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'Wood' you like to recycle concrete? + Teaching photons to behave like electrons

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'Wood' you like to recycle concrete?
https://www.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/news/3241/

RELEASE: Researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science, a part of The University of Tokyo, have developed a new procedure for recycling concrete with the addition of discarded wood. They found that the correct proportion of inputs can yield a new building material with a bending strength superior to that of the original concrete. This research may help drastically reduce construction costs, as well as slash carbon emissions.

Concrete has long been the material of choice for construction our modern world, used in structures such as skyscrapers, bridges, and houses--to name just a few. However, as countries work to constrain their greenhouse emissions, concrete production has fallen under increased scrutiny. Concrete consists of two parts, aggregate--which is usually made of gravel and crushed stone--and cement. It's the production of cement that is blamed for a large amount of the carbon dioxide humans release into the atmosphere.

"Just reusing the aggregate from old concrete is unsustainable, because it is the production of new cement that is driving climate change emissions," explains first author Li Liang. Therefore, a new, environmentally friendly approach is needed to help promote the circular economy of concrete. The researchers optimized their new method by adjusting the mixture proportion, pressure, temperature, pressing duration, and water content. Finding the right proportion of concrete and recycled wood was critical to obtaining concrete with the most strength. Wood gets its rigidity from lignin, which are highly crosslinked organic polymers. In this case, lignin fills the gaps in the concrete and functions as an adhesive when mixed with waste concrete powder and heated. The strength was also improved by higher temperatures and pressures during pressing.

"Most of the recycled products we made exhibited better bending strength than that of ordinary concrete," says senior author Assistant Professor Yuya Sakai. "These findings can promote a move toward a greener, more economical construction industry that not only reduces the stores of waste concrete and wood, but also helps address the issue of climate change."

The recycled concrete is even likely to be biodegradable, because the concrete waste is attached to the wood component. The method could also be extended to recycle other types of discarded plant matter, instead of wood, or even brand-new concrete made from plants, sand, and gravel.

The work will be published in the proceedings of The Sixth International Conference on Construction Materials (ConMat'20) as "Experimental Study of the Bending Strength of Recycled Concrete and Wooden Waste by Heating Compaction"



What if we could teach photons to behave like electrons?
https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazin...-electrons

RELEASE: To develop futuristic technologies like quantum computers, scientists will need to find ways to control photons, the basic particles of light, just as precisely as they can already control electrons, the basic particles in electronic computing. Unfortunately, photons are far more difficult to manipulate than electrons, which respond to forces as simple as the sort of magnetism that even children understand.

But now, for the first time, a Stanford-led team has created a pseudo-magnetic force that can precisely control photons. In the short term, this control mechanism could be used to send more internet data through fiber optic cables. In the future, this discovery could lead to the creation of light-based chips that would deliver far greater computational power than electronic chips. “What we’ve done is so novel that the possibilities are only just beginning to materialize,” said postdoctoral scholar Avik Dutt, first author of an article describing the discovery in Science.

Essentially, the researchers tricked the photons — which are intrinsically non-magnetic — into behaving like charged electrons. They accomplished this by sending the photons through carefully designed mazes in a way that caused the light particles to behave as if they were being acted upon by what the scientists called a “synthetic” or “artificial” magnetic field. “We designed structures that created magnetic forces capable of pushing photons in predictable and useful ways,” said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering and senior scientist behind the research effort.

Although still in the experimental stage, these structures represent an advance on the existing mode of computing. Storing information is all about controlling the variable states of particles, and today, scientists do so by switching electrons in a chip on and off to create digital zeroes and ones. A chip that uses magnetism to control the interplay between the photon’s color (or energy level) and spin (whether it is traveling in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction) creates more variable states than is possible with simple on-off electrons. Those possibilities will enable scientists to process, store and transmit far more data on photon-based devices than is possible with electronic chips today.

To bring photons into the proximities required to create these magnetic effects, the Stanford researchers used lasers, fiber optic cables and other off-the-shelf scientific equipment. Building these tabletop structures enabled the scientists to deduce the design principles behind the effects they discovered. Eventually they’ll have to create nanoscale structures that embody these same principles to build the chip. In the meantime, says Fan, “we’ve found a relatively simple new mechanism to control light, and that’s exciting.”
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