A Sensor To Help Your Smartphone Detect Toxic Gases

                Researchers have developed a cheap sensor that can be integrated to electronic circuits and can enable smartphones to detect toxic gases within seconds. Researchers said the chemical sensor’s electrical conductivity increases up to 3,000 times when it is exposed to electrophilic toxic gases. They integrated the sensor into the electronic circuit in a near-field communication (NFC) tag, which is embedded in smart cards. This technology made it possible for smartphones to detect toxic gases in five seconds at a low concentration (10 parts per million). Today people are subject to risks of being exposed to toxic gases derived from natural sources and currently available toxic gas sensors are expensive, bulky, heavy and difficult to operate.

The new device consists of a group of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) individually wrapped with supramolecular polymers – clusters of monomers held together through weak interactions – which reduces its manufacturing price. CNTs alone are highly conductive materials, but when they are wrapped with supramolecular polymers, they become poor conductors. The supramolecular polymers were designed so that weakly-bound sites in the molecules are dissociated when these sites are exposed to toxic gases. Users can determine the presence of toxic gas by holding an NFC-compatible smartphone over a sensor-embedded NFC tag while making sure that communication between the two devices is intact.

A Galaxy With 99% Mysterious Matter Spotted

                Scientist have found a “ghost” galaxy – roughly the same mass as our own, but entirely made up of dark matter. Dragonfly 44 is almost entirely made up of dark matter, the mysterious – and for now mostly theoretical – stuff that makes up 27% of the universe but has never actually been seen. Though the galaxy is relatively nearby, at least in the scale of the universe, it is so dark that scientists completely missed it for decades. But it was finally spotted last year. It sits in the Coma galaxy cluster, about 330 million light years from us. When scientists looked at it further, they found that it was not just a normal set of stars – but instead a ghost, made up of dark matter. Though it has about the same mass as our own Milky Way galaxy, only one hundredth of 1% is made of up of the normal matter like stars, dust and gas that surround us.

                Rather, it is 99.99% made up of dark matter. Nobody knows what exactly that is, how it came about – or even how a galaxy could have arisen that looked that way. Dragonfly 44 does have some normal stars of its own. But our galaxy has a hundred times more stars than are there. Astronomers found out about the strange ghost galaxy by looking at the movement of the galaxy’s stars – movement that seemed to be influenced by matter that doesn’t by normal measures exist. Motions of the stars tell us how much matter there is. They don’t care what form the matter is, that just tell us that it’s there. In the Dragonfly galaxy, stars move very fast. So there was a huge discrepancy. We found many times more mass indicated by the motions of the stars than there is mass in the stars themselves. Scientists know that there must be something providing the gravity that is needed to hold the galaxy together. But the mass that would normally provide that isn’t there.