism."

"Next the researchers will explore what happens between deformation and shattering. "As a consequence of deformation, next comes the stage where 20 atoms are affected," Egami said. "Sometimes they start an avalanche. Then hundreds of atoms are involved. At the end, all atoms in the system are involved—billions of atoms. So shattering is first started by five and then snowballs into big action."

The researchers' improved fundamental understanding of metallic glasses creates new knowledge of a material class about which little is known. Such advances may contribute to the USA, federal government's Materials Genome Initiative, launched in 2011 to accelerate discovery, manufacture and deployment of advanced materials for the global marketplace.

Metallurgist and Golfers alike maybe pleased to read more on the topic of Metallic Glasses via links provided by Phys.org.,  and in particular,  Nature Communications. 

Read more at Phys.org 

Three cheers to the metallurgical & mat sci community. Golfers Enjoy.

Original Article Title:

Atomic trigger shatters mystery of how glass deforms:



'via Blog this'

NOBEL PRIZE AWARDS 2014-blog up dates and links

A longstanding, if not awaited, up-date of my pages was badly needed. This has been done. Unfortunately for me, I was unable to continue using Nobel.org, RSS Feed to capture the information as had been the case up to 2012. This appears to have been abandoned by Nobel.org. Much more effort was required by me, but is now complete. Readers will see the three prizes most relevant to Materials Scientists and Engineers namely: Physics, Chemistry and Economic Sciences. This is in no way an under estimation of two fundamental subjects of huge significance for all humanity and rightly given prominence by Albert Nobel's far-sighted Awards: Peace and Medicine.

Looking forward to reading the Prize Winners Lectures usually available towards the end of 2014.

Comments welcome.

Surprising behaviour of metallic nanoparticles, "They wobble jelly like!"

The following report was brought to my  notice  by The Institute of Physics,UK (IOP) outreach team "Physics in Society"at the IOP. ( Phys.org Newsletter, Oct. 12, 2014).  A short summary follows:

A surprising phenomenon has been found in metal nanoparticles: They appear, from the outside, to be liquid droplets, wobbling and readily changing shape, while their interiors retain a perfectly stable crystal configuration. 

The results, published in the journal Nature Materials, come from a combination of laboratory analysis and computer modeling, by an international team that included researchers in China, Japan, and Pittsburgh, as well as at MIT.

                                          Credit: Yan Liang

More info & images may be found in NATURE MATERIALS | LETTER "Liquid-like pseudoelasticity of sub-10-nm crystalline ​silver particles" ,

Jun Sun,

Longbing He,

Yu-Chieh Lo,

Tao Xu,

Hengchang Bi,

Litao Sun,

Ze Zhang,

Scott X. Mao

& Ju Li, 

Received 

26 November 2013 

Accepted 

04 September 2014 

Published online

12 October 2014.

The experiments were conducted at room temperature, with particles of pure silver less than 10 nanometers across—less than one-thousandth of the width of a human hair. But the results should apply to many different metals, says Li, senior author of the paper and the BEA Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Silver has a relatively high melting point—962 degrees Celsius, or 1763 degrees Fahrenheit—so observation of any liquidlike behavior in its nanoparticles was "quite unexpected," Li says. Hints of the new phenomenon had been seen in earlier work with tin, which has a much lower melting point, he says.

The use of nanoparticles in applications ranging from electronics to pharmaceuticals is a lively area of research; generally, Li says, these researchers "want to form shapes, and they want these shapes to be stable, in many cases over a period of years." So the discovery of these deformations reveals a potentially serious barrier to many such applications: For example, if gold or silver nanoligaments are used in electronic circuits, these deformations could quickly cause electrical connections to fail.

The researchers' detailed imaging with a transmission electron microscope and atomistic modeling revealed that while the exterior of the metal nanoparticles appears to move like a liquid, only the outermost layers—one or two atoms thick—actually move at any given time. As these outer layers of atoms move across the surface and redeposit elsewhere, they give the impression of much greater movement—but inside each particle, the atoms stay perfectly lined up, like bricks in a wall.

"The interior is crystalline, so the only mobile atoms are the first one or two monolayers," Li says. "Everywhere except the first two layers is crystalline."

By contrast, if the droplets were to melt to a liquid state, the orderliness of the crystal structure would be eliminated entirely

Technically, the particles' deformation is pseudoelastic, meaning that the material returns to its original shape after the stresses are removed—like a squeezed rubber ball—as opposed to plasticity, as in a deformable lump of clay that retains a new shape.

The phenomenon of plasticity by interfacial diffusion was first proposed by Robert L. Coble, a professor of ceramic engineering at MIT, and is known as "Coble creep." "What we saw is aptly called Coble pseudoelasticity," Li says.

Now that the phenomenon has been understood, researchers working on nanocircuits or other nanodevices can quite easily compensate for it, Li says. If the nanoparticles are protected by even a vanishingly thin layer of oxide, the liquid-like behaviour is almost completely eliminated, making stable circuits possible.

REFS:

Unexpected finding shows nanoparticles keep their internal crystal structure while flexing like droplets

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-unexpected-nanoparticles-internal-crystal-flexing.html#jCp

Perhaps one of the most important discoveries in cement science this century.

Perhaps one of the most important discoveries in cement science this century, say researchers at Rice Univ Texas

“Green” concrete can lower concrete's CO2 atmospheric contribution

MORE?
1. “Green” concrete can lower concrete's CO2 atmospheric contribution

2. NATURE COMMUNICATIONS  : Combinatorial molecular optimization of cement hydrates (pdf)  Published 24 Sep 2014.