Carbon nanotubes improve metal’s longevity under radiation

Nuclear reactors are incredible feats of engineering, but they come with a persistent problem: the metals holding everything together don't age gracefully under intense radiation. Over time, exposure to the harsh radiation environment near the reactor core causes metals to become porous and brittle — a gradual deterioration that eventually forces reactors into early retirement.

But a team of researchers from MIT and several international partners may have found a surprisingly simple fix: carbon nanotubes.

Tiny Tubes, Big Impact

The idea sounds almost too straightforward. By mixing just a small quantity of carbon nanotubes — less than 2 percent by volume — into a metal during manufacturing, the resulting composite becomes dramatically more resistant to radiation damage. The team published their findings in the journal Nano Energy.

Here's what actually happens inside a reactor: nuclear fission produces helium gas, which gets trapped within the metal's crystal structure. Over time, this trapped helium forms tiny bubbles along grain boundaries, making the metal progressively more brittle. It's a slow-motion weakening that nobody has been able to stop — until now.

The carbon nanotubes, despite being just a minuscule fraction of the total material, form what the researchers describe as a percolating one-dimensional transport network. Think of it like a system of microscopic chimneys running through the metal, giving the trapped helium a way to escape before it can cause lasting damage.

Surviving the Extreme

Testing showed the composite structure held up under 70 DPA of radiation damage — a measurement that describes how many times, on average, every atom in the material gets knocked out of its position by radiation. That's a lot. In practical terms, the new material showed five to ten times less embrittlement compared to untreated metal samples.

Even after heavy radiation exposure, the nanotubes retained their slender, one-dimensional shape. MIT's Ju Li described the phenomenon as something like "insects trapped in amber" — the nanotubes transform chemically into carbides, but their structure persists, continuing to provide those crucial escape routes for helium.

Stronger Before Radiation Even Hits

What's particularly striking about this material is that its benefits don't wait for radiation exposure to kick in. Even in a brand new, unirradiated state, the addition of carbon nanotubes boosts the metal's strength by 50 percent and also improves its tensile ductility — its ability to bend and deform without snapping.

For now, the approach has only been demonstrated in aluminum, which limits it to lower-temperature environments like research reactors. But the team is already testing the concept with zirconium — a metal widely used as fuel rod cladding in commercial reactors — and believes the radiation-shielding effect is likely a general property of metal-nanotube composites.

Affordable and Already Being Made

One of the more practical aspects of this discovery is cost. Carbon nanotubes are already being manufactured at industrial scale in South Korea for the automotive industry, which means the raw materials are relatively cheap. The composite itself can be produced using standard industrial processes, and it's already being made by the ton.

If the results hold up across other metals, this approach could meaningfully extend the operational lifetimes of nuclear reactors — both research facilities and commercial power plants — while also finding applications in spacecraft and nuclear waste storage containers.

---

Source: MIT News

Read More

Mint can as anti-cancer drug!

Mint is one of those herbs most people associate with fresh breath or a soothing cup of tea. But researchers at India's Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (CIMAP) in Lucknow have been looking at it from a very different angle — as a potential weapon against cancer.

Their focus? A compound called L-Menthol, naturally found in the mint plant, which has shown a surprising ability to kill cancer cells and block their growth.

What Makes Menthol Stand Out

What makes this research particularly interesting is not just that menthol works against cancer cells — it's how it works. The compound appears to interfere with cell division, preventing cancer cells from multiplying and spreading to other organs. In laboratory studies, it has shown activity against colon cancer cells, and researchers believe it could have broader applications.

Menthol's potential isn't entirely new to science. Studies have looked at its effects on liver cancer, colon cancer, and even brain tumors. One intriguing area involves menthol-modified nanoparticles that can carry anti-cancer drugs across the blood-brain barrier — a major obstacle in treating brain tumors — achieving deeper penetration into tumor tissue than conventional formulations.

A Cost-Effective Alternative

One of the more practical arguments for exploring menthol as an anti-cancer agent is economics. Current cancer drugs are often extraordinarily expensive to produce. Paclitaxel, for instance, is derived from the bark of the European Yew tree — a slow-growing and limited resource. Menthol, by contrast, is cheap to produce, widely available, and already manufactured at scale for use in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.

That cost difference could matter enormously in making cancer treatments more accessible, especially in developing countries where high drug prices are a major barrier to care.

Research Is Still in Early Stages

It's worth being clear: this research is still primarily at the laboratory and preclinical stage. Menthol has shown genuine promise in cell studies and animal models, but it has not yet been through the rigorous clinical trials needed to confirm it as a human cancer treatment.

Scientists at the University of Salford in the UK have also been investigating a related compound, hoping to move toward testing on human cancer cells from breast and lung tissue. The path from a promising lab result to an approved drug is long and demanding — but the early signals are encouraging enough to keep researchers interested.

For now, mint remains your herb garden's most intriguing overachiever — and researchers are just beginning to understand what it might truly be capable of.

---

Source: Chemistry World

Read More

New Way Could Boost Battery Performance using Bee Pollen

When Jialiang Tang, a doctoral student at Purdue University, heard that his mother had developed a pollen allergy, his reaction was a little unusual. Instead of reaching for antihistamines, he started thinking about batteries.

"I was fascinated by the beauty and diversity of pollen microstructures," Tang explained. "But the idea of using them as battery anodes didn't really kick in until I started working on battery research and learned more about the carbonization of biomass."

The result is a genuinely surprising piece of research: pollen — nature's most notorious allergen — might be a viable alternative to graphite in the anodes of lithium-ion batteries.

From Flowers to Electrodes

The Purdue team tested two types of pollen: bee pollen (collected from multiple flower sources by bees) and cattail pollen (which comes from a single plant and has a more uniform grain structure). Both were converted into carbon microstructures through a process called pyrolysis — heating the pollen to high temperatures in an argon-filled chamber to yield pure carbon that retains the original pollen shape. A follow-up step, heating in the presence of oxygen, created tiny pores throughout the structure that boost energy storage capacity.

The results were published in Nature's Scientific Reports.

Surprising Performance Numbers

Cattail pollen outperformed bee pollen in testing, delivering a specific capacity of 590 milliamp hours per gram at 50°C and 382 mAh/g at room temperature. For context, conventional graphite — the standard anode material in lithium-ion batteries — has a theoretical capacity of 372 mAh/g. So the cattail-derived carbon is already exceeding what graphite can theoretically offer.

Bee pollen performed somewhat less impressively but still showed strong early results. After just one hour of charging, the anodes reached more than half their full capacity — delivering 200 mAh/g in that short window. A full charge required about 10 hours.

Why This Matters

Beyond the performance numbers, pollen has a few practical advantages. It's renewable, abundantly available, and can be harvested without complex industrial processes. The pyrolysis method used to convert it into carbon is relatively simple and low-energy. That combination — accessible raw material plus straightforward processing — is attractive from both a cost and sustainability standpoint.

The researchers tested the anodes at two temperatures (25°C and 50°C) to simulate real-world climate differences, since battery performance can vary significantly depending on where in the world a device is used.

Still Early Days

Professor Vilas Pol, who led the research, was candid about where things stand. "We are just introducing the fascinating concept here," he said. "Further work is needed to determine how practical it might be."

The current study only looked at pollen in anodes. The next phase of research will test pollen-derived carbon in full-cell batteries paired with commercial cathodes — a necessary step toward understanding whether this could ever move from laboratory curiosity to real-world product.

Whether pollen ever makes it into your phone battery remains to be seen. But for now, it's hard not to appreciate the irony: the thing that makes spring miserable for millions of allergy sufferers might one day help power their devices.

---

Source: ACS Energy Letters / Purdue University

Read More

ZIKA VIRUS USED TO SPREAD COMPUTER VIRUS [Really]

When a health crisis captures global headlines, cybercriminals are rarely far behind. The Zika virus outbreak of 2016 was no exception.

As fears about the mosquito-borne virus spread across Brazil and beyond, security researchers at Symantec uncovered a malicious email campaign specifically designed to exploit public anxiety — using concern about Zika to deliver malware directly to people's computers.

The Setup: A Fake Health Alert

The scam emails were crafted to look like they came from Saúde Curiosa (Curious Health), a legitimate Brazilian health and wellness website. The subject line read: "ZIKA VIRUS! Isso mesmo, matando com água!" which translates to "Zika Virus! That's right, killing it with water!"

Inside the email, recipients were urged to click buttons labeled things like "Eliminating Mosquito! Click Here!" or "Instructions To Follow! Download!" Both the links and the attachment led to the same destination: a piece of malware called JS.Downloader, hosted on Dropbox. Once installed, this malware acted as a gateway, downloading additional malicious software onto the victim's computer.

More than 1,500 people had already clicked the infected links by the time Symantec reported it.

Why Brazil Was the Target

Brazil was the epicenter of the Zika outbreak, with the vast majority of global cases concentrated there. The WHO had declared Zika a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in February 2016, following a significant surge in birth defects in affected regions.

The timing made Brazil's population especially vulnerable to health-related phishing campaigns. People were actively seeking information and protective guidance, which made a convincing fake health alert all the more dangerous.

How to Protect Yourself

Symantec issued clear guidance at the time, which applies to any similar situation:

• For health information, go directly to official sources like the World Health Organization website
• Never click links or open attachments in unsolicited emails, even if the sender looks familiar
• Keep your security software updated and running
• Treat any email with urgent health warnings and download buttons as suspicious by default

This kind of social engineering exploiting fear and urgency to bypass people's better judgment is one of the oldest tricks in cybercrime. Whenever a major health scare or global crisis dominates the news cycle, expect a wave of phishing emails to follow within days.

---

Source: Symantec Security Response

Read More