Dairy calves use brushes for more than combing their hair

Dairy cows have a natural drive to groom themselves and to scratch those hard-to-reach itches on their bodies. When given the opportunity, dairy cattle use mechanical brushes daily at every stage of their lives. A new study ...

It's all about the interface with multi-use polymer brushes

The University of Newcastle and UNSW Sydney are using advanced neutron scattering techniques at ANSTO to carry out research on the structure of polymers in complex salt environments that will ultimately provide a way to predict ...

Actively swimming gold nanoparticles

Bacteria can actively move towards a nutrient source—a phenomenon known as chemotaxis—and they can move collectively in a process known as swarming. Chinese scientists have redesigned collective chemotaxis by creating ...

Making composite material smart with precious metal

Doping polymer brushes with gold nanoparticles results in a switchable composite material which changes its thickness depending on the pH value. The research by physicists at the TU Darmstadt, published in the journal Soft ...

Perking up and crimping the 'bristles' of polyelectrolyte brushes

If the bristles of a brush abruptly collapsed into wads of noodles, the brush would, of course, become useless. When it's a micron-scale brush called a "polyelectrolyte brush," that collapse can put a promising experimental ...

Systematically studying slippery surfaces

Betaines are materials with both a positively charged functional group and a negatively charged functional group linked by an alkyl chain spacer. This combination of functional groups causes betaines to strongly attract water, ...

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