Seokheun “Sean” Choi developed an inexpensive, bacteria-powered battery made from paper, he writes in the July edition of the journal Nano Energy.

The battery generates power from microbial respiration, delivering enough energy to run a paper-based biosensor with nothing more than a drop of bacteria-containing liquid. “Dirty water has a lot of organic matter,” Choi says. “Any type of organic material can be the source of bacteria for the bacterial metabolism.”

The method should be especially useful to anyone working in remote areas with limited resources. Indeed, because paper is inexpensive and readily available, many experts working on disease control and prevention have seized upon it as a key material in creating diagnostic tools for the developing world.

“Paper is cheap and it’s biodegradable,” Choi says. “And we don’t need external pumps or syringes because paper can suck up a solution using capillary force.”

While paper-based biosensors have shown promise in this area, the existing technology must be paired with hand-held devices for analysis. Choi says he envisions a self-powered system in which a paper-based battery would create enough energy — we’re talking microwatts — to run the biosensor. Creating such a system is the goal of a new three-year grant of nearly $300,000 he received from the National Science Foundation.

Choi’s battery, which folds into a square the size of a matchbook, uses an inexpensive air-breathing cathode created with nickel sprayed onto one side of ordinary office paper. The anode is screen printed with carbon paints, creating a hydrophilic zone with wax boundaries.

Total cost of this potentially game-changing device? Five cents.

Choi, who joined Binghamton’s faculty less than three years ago as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, earned a doctorate from Arizona State University after doing undergraduate work and a master’s degree in South Korea. Choi, who holds two U.S. patents, initially collaborated on the paper battery with Hankeun Lee, a former Binghamton undergraduate and co-author of the new journal article.

Choi recalls an actual “lightbulb moment” while working on an earlier iteration of the paper-based batteries, before he tried the origami approach. “I connected four of the devices in series, and I lit up this small LED,” he says. “At that moment, I knew I had done it!”

RNA (ribonucleic acid) is one of three major molecules essential for all known forms of life, along with DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and proteins.

“For a long time, people believed that RNA was simply a middleman, a worker that enabled the flow of genetic information from DNA to proteins,” says Rozners, an associate professor of chemistry. “Now, with the sequencing of the human genome, we know that only 2 percent of DNA encodes for proteins, while 70 to 90 percent is used to make RNA. That’s a lot of RNA, and even if we don’t yet understand it completely, we’re coming to appreciate that RNA is involved in the decision-making process of how cells develop.”

RNA, he notes, is an active player in cell development that determines which cells become skin, which become muscle, which become bone. “My lab is designing tools for the molecular recognition of different kinds of RNA, which can look very similar in cells, but are still significantly different,” Rozners says. “Such tools will enable studies on the various RNAs in their native environment, live cells.”

In the first project, “Amide-Modified RNA: Synthesis, Structure and Potential for RNA Interference,” Rozners and his collaborators — Martin Egli of Vanderbilt University, Kaizhang He of Dharmacon and Scott Kennedy of the University of Rochester — received a $1.5 million, four-year renewal grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to continue investigating the possibility of an artificial biopolymer that can mimic the properties of RNA.

In the second three-year project, “Sequence Selective Recognition of Double-Stranded Non-Coding RNA via Triplex Forming PNA,” the National Science Foundation awarded Rozners $414,767 to develop synthetic compounds that can differentiate between types of RNA by reading their sequence-specific nucleic codes. These compounds will be tested in collaboration with Paul Agris of the University at Albany, another SUNY institution.

Both projects are still years away from finding hands-on applications. But their potential, either as new research tools or as new medicines to target diseases that involve aberrant RNA expression, is enormous.

“This is difficult work, and Eriks is one of the few people who can do it, because it tends to be very elaborate, very complicated and very expensive” says Egli, an expert on X-ray crystallography. “Eriks is very meticulous, and has gone much further than previous attempts to study amides. He’s taking a much more holistic approach, focusing on the basic science of chemically modified nucleic acids and looking at fundamental changes all the way down to the atomic level.”

Devices like cell phones and wireless printers compete to communicate within a finite spectrum, accessing different portions in order to transmit data. In the same way that overlapping radio frequencies can sound fuzzy and unclear, when these wireless signals overlap, none of them can communicate efficiently.

Azizjon “Isaac” Saliev, a senior electrical engineering major, says his goal is to ensure clear communication by using specific frequency ranges more efficiently. The problem is that the rise in wireless technology happened so quickly, that the frequency spectrum that had been thought to be inexhaustible became scarce. That’s pushing engineers to create better algorithms, methods and techniques of wireless data transmission.

“This field of study is relatively new,” Saliev says. “We used to think we had an unlimited amount of frequency domain.”

Saliev and his colleagues are trying to solve this problem by using cognitive radio networks (CRNs). These CRNs will automatically detect the available network, and transmit their signal using the available unoccupied space, rather than overlapping with other signals. His approach is to create an algorithm to detect the specific frequencies that devices are signaling. This information would be helpful when applied to emergency communications, where the efficiency of a radio signal could mean the difference between life and death.

Saliev left Uzbekistan five years ago to pursue an education at Binghamton. Today he’s such a dedicated student that his biggest fear about a recent snowstorm was that it would keep him from his linear algebra class. He is one of the first students at Binghamton to work on this project, sponsored by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation and headed by Xiaohua Li, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Li says it was a combination of Saliev’s class rank, previous research experience and ambition that made him the ideal candidate for this project. That ambition goes a long way in Li’s lab, where he called on Saliev and his partner to create the test bed for the experiment. “I asked them to set up a communication system using cognitive radio devices,” Li says.

Saliev and his partner had to complete extensive Internet research and make their own software, developing a test bed that allowed the project to proceed.

In addition to the work he is doing in Binghamton, Saliev spent a summer in Taiwan, where he conducted research for Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect. He developed two simple games in which the players use their bodies to control the on-screen movement.

Saliev plans to seek a doctorate in electrical engineering after he graduates, and he already has a job as an integration engineer at IBM starting this summer.

“In the long run,” he says, “I want to be an entrepreneur, and maybe open up my own start-up or consulting firm for the technology industry. My ultimate goal is to share my knowledge with others and make the world little better than it is today.”

The new designs don’t make biological solar cells practical, yet. But they do take them out of the realm of “absurd” and place them squarely in the realm of “someday soon.”

Here’s the challenge:

Current photovoltaic cells generate watts of energy per square centimeter. A solar chip about the size of your fingernail can power a simple handheld calculator. Existing biological cells — which use photosynthesis to generate electricity — produce picowatts per square centimeter — a trillionth of a watt. To power that same calculator, the cells would stretch 20 meters wide and from Binghamton to Ireland. Absurd.

Choi’s first biological solar cell produces a million times more energy, microwatts per square centimeter, so the calculator could operate with a solar panel that fits on a trailer home roof — just 20 meters by 5 meters. His findings were recently published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Lab on a Chip.

And Choi’s latest experiment churns out milliwatts per square centimeter — reducing the calculator’s solar panel to a backpack-sized 8 inches by 20.

That brings it into the range of practical application, says Hongseok “Moses” Noh, an engineer and professor at Drexel University who specializes in lab-on-a-chip technology and applications. “Milliwatt power should be sufficient to meet those needs,” Noh says. “But the device, so far, is too big for hand-held systems, honestly.”

If Choi can reduce the cell to a tenth of its size while maintaining milliwatt power density, it would be enough to power hand-held blood analysis devices or air-testing machines. “This is one of very few miniaturized bio-solar products,” Noh says, and it’s worth following Choi’s progress.

What makes Choi’s approach different? Existing biological solar cells use a thin strip of gold or indium tin oxide as an anode between the bacteria and an air cathode. Not very efficient, and the bacteria eventually die because they lack air.

Choi uses a carbon anode immersed in the bacteria-laden fluid — a pretty peridot green in a lab flask. More efficient, and because the solution has access to air, it’s self-sustaining. It also uses the plant’s natural respiration to draw energy from the sugars in the cells to keep power up even if light is low.

Choi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, says he doesn’t understand why one form of cyanobacteria works better than another, or why a mixture of cyanobacteria and heterotrophic bacteria work even better than a single variety. His last biology class was in high school.

“I have no idea about microbiology; I just bought the bacteria and followed the instructions to culture it,” he says. But millions of bacteria species abound, and he plans to experiment to find the most productive combination.

Or, he suggests, he might work with bioengineers to develop a bacterium with its photosynthetic engine on the cell’s surface instead of deep in its heart. That would be another order of magnitude more productive because less energy would be wasted just going from the heart of the cell to its exterior. He has received seed funding from Binghamton’s Transdisciplinary Area of Excellence in smart energy to continue this work.

Choi says he’s confident he’ll eventually reach watt-level energy density, comparable to photovoltaic cells. “I can get that,” he says. “We have room for improvement.”

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could be relevant to understanding and perhaps controlling oxidation in a range of materials — from catalysts to the superalloys used in jet engine turbines and the oxides in microelectronics.

The experiments were performed by a team led by Guangwen Zhou, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton University, in collaboration with Peter Sutter of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The team used a low-energy electron microscope (LEEM) to capture changes in the surface structure of a nickel-aluminum alloy as “stripes” of metal oxide formed and grew under a range of elevated temperatures.

The metal Zhou wanted to study, nickel-aluminum, has a characteristic common to all crystal surfaces: a stepped structure composed of a series of flat terraces at different heights. The steps between terraces are only one atom high, but they can have a significant effect on material properties. Being able to see the steps and how they change is essential to understanding how the surface will behave in different environments, in this case in response to oxygen, Sutter said.

Said Zhou, “The acquisition of this kind of knowledge is essential for gaining control over the response of a metal surface to the environment.”

Scientists have known for a while that the atoms at the edges of atomic steps are especially reactive. “They are not as completely surrounded as the atoms that are part of the flat terraces, so they are more free to interact with the environment,” Sutter said. “That plays a role in the material’s surface chemistry.”

The new study, supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science, showed that the aluminum atoms involved in forming aluminum oxide stripes came exclusively from the steps, not the terraces. But the LEEM images revealed even more: The growing oxide stripes could not “climb” up or down the steps, but were confined to the flat terraces. To continue to grow, they had to push the steps away as oxygen continued to grab aluminum atoms from the edges. This forced the steps to bunch closer and closer together, eventually slowing the rate of oxide stripe growth, and then completely stopping it.

“For the first time we show that atomic steps can slow surface oxidation at the earliest stages,” Zhou said.

However, as one stripe stops growing, another begins to form. “As the oxide stripes grow along the two possible directions on the crystal, which are at right angles to one another, one ends up with these patterns of blocks and lines that are reminiscent of the grid-based paintings by Mondrian,” Sutter said. “They are quite beautiful” and persistent after all.

Still the details and differences of the two types of surfaces could offer new ways scientists might attempt to control oxidation depending on their purpose.

“Oxides are not all bad,” Sutter said. “They form as a protective layer against corrosion attack. They play important roles in chemistry, for example in catalysis. Silicon oxide is the insulating material on microelectronic circuits, where it plays a central role in directing the flow of current.”

Knowing which kind of surface a material has and its effects on oxidation — or how to engineer surfaces with desired properties — might improve the design of these and other materials.

Optical dyes can be used to control color and light in applications ranging from laser welding to production of sunglasses and plasma TVs. The dyes used for this purpose are often expensive; others are cheap but apt to decompose when exposed to heat.

A better set of options — optical dyes that are both economical and stable — is about to hit the market, thanks to researchers at Binghamton University.

Wayne Jones, professor of chemistry and chair of Binghamton’s chemistry department, received a $50,000 investment from SUNY’s Technology Accelerator Fund (TAF) for a new process to bind organic dyes to metal oxides. The investment will help Jones and his lab further develop the process and scale up for commercial production.

Jones made the discovery in collaboration with Bill Bernier, a research professor in the chemistry department, and graduate student Kenneth Skorenko.

The organic dyes that form the focus of their research are small organic molecules. “In the presence of high temperature, they tend to react with oxygen and water in the atmosphere,” Jones says. The reaction causes the dyes to break down. That makes them a poor choice to use, for example, in plastics that are melted for extrusion or molding.

The new process runs an electric current through a metal electrode to create charged nanoparticles of metal oxide, which bind to molecules of the dye. The bound molecular composite is stable at temperatures higher than needed in most industrial applications.

Jones and his collaborators have used a prototype of this process to make polymer pellets infused with a light-controlling dye. “We hope the TAF investment is going to allow us to take this to full-scale manufacturing,” he says.

Jones’ lab has patented the binding process. To commercialize the invention, the researchers formed a small company, ChromaNanoTech, with Bernier as chief executive officer and Skorenko as chief technology officer. The company will operate in Binghamton University’s business incubator.

One potential customer has already sent ChromaNanoTech a purchase order for a large quantity of dye, Jones says. But there’s a catch. “The purchase order doesn’t become effective until we can produce a kilogram a week,” he says. “In a research lab like mine, typically we’re delighted if we produce one gram a week. So we have to scale up a thousand fold.”

The TAF investment will help the company do just that, allowing the startup to buy new equipment and hire Skorenko, who will work on technologies to make the process run faster.

Jones and his team also plan to develop and commercialize additional processes for stabilizing dyes. ChromaNanoTech has formed a partnership with a dye manufacturer that has hundreds of dyes in its portfolio, none of them currently suitable for applications involving high temperature plastics. “We can potentially convert all of them,” Jones says, “and have a wide series of these dyes.”

Imagine, he says, that you and your co-workers plan via social media to head for lunch about 12:30 p.m. most Thursdays. Usually that Italian place downtown. Frequently tweet about traffic on the way.

Now imagine that at 10 a.m., you’re tweeted a coupon from the Chinese place near the Italian joint — and directions around a traffic jam that will start in about 90 minutes. Score one Sichuan hot pot.

Yoon can make that happen. He and fellow Binghamton University systems scientist Sarah Lam have been working with Binghamton alumnus Nathan Gnanasambandam, a senior researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a division of Xerox Research. They used 500 million tweets to develop algorithms that not only paint a picture of everyday human dynamics, but can predict an individual’s behavior hours in advance. The team, which also included graduate students Keith Thompson and Bichen Zheng, recently published their findings in Industrial Engineer.

Think about what your typical social media post says about you: when you posted, where you were. Your networking relationships can be learned — and with context-based algorithms like those PARC and Binghamton University have developed — what you plan. They use what is called an artificial neural network.

How sure are they? Better than 90 percent for a typical social media user in a three-hour horizon. “If you look at the picture, it’s very static. But the individuals are all over the place,” Yoon says.

Some people are very careful about what data they give out, but the algorithms can work pretty well with anonymized data. Usable predictions can be made more than 60 percent of the time, if the right data are aggregated. And that data isn’t just coming from social media: Think about sources such as credit card transactions, monitored telephone calls, e-mail, GPS data.

Creepy, perhaps, but this type of analysis also has benefits. Xerox, which has funded and participated in the team’s ongoing research, can apply the tools to traffic. (It helps run the New York State Thruway’s EZ-Pass system and parking services in several cities across the country.) Imagine getting directions during an emergency that not only get you out of harm’s way, but get you to someplace personal where you’re safe, reducing the burden on emergency shelters. Or imagine directions that prevent a traffic jam, rather than simply route you around one.

Now apply that research tool to call and contact centers, which Xerox also runs. These methods can fuse data from call centers, online chat and e-mail help desks. “We give it structure — not all feeds have structure,” says Gnanasambandam, who is also a visiting professor in Binghamton’s department of systems science and industrial engineering.

“What if you call a company…” Yoon says, and Lam completes: “… And they know why you’re calling before you call?”

Help desk associates can be cross-trained in topics so they face less downtime, or calls could be routed faster to the best specialist. Data about problems can be analyzed in near-real time, perhaps allowing fixes to be made before the customer realizes there’s a problem. “That’s not too far away from what’s happening,” Gnanasambandam says.

Now direct this approach toward healthcare — which provides about $2 billion of Xerox’s annual business — and researchers can build tools to help patients, doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical companies better understand the complexities of public health or ferret out prescription or Medicaid fraud.

“There’s a lot of different directions you can go,” Lam says.

Including to Yoon’s next Chinese meal.

Louis Piper’s research focuses on metal oxides, a class of materials that includes some of the best insulators as well as some of the best conductors in use today. He and his colleagues, writing this month in the journal Applied Physics Letters, suggest a new method for manufacturing amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide (a-IGZO), a ceramic that looks like glass and can behave like metal, or even like silicon.

Companies such as Sharp and LG already use a-IGZO in some high-end displays. It’s also found in Apple’s new iPad Air. But it has been difficult to maintain transparency and conductivity: In some samples, Piper said, the material took on a brown or yellow tinge that would harm the display’s performance.

Using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to examine the chemical composition and electronic structure of a-IGZO, Piper and his colleagues tested 50 samples, each about a centimeter square and a micron thick. Previous studies have worked with fewer than five samples; this larger effort enabled the physicists to observe trends and conduct data analysis.

The surprising finding of these elaborate experiments? The deep subgap feature, which caused the discoloration in the material, is the result of local variation in oxygen coordination, rather than oxygen vacancies. “There was a lot of detective work,” Piper said. “Several models had suggested missing oxygen played an important role, but our data showed otherwise.”

Eventually, computations conducted by theorists at the University of Bath backed up the experimental findings from Binghamton: Oxygen that has too few positive metal ions surrounding it seems to be the cause of the subgap.

The team not only identified the reason for the subgap feature; it also developed a way to resolve the problem. Low-temperature annealing — heating at 390 degrees Fahrenheit (a temperature you might use when baking a pizza) — allows a-IGZO to retain its conductive properties but removes the subgap states, Piper said.

Bottom line, he said: “You don’t have to sacrifice transparency for conductivity.”

Creating a more reliable production process for a-IGZO will save electronics manufacturers money. It could also reduce energy use, as a fully transparent display can take advantage of ambient light and does not require as much backlighting.

One of 32 grants awarded for a total of $100 million to fund Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs), it will help accelerate the innovations needed to build a 21st-century energy economy.

“We are mobilizing some of our most talented scientists to join forces and pursue the discoveries and breakthroughs that will lay the foundation for our nation’s energy future,” U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said this week in announcing the grants.

The Binghamton grant was awarded to the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES), directed by M. Stanley Whittingham, distinguished professor of chemistry and of materials science.

“Stan Whittingham is a pioneer in the development of lithium ion batteries and his research has already had a phenomenal impact on our society,” President Harvey Stenger said. “Receipt of this highly competitive grant will enable Stan and his colleagues to continue to push the boundaries of energy storage and battery life, and underscores the value of the work Binghamton University researchers are involved in every day.”

“This grant illustrates the quality and importance of smart energy research at Binghamton,” said Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and distinguished professor of mechanical engineering. “Batteries are essential to improving technology in so many ways, whether it’s portable electronics; smart grids, which enhance security and save energy; green energy harvesting such as solar and wind; or data centers, which require a backup energy source.”

“Stan Whittingham’s center competed against proposals from top schools around the country and won,” Sammakia said. “It’s an endorsement of him and speaks to the high caliber of his research.”

Whittingham and his colleagues want to understand the fundamental chemical reactions in energy storage materials to make them work better and to develop new materials that are cheaper, environmentally friendly and able to store more energy than current materials can.

Intercalation reactions are the key to Whittingham’s research on lithium-ion batteries. Such reactions will require materials that remain structurally the same even as lithium ions are put into them and taken out of them. These materials would work much like a sponge, which retains the same basic structure even as it absorbs water and as that water is squeezed out of it. Finding that sort of structure is a crucial aspect of hybrid electric cars because consumers would expect a battery to last 10 years or so. The less battery materials change as they recharge and are used, the longer they’ll last.

“The research I have been involved with for over 30 years has helped advance how we store and use energy at a very foundational level — through batteries that, among other things, power most laptop computers,” Whittingham said. “This infusion of funding for the work that I do with my colleagues in the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage will allow our work to continue as we seek to improve on current methods for energy storage in a way that will impact everyone around the globe.”

More than 200 proposals were submitted to the Department of Energy for this second round of awards for EFRCs to enable fundamental advances in energy production, storage and use. The NECCES, with Whittingham as director, also received funding in the first round. Partner institutions include Rutgers, MIT, Argonne National Laboratory, Cambridge University, the University of California at San Diego and at Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois-Chicago and New York University.

Since their establishment by the Department’s Office of Science, the EFRCs have produced 5,400 peer-reviewed scientific publications and hundreds of inventions at various stages of the patent process. EFRC research has also benefited a number of large and small firms.

The centers selected for the second round of funding will help lay the scientific groundwork for fundamental advances in solar energy, electrical energy storage, carbon capture and sequestration, materials and chemistry by design, biosciences and extreme environments. 

If you consistently experience high levels of stress, you may be stimulating bacteria that weaken your blood vessels, Binghamton University researchers have found.

The microbiologists discovered a link between stress hormones and bacteria that may explain how emotional shock or over-exertion can trigger heart attacks or strokes in vulnerable people. Researchers believe that this is how someone could literally be scared to death.

The research, published in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, indicates that hormones released during stress could cause thin sheets of bacteria called biofilms to disperse.

If this happens in your body, biofilms within your arterial walls would be stimulated to release enzymes that might weaken the arterial wall and lead to plaque rupturing into the blood stream. Plaque rupture has long been known to be one of the leading causes of heart attack and stroke.

“Our hypothesis fits the observation that heart attack and stroke often occur following an event where elevated levels of catecholamine hormones are released into the blood and tissues, such as occurs during sudden emotional shock or stress, sudden exertion or over-exertion,” says David Davies, associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton.

Biofilms, often referred to as slime, form when bacteria undergo a genetic change and then organize within a self-produced matrix of extracellular polymeric substance. Once they are protected within the biofilm, bacteria are harder to detect and to treat with antibiotics.

Davies and his colleagues grew different species of bacteria taken from diseased carotid arteries affected by atherosclerosis, the build-up of thick plaques within the walls of blood vessels. They found multiple bacterial species living as biofilms in the walls of every atherosclerotic carotid artery tested. Certain molecular signals can cause the biofilms to release enzymes that digest the scaffolding anchoring the bacteria in place.

“The release of iron into the blood as a result of increases in stress hormones is what causes the bacteria to release their hold on each other and the plaque,” says study co-author Karin Sauer, professor of biological sciences at Binghamton.

This research suggests that bacteria should be considered to be part of the overall pathology of atherosclerosis. The scientists suggest that management of bacteria within an arterial plaque lesion may be as important as managing cholesterol.

Davies believes this research might someday change the medical community’s view of many conditions. “We’re going one disease at a time and trying to demonstrate whether or not bacteria are involved,” he says. “In most diseases with the letters itis … it means inflammation, it means a biofilm infection.”

As a bioengineer with expertise in fluid and solid dynamics, he decided to find out whether there was more going on than hype. “I’m interested in the underlying physics of it,” he says.

Most cleansers — from shampoo to floor cleaner — are based on surfactants. They’re a handy way to remove dirt and oil.

Why is that? The surfactant creates a nice, foamy lather. It also works as an emulsifier. “Essentially, oil and water do not want to mix,” German explains. “When surfactants are added during washing, they will sit at oil-water interfaces. This reduces the surface tension at the interface of the two liquids and allows the oil drops to be suspended in the water.”

But as your skin gets clean, it may also feel tight. That’s because along with the dirt, you’re washing away lipids and natural moisturizing factors healthy skin needs.

Washing changes the chemical composition of the dead skin cells that form the outermost layer of skin, the stratum corneum. This shell is what protects the soft, tender living tissue — the rest of you — from dehydration and infection. “You’ve got to thank the stratum corneum for allowing you to live on land,” German says. “It works to slow down the water escaping from your body, which means we can live on land and not in the ocean.”

In a study funded by Unilever, German developed a technique called high throughput correlation tracking to measure how much the stratum corneum dries out and stiffens after being treated with surfactants. This technique will allow researchers to test hundreds of surfactants and build a better soap.

German tested four surfactants — sodium cocoglycinate, sodium lauryl ether sulfate, cocomido propyl betaine and alkyl polyglucoside. (The last, known as APG, is more commonly used today in floor cleaners than in facial cleansers.) The APG showed the most deformation, while two others resulted in deformation similar to the control, treated with water.

Not all surfactants are the same. Some remove lipids and natural moisturizing factors. Different surfactants remove different amounts and, therefore, cause different amounts of barrier damage.

Bottom line, German says: “Your choice of cleanser matters. Read the back of the label.”

Bruce White worked with semiconductors and transistors at Motorola and Texas Instruments. But when he left industry for a position on Binghamton University’s faculty, the materials scientist decided to take his research in a new direction. “I didn’t want to just continue to work on transistors and memory,” White says. “I wanted to try to apply those tools to big problems that impact society.”

Energy is one of those big problems; in the United States, more than half of the energy we burn each year gets lost as heat instead of being put to use.

“We do all this work to get oil out of the ground and to refine it, but when we try to do some work with it, most of the energy goes out the exhaust pipe of a car or out the smokestack of a power plant,” White says. “Even if we could reclaim a small fraction of what we throw away as heat, that would have a significant impact on our energy use.”

There are ways to turn heat into electricity. If a material is hot on one side and cold on the other, the flow of heat from hot to cold can be turned into electricity. But most of the thermoelectric materials on the market today are not very good at doing that. The tricky part, White says, is getting the heat to flow through the material on the backs of electrons. In most materials, the heat flows in a wave that simply makes the material’s atoms vibrate faster. That’s not a useful phenomenon, and it ends up destroying the important hot-cold differential. In many materials, the vibration of atoms carries away 90 percent of the heat before it can be harnessed.

White’s goal is to create materials where the vibrational effects are minimized — or, in other words, where a larger percentage of the heat gets shuttled by electrons, creating a flow of electricity. He also thinks it’s important to make sure those materials are abundant and nontoxic.

White may have found a candidate in zinc oxide, a substance used in many brands of sunblock. Zinc oxide is abundant, cheap and safe, and it happens to be really good at moving electrons around. Unfortunately, in its normal state, zinc oxide has a molecular structure that transports heat by vibrating atoms instead of turning it into electricity.

By manipulating zinc oxide at the molecular level, White and his colleagues are able to make it better at generating electricity. First, they stretch the material into wires that measure 50 nanometers across. (That’s roughly 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.) That incredible thinness changes the way heat spreads through the material. Next, they embed the nanowires in a silica aerogel, a substance that’s terrible at conducting heat. Because of the interesting and unique interactions that occur at very small scales, nanowires can take on the properties of surrounding materials. In this case, the wires became very poor heat conductors. Their ability to conduct heat through atomic vibrations decreased by a factor of 10, so their efficiency in turning heat to electricity shot up. The results were published in April 2013 in Applied Physics Letters, the top journal in the field.

What’s particularly exciting about this discovery, White says, is that the materials of the wires and the aerogel can be mixed and matched to customize the thermoelectric properties for different applications — such as harnessing waste heat from a power plant, car or household furnace. Since aerogels are nearly transparent, White even envisions making window coatings that exploit indoor versus outdoor temperature differences to generate electricity.

With the right materials, it may be possible to eliminate the internal combustion engine altogether. White and his lab members think they may have a way of doing that. It all comes down to silicon, which is an excellent semiconductor — that’s why our electronic devices are silicon-based — but is also really good at conducting heat via atomic vibrations. White’s group is getting rid of those vibrations by building a silicon-tin composite using a new fabrication technique that grows the material layer by layer.

The work caught the attention of the Naval Research Office, which provides funding for White’s research. “It’s his fabrication method that really makes it different,” says Robert Walters, head of the Naval Research Laboratory’s Solid State Devices Branch. “Bruce has developed the fabrication technique that we feel will actually achieve the layered silicon-tin structure, which we think we really need to have to de-couple silicon’s thermal and electrical properties. … It’s a very good idea. It’s innovative and it’s different from other things that we’ve seen.”

The new composite material has a thermal conductivity that’s 1,000 times lower than regular silicon. The group hopes to make it three times lower still by making the crystal purer and more evenly patterned. If the thermal conductivity gets that low, the material would be so good at turning heat into electricity that it could power a car with the burning of a flame.

That’s far off in the future, though. As they work on refining the materials they’ve already developed, White’s group is on the brink of creating less extreme materials that could still have a big impact. Heat-harnessing materials, which could be retrofitted onto a car’s tailpipe or radiator, could soon generate enough electricity to power the car’s electronics. “That alone could increase the fuel efficiency by a few miles per gallon,” White says. “When you think about integrating it over the entire automotive fleet, that makes a huge difference.”

Binghamton University chemist Nikolay Dimitrov imagines all of these things, and because of that they may someday be a reality for the rest of us. Dimitrov uses his expertise in electrochemistry, analytical chemistry and materials science to develop catalysts that he hopes will be sturdier and cheaper than existing options.

Take the lithium ion battery. This workhorse of the tech world powers products ranging from cell phones to electric vehicles. But it has basic limitations: Its capacity decreases so fast that even the best smartphones lose their juice in two days; its energy density pales in comparison to gasoline; and overcharging can lead to instability and, in the worst cases, fires.

One future alternative is the lithium oxygen (air) battery. Dimitrov estimates that, once developed, the lithium oxygen battery will store 10 times the energy of a similar-sized lithium ion.

Dimitrov contributes to that future by developing the fundamental catalysts from which those batteries (and many other things) could someday be built.

A paper he co-authored in Nature in 2001, which first introduced to a broader audience de-alloying, a key process to his approach, has been cited more than 1,000 times. Dimitrov, an associate professor of chemistry and materials science, has brought $1.5 million dollars in research funding to Binghamton since joining the faculty a decade ago. His National Science Foundation support includes a $300,000 award this year and a 2008 CAREER Award. (That’s the most prestigious federal grant for young faculty.)

“The NSF wants to make sure that we can control key fundamental aspects of this process so we can move to practical application in a more confident way,” Dimitrov said.

Most catalysts are now made using nanoparticles. They’re handy and versatile little objects, but controlling them is difficult and results in substantial losses.

Dimitrov’s method, on the other hand, involves electrochemically depositing an alloy of readily mixed metals, such as silver and gold, then selectively removing the less noble one (in that case, silver), to leave a noble, three-dimensional porous structure that’s ultra-thin, uniform and beautifully interconnected. This structure can then be customized with a variety of coatings with specific catalytic activity.

“We control the current, and by running it for a specific time, we get a charge that accounts for every atom deposited on the surface,” Dimitrov said.

Radoslav Adzic, a senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and leading researcher in fuel cell catalysis, says Dimitrov’s work on fundamental questions in electrochemistry has made significant contributions to their field.

“His recent work developing catalysts for energy applications is the subject of enormous importance for achieving goals of clean energy and a clean environment,” Adzic said. “His methodical approach and ability to identify key issues produces publications that will help in reaching these goals in the near future.”

Aleksey Kolmogorov, assistant professor of physics at Binghamton, proposed the new superconductor in Physical Review Letters in 2010 and then teamed up with leading experimental groups in Germany, Belgium, Italy and France to test the prediction.

The synthesized material — a novel iron tetraboride compound — is made out of two common elements, has a brand-new crystal structure and exhibits an unexpected type of superconductivity for a material that contains iron, just as predicted in the original computational study.

“Paradigm-shifting superconducting materials have so far been discovered experimentally, and oftentimes accidentally,” Kolmogorov says.

Until now, theory has been used primarily to investigate superconducting mechanisms and, in rare cases, suggest ways that existing materials might be modified to become superconductors. But many proposed superconducting materials are not stable enough to form and those that do form are poor superconductors.

Superconductors, which conduct electric current without any resistance when cooled below a certain temperature, have many interesting applications. For instance, power lines made out of superconducting materials can significantly reduce the energy lost in transmission. Superconducting magnets are also used in high-speed levitating trains and could improve wind turbines.

The phenomenon of superconductivity was discovered more than 100 years ago, with breakthroughs in the 1960s bringing it into practical application in a variety of technologies. The critical temperature, or Tc, for superconductors discovered to date is between 0 and 136 Kelvin (-460 and -214 degrees Fahrenheit). This means that most superconductors require expensive cooling mechanisms. Scientists are still searching for new materials that are superconductors at higher temperatures and can be mass produced.

More than five years ago, Kolmogorov, then at Oxford University, began studying boron-based materials, which have remarkably complex structures and a wide range of applications. He developed an automated computational tool to identify previously unknown stable crystal structures without any input from experiment. His “evolutionary” algorithm emulates nature, meaning it favors more stable materials among thousands of possibilities. (Kolmogorov is a computational physicist, but he also dreams of holding a compound in his hands that he predicted in silico.)

The search revealed two promising compounds in a common iron-boron system, which came as a surprise. Moreover, graduate student Sheena Shah’s calculations indicated that one of them should be a superconductor at an unusually high temperature of 15-20 Kelvin for the considered (so-called “conventional”) type of superconductivity.

Months of double-checking confirmed the preliminary results on the stability and superconductivity of the compound. Still, the 2010 theoretical discovery was met with skepticism.

Natalia Dubrovinskaia and Leonid Dubrovinsky, professors at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, undertook a year-long series of challenging high-pressure experiments and produced a very small quantity of iron tetraboride in the predicted crystal structure, leading to the most recent journal article. Detailed measurements also demonstrated the material’s predicted superconducting property and, unexpectedly, its exceptional hardness.

“The discovery of this superhard superconductor demonstrates that new compounds can be brought into existence by revisiting seemingly well-studied systems,” Kolmogorov says. Now that this material has been synthesized, it may be possible to modify it and raise the temperature at which it becomes a superconductor.

Next, Kolmogorov plans to turn his attention to metal oxides. “They are fascinating because they have applications as catalysts, photovoltaic materials and protective coatings,” he says. “We hope our predictive methodology will lead to more exciting discoveries.”

A software problem meant human operators were unaware they needed to shunt power around the break. Then they couldn’t keep up with relays commanding to break circuits to prevent overloads. Grid by grid, community by community, the cascading power failure shut down the Northeast United States and much of Ontario, Canada.

Fifty-five million people were left without power, and lost productivity and damaged equipment cost between $6 billion and $12 billion.

Eva Wu’s task is to help prevent that from happening again.

Wu, an expert in control systems and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Binghamton University, is working with New York State Electric & Gas Corp. to understand the best way to monitor and control a power grid that is too complex for current automated equipment to control and sometimes operates too fast for much human intervention.

The federal government has spent $300 million since 2003 to add 1,000 new monitoring devices that are networked and time-synchronized with GPS. Power controllers get system-wide updates 60 times a second, rather than once every five seconds. This also provides the opportunity to make the fast-acting protection system more reliable. “One of the major reliability problems is protection system misoperation,” Wu says.

Current protection systems are designed to protect local equipment, not the entire network. Nothing watching the whole system is capable of making a decision in tenths of milliseconds, which some problems require.

Blink once. Some actions need to be taken 800 times faster than that.

“Part of my research is to make the best use of that information in an automated manner,” Wu says. That means both deciding how to place monitors to greatest effectiveness and how to design a control system that can cost-effectively mitigate the blackout of the power grid, beyond merely protecting local equipment.

To do that, she must measure two concepts: security profile, the ability of the system to respond to a disturbance in a timely manner; and control effectiveness, measuring both how well the system can be observed and how well it can be controlled.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority funds Wu’s research. “We certainly are interested in projects that enhance the reliability of the network,” NYSERDA spokeswoman Dayle Zatlin says.

This research has worldwide implications. Sixty million people in Brazil and Paraguay lost power in a cascade failure in 2009. In 2012, the largest blackout in history hit India, cutting power to 620 million people — twice the U.S. population.

“Control systems enabled by new smart devices have the ability to make the system act in a very robust way,” Wu says. “Obviously, we need to do better.”

Amber Doiron, assistant professor of bioengineering, says current methods of assessing atherosclerosis — commonly known as hardening of the arteries — are not terribly accurate. Some 30 percent of deaths worldwide can be attributed to the disease, which occurs when fat, cholesterol and other particles form hard structures called plaques in the walls of arteries.

“It’s really a guessing game right now,” she says. “Doctors use factors like blood pressure and cholesterol level to get an idea of a patient’s risk. Then they use plaque size as a general measure of whether a person has the disease. But there’s a fairly poor correlation between plaque size and heart attack or stroke.”

Doiron, who has an interest in molecular imaging as well as expertise in nanoscience, wants to help physicians do a better job of identifying which plaques are cause for concern.

She and a Temple University colleague recently received a two-year, $418,000 grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to support this project. It’s a notable success in part because this was Doiron’s first National Institutes of Health grant proposal.

The researchers will use a combination of polymers and superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles for the study. The nanoparticle is sensitive to oxidative stress, which occurs in atherosclerosis and has been linked to patients who have a higher prevalence of heart attack and stroke. Using an MRI scan, the researchers will be able to see how active the nanoparticle is, which will indicate whether the plaque is stable.

“A stroke or a heart attack doesn’t necessarily come when a plaque fully blocks the flow of blood through an artery,” Doiron explains. “What happens is the plaque ruptures and the gunk that underlies the plaque is exposed to blood and a clot forms. The clot builds quickly — on an hour time scale as opposed to over years — and the clot can grow there until it blocks flow, or it can dislodge and block flow somewhere else. Most heart attacks do not occur from a full blockage of plaque. It happens because the plaque bursts. Same thing with strokes. That’s why size isn’t necessarily indicative of how dangerous a plaque is.”

The discovery of a molecule or a cell type that indicated which plaques are safe and which ones are dangerous would be a huge breakthrough, Doiron says. She thinks oxidative stress may be such an indicator.

“Atherosclerosis is an incredibly complex disease that progresses over decades,” Doiron says. “It’s hard to tell who’s walking around with plaques that are stable, relatively safe, and who has plaques that may cause a heart attack tomorrow. For some patients, the first sign of trouble is a heart attack.”

Binghamton University’s Center of Excellence in Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging (S3IP) conducts research to advance this vital technology. “S3IP is about developing products and applications that improve the way people live their lives,” Director Bahgat Sammakia says. “It’s that simple. That’s our goal.”

Small-scale systems are electronic systems with features built at the microscale or even smaller. “These are difficult to construct, but also extremely useful,” says Sammakia, a former IBM engineer who is also vice president for research at Binghamton. “When you can build electronic systems at that scale, you can put much more function in a much smaller volume and weight. So your phone now can do what a supercomputer could do three decades ago. That’s where scale becomes really important, when you can have more function in a smaller space at lower power.

“We decided to focus on small-scale systems because that’s where the future is.”

S3IP, established 10 years ago, builds on Binghamton’s Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC), founded in 1991. The IEEC focuses on electronics packaging. Since then, S3IP has added to its portfolio of research interests. It now boasts centers that address:

• Flexible electronics: The Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM)
• Solar energy: The Center for Autonomous Solar Power (CASP)
• “Green” data centers: The Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2)

It also has three unique, multiuser laboratories that support this work:

• The Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory (ADL), which offers state-of-the-art instrumentation for electron microscopy, thermal analysis, X-ray analysis, surface and interface analysis and more
• The Nanofabrication Laboratory (NLAB), which focuses on nano-scale research
• The Reliability and Failure Analysis Lab, a facility focused on evaluating reliability of electronic packaging and determination of failure modes

An industry-driven quest for answers

The Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC) is where it all began, and electronics packaging remains at the core of S3IP’s activities. Those activities are driven by member companies, which provide faculty researchers an opportunity to tackle real-world problems and support their work financially. In turn, these companies obtain access to cutting-edge research and facilities.

From 1996 through 2012, the IEEC’s work led to the creation of 780 jobs as well as the retention of 1,000 positions at New York state companies. The center has had an economic impact of more than $971 million on the state. “The IEEC was our origin, and it remains our key economic engine,” says Daryl Santos, IEEC director.

William Infantolino, associate director of the IEEC, says reliability testing is one of the center’s specialties. It’s an area of growing concern to electronics manufacturers, whose customers now expect, for example, that their cell phones will still work if they’re dropped.

The IEEC can expose parts and devices to accelerated test conditions to see how they perform over time when exposed to elevated temperatures or other stressors. “We can fit a lifetime of on/off cycles into three months,” Infantolino explains. “It gives us an approximation of how a part will perform over time in actual use.”

Some of the most exciting IEEC projects now focus on 3D integration of silicon electronic devices. “That has always been a dream,” Sammakia says, “and now it is becoming real.”

Essentially, in an effort to make devices smaller and help them run faster, companies now are stacking microchips vertically, Infantolino says. Sematech, a consortium of semiconductor companies, is working in this area and has come to the IEEC for assistance with this research. Binghamton experts are conducting mechanical and thermal modeling as well as reliability assessments related to these designs.

“There’s high potential in 3D packaging,” Infantolino says. “It comes down to cost for performance. If the performance and size advantages can justify the cost of the more complex structure, there’ll be a major migration. It’s going to take some time to develop the processes, equipment and supply chain. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

Like the IEEC, the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM) takes its cue from industry. In fact, the center is based at Endicott Interconnect Technologies, about a 15-minute drive from the University.

In general, the CAMM looks for ways to translate aspects of traditional electronics manufacturing into flexible, roll-to-roll processes. Its 10,000-square-foot facility boasts a panel line for process and product development and an integrated roll-to-roll research line for product development. Much of the equipment found there is available nowhere else in the country.

Roll-to-roll processing is traditionally the domain of paper: Think of the enormous rolls of newsprint on which your local newspaper is printed. The CAMM has helped to expand that domain to include lightweight, thin plastic and, most recently, flexible glass. Corning Inc. collaborated with the CAMM to evaluate its spooled flexible Willow Glass. While glass is the preferred substrate for many kinds of electronics, scientists were unsure about the design rules for equipment that would handle and process flexible glass.

Cynthia Giroux, division vice president and research director for optics and surface technologies at Corning, participates on the CAMM’s executive advisory board and notes the company’s relationship with the CAMM has led to numerous conference presentations and journal articles. “Cost-efficient manufacturing is a necessary step in achieving the goal of high-quality and interconnected electronics that are integrated into everyday objects such as tabletops, walls, appliances and vehicles,” she says. “We look forward to further collaborations with Binghamton University’s S3IP centers to identify flexible electronic device designs and fabrication methods for these emerging applications.”

“That’s the future of the CAMM: to help companies commercialize products,” Sammakia says.

The first product commercialized at the CAMM was a catheter system, and Sammakia envisions the center playing a role in future healthcare research. “S3IP’s role in healthcare research will be tied to electronics,” he says.

Mark Poliks, CAMM technical director and R&D director for Endicott Interconnect, agrees. “There is a huge opportunity for advanced diagnostic and therapeutic medical electronics for use both in and out of the body: high-definition ultrasound probes, wearable MRI coils, neural stimulation, retinal implants and more,” Poliks says. “Even relatively simple monitoring devices such as heart monitors, oxygen sensors or glucose monitors could be reduced to a comfortable-to-wear Band-Aid patch complete with a wireless interface.”

Looking to the future

In addition to healthcare, smart energy is a key focus of research at Binghamton. That emphasis is evident in the work done by the Center for Autonomous Solar Power (CASP) and the Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2).

At CASP, scientists are working to improve thin-film solar cells, build next-generation supercapacitors, conduct reliability studies and develop thermoelectric cells that expand on the fraction of the sun’s energy captured by most solar technology.

Laboratories around the world are engaged in a game of one-upmanship to build ever more efficient solar cells, says Charles R. Westgate, CASP director. Binghamton researchers have entered this race, focusing on cells made with copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS), which is less costly than the materials used in most cells now on the market. “Among universities, we’re now No. 1,” he says.

The greatest barrier to more widespread use of solar power in the United States is cost, Westgate notes. The development of solar cells from materials that are easier to extract from the earth should address cost concerns and result in processes that are less harmful to the environment.

“We’re meeting only about 1 or 2 percent of our energy needs from solar energy,” he says. “A reasonable goal is to increase that to about 10 percent in the next decade and about 20 percent in the long term.”

ES2, meanwhile, unites researchers from computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and other disciplines in pursuit of “green” data centers. The goal is to reduce energy consumption without sacrificing computing power.

“The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts,” says Kanad Ghose, ES2 site director and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Binghamton. “The center takes a holistic approach when it considers computing, thermal and other challenges.”

ES2 is a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center with nearly two dozen industry partners, including IBM, Microsoft and Facebook. The center will soon open a data center that’s also a “living laboratory” where new products and ideas can be tested. “Companies can come in, develop best-practice solutions and evaluate them,” Ghose says. “We’ll be developing standards for industry in this lab.”

ES2 researchers will help companies establish the right amount of cooling for a given number of servers, identify new ways to recover and use the waste heat from data centers, and suggest new methods of designing data centers to maximize efficiency.

“We have projects that have short-term consequences as well as projects that have significant long-term consequences,” Ghose says. “The research covers the spectrum from chip-level work to entire data centers. Our goal is to do long-term research and develop technology that can be translated into the real world.”

ES2 also offers interdisciplinary training for graduate students. The research center is quite new, but  graduates have already gone on to positions with industry giant Intel.

“The United States has to invest in computing technology to stay competitive,” he adds. “The future of the country is at stake. Already, some of the fastest computers are in China and not in the U.S.”

At Binghamton University, campus, state and federal investments are evident in a new facility for S3IP. The Center of Excellence will move this year into a $30 million, 114,000-square-foot space that will allow it to expand and consolidate its operations. ES2 will use the facility itself as a lab for “smart buildings,” testing ways to reduce energy consumption through smart lighting, natural cooling and other “green”  innovations.

The building will connect other facilities at Binghamton’s Innovative Technologies Complex focused on biotechnology and engineering as well as a future R&D facility to be devoted to smart energy.

“The S3IP building is going to be the virtual bridge between engineering and science,” Sammakia says. “The IEEC has always done that. Now we will have this building and these labs, and we expect that faculty from chemistry and biology, physics and math will come and partner with engineering.”