2015 is drawing to a close, and various accounts have been counted one after another. for example, in the field of science, major journals such as Nature and Science have identified the most important scientific achievements and figures of the year. Here, Cool Science also wants to do a little review.

the inventory here is purely personal, it does not guarantee full coverage, and the criterion of evaluation is not "importance", but interesting. In short, what is listed here is that the home page will feel "ah?" after reading it personally. , "is that all right?" Several scientific studies of "Ah how interesting" have found that

1.

the first impression of this research report is "what?" Even if it is driven by evaporation, what kind of idea is it to use bacterial spores to form a transmission device?

but after watching the demo video, I really like it. I don't know why it looks so cute!

bacterial spores are a kind of natural "hygroscopic material". They absorb water and expand when the humidity is high, and reduce their volume when the humidity is low. The resulting pressure change provides the possibility of transforming energy from water evaporation. This car uses this principle. There are many small flakes hanging in the big wheels above, and one side of these flakes contains bacterial spores (spores of Bacillus subtilis, a harmless bacteria in the soil). It can bend and straighten at different humidity.

although this power is far from enough to bring a real car, the idea really touched me _ (: fat "∠) _

this is a serious study! In order to prove this point, I decided to list references this time:

Chen, X. et al. Scaling up nanoscale water-driven energy conversion into evaporation-driven engines and generators. Nat. Commun. 6 doi 7346: 10.1038/ncomms8346 (2015).

2. The study of embedding wires in plants

is also an amazing idea, and the feeling I just saw is basically "what?" , "what's going on?" Something like that...

what the research team does is create conductive plants-- and so on, don't plants conduct electricity themselves? How else is the potato battery made? That's true, but the result here is not to insert two electrodes into the plant. In fact, what they do is to use existing ducts in plants to make wires, turning plants into living wire networks.

they experimented with a fresh cut rose (similar to the roses in a florist, but slightly different), which allowed the branches to absorb a conductive polymer called "PEDOT-S", which formed long gel wires in the catheter. After testing, these wires can indeed play the role of wires, and can even be used to form a simple circuit.

this idea is very novel, but researchers in materials science don't seem to have figured out what they can do with this technology. "Conductive plants" may help us detect living plants, and it may also become a new way to regulate plant growth in addition to genes and chemicals, but this is the end, and a lot of follow-up research is needed. But in a word, the goose girl is still very Eleni Stavrinidou, Roger Gabrielsson, Eliot Gomez, et al. Electronic plants. Science Advances 20 Nov 2015: Vol. 1, no. 10, e1501136 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1501136

the first impression of this research report is "what?" Even if it is driven by evaporation, what kind of idea is it to use bacterial spores to form a transmission device?

but after watching the demo video, I really like it. I don't know why it looks so cute!

bacterial spores are a kind of natural "hygroscopic material". They absorb water and expand when the humidity is high, and reduce their volume when the humidity is low. The resulting pressure change provides the possibility of transforming energy from water evaporation. This car uses this principle. There are many small flakes hanging in the big wheels above, and one side of these flakes contains bacterial spores (spores of Bacillus subtilis, a harmless bacteria in the soil). It can bend and straighten at different humidity.

although this power is far from enough to bring a real car, the idea really touched me _ (: fat "∠) _

this is a serious study! In order to prove this point, I decided to list references this time:

Chen, X. et al. Scaling up nanoscale water-driven energy conversion into evaporation-driven engines and generators. Nat. Commun. 6 doi 7346: 10.1038/ncomms8346 (2015).

2. The study of embedding wires in plants

is also an amazing idea, and the feeling I just saw is basically "what?" , "what's going on?" Something like that...

what the research team does is create conductive plants-- and so on, don't plants conduct electricity themselves? How else is the potato battery made? That's true, but the result here is not to insert two electrodes into the plant. In fact, what they do is to use existing ducts in plants to make wires, turning plants into living wire networks.

they experimented with a fresh cut rose (similar to the roses in a florist, but slightly different), which allowed the branches to absorb a conductive polymer called "PEDOT-S", which formed long gel wires in the catheter. After testing, these wires can indeed play the role of wires, and can even be used to form a simple circuit.

this idea is very novel, but researchers in materials science don't seem to have figured out what they can do with this technology. "Conductive plants" may help us detect living plants, and it may also become a new way to regulate plant growth in addition to genes and chemicals, but this is the end, and a lot of follow-up research is needed. But in a word, the goose girl is still very Eleni Stavrinidou, Roger Gabrielsson, Eliot Gomez, et al. Electronic plants. Science Advances 20 Nov 2015: Vol. 1, no. 10, e1501136 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1501136

Food pigment droplets will also cuddle! They will also chase each other back and forth:

. )

what's going on? In fact, scientists have found that two-component droplets composed of water and propylene glycol have some unique spontaneous movements. The different colors are only used to mark different concentrations of propylene glycol solution.

here briefly explain why the droplets come together:

(this is really troublesome, you can skip this part if you don't want to take a closer look)

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the glass used here is a clean, dry, high-energy surface. On such a surface, the shape of the droplet will become somewhat special, and a thin liquid film will spread around the droplet. Like this:

in the place of the liquid film, because of the large surface area, evaporation will have a greater impact on the composition of the solution, and then the liquid composition of the main body of the liquid film and the droplet will become different, so the surface tension will change, and the unbalanced surface tension will drive the liquid flow (remember the hanging cup on the wine glass? In fact, the principle is similar, reply [hanging cup] can be reviewed). The liquid film evaporates more water, so the surface tension of the liquid here is smaller, resulting in the direction of liquid flow as depicted by the arrow above.

there is a flow inside a single droplet, but it does not move as a whole because the force on all sides is uniform. And when two droplets are adjacent,The humidity in the air between the two droplets becomes higher, thus slowing down the evaporation of water on the inside, so the evaporation of the inner and outer liquid film becomes different, so the force becomes different, and the end result is that the two droplets are pulled together by the surface tension.

based on this principle, more phenomena can be shown. Here is the full version of the demo video:

N. J. Cira, A. Benusiglio & M. Prakash. Vapour-mediated sensing and motility in two-component droplets. Nature 519,446 doi:10.1038/nature14272 450 (26 March 2015)

4. Nematode Lego Robot

this was actually seen during a review a while ago, but it was also very impressive. To put it simply, a group of researchers analyzed the neural network of beautiful hidden rod nematode (a relatively simple model organism), and then based on these data, they created a software to simulate the "nematode brain". Then use this software to independently control a robot car, which can spontaneously produce behaviors such as avoiding obstacles. There is a feeling that injects the soul of the nematode into the robot _ (: worm "∠) _

feeling is, although now it seems that artificial intelligence and artificial neural network still have many shortcomings. But the progress people have made in this area is also very exciting.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/27910/20150121/scientists-upload-mind-of-roundworm-in-lego-robot-nearing-artificial-intelligence.htm

. In short, these are some of the scientific achievements that have impressed me in the past year. Of course, they do not represent the whole picture of the frontier of scientific research. In terms of importance, there are a lot of things that have to be ranked first. But they do make people feel pretty good.

I wonder what scientific news has touched you in the past year.