Low-carbon cement technology heading from lab to market

The recent one-year anniversary of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships is a reminder of the federal government’s commitment to take a larger role in supporting the transition of use-inspired research from the lab to the marketplace. Ideally this support will allow more university researchers to follow in the footsteps of Sublime Systems, a spinout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that aims to commercialize a low-carbon cement technology.

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Finding trees within the forest: Deep learning network detects individual carbon nanotubes in SEM images

For researchers to improve the properties of carbon nanotubes grown en masse, they must first be able to measure and characterize how individual nanotubes are assembled within carbon nanotube “forests.” In a recent paper, researchers at the University of Missouri outlined a deep learning technique to segment these forests in scanning electron microscopy images.

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Adsorption of complex pollutants: Designing hydrogarnets to remove humic substances from water

Humic substances are beneficial to agriculture, but they can aggravate pollution in water by interacting with disinfectants to produce toxic byproducts. Hydrogarnet has shown excellent potential as an adsorbent for humic substances, and researchers in Japan investigated the effects of heat treatments to control hydrogarnet composition and adsorption properties.

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