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Investigators at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have created strange optical effects, including corkscrew-like vortex beams, by reflecting light off a flat, nanostructured surface. Credit: Nanfang Yu, SEAS.
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Rolla researchers predict they can cut cooling costs by 40 percent
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Optoelectronics appear as hopeful application for graphene
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Rolla hospital’s cancer institute named for ceramist Delbert Day
Ted Day, left, with father Delbert Day.
Nice honors for a good guy! The Phelps County Regional Medical Center in Rolla, Mo., announced yesterday that it is naming its new cancer facility the Delbert Day Cancer Institute. It helps to know that Rolla is the home of Missouri University of Science and Technology, which historically has been a hotbed of glass and ceramic research, and the place where Del Day serves as Curators’ Professor Emeritus of ceramic engineering.
The DDCI is being funded through a generous gift from Day’s son and daughter-in-law, Ted and Kim Day.
Del Day is known worldwide in the medical field for several glass and ceramic medical applications he helped developed. The most famous of these is his co-invention of TheraSphere and RadSphere glass beads, which are microspheres that are used to accurately deliver tiny amounts of radiation to treat cancer tumors. From what I recall, these beads are especially effective in treating cancerous tumors in the liver, including inoperable tumors, and are used at over 100 medical centers. The beads are bioinert and are eventually decomposed and absorbed by the body.
The effectiveness of the TheraSphere/RadSphere products helped open a new medical field: selective internal radiation therapy.
Del Day founded and for many years led a company, Mo-Sci Corp., that manufactures the beads as well as other specialty precision glass products aimed at transportation, electronics and sporting goods markets. Ted Day is now president of Mo-Sci.
The senior Day has been a professor at Missouri S&T for nearly five decades. He is still active in research and developing new applications while working as senior investigator at the school’s Graduate Center for Materials Research. He is also a Distinguished Life Member and Fellow of ACerS.
A statement from the hospital notes that the DDCI will enable the medical center to create the infrastructure needed to participate in the National Cancer Institute’s Community Oncology Program.
The hospital didn’t reveal the amount of Ted and Kim Day’s donation, but in a story on the OzarksFirst.com website, a hospital says its the biggest donation in the facility’s history.
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Missouri S&T geothermal energy system to replace power plant
Missouri University of Science and Technology plans to install a new geothermal energy system. The project is expected to reduce energy costs, as well as cut the campus’s carbon dioxide emissions.
According to and Missouri S&T press release, construction of the geothermal system will take approximately five years to complete. The system is expected to save $2.8 million in energy and operational costs annually.
The project also is expected to reduce Missouri S&T’s carbon dioxide emissions by more than 25,000 tons per year. The power plant being replaced is a 1945 system that relies on coal and wood chips to provide steam-generated heat to buildings on campus.
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The next frontier? Lunar mining for rare earth elements?
This image of the moon is from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper illustrates the extent to which different materials are mapped across the side of the moon that faces Earth. (Credit: NASA.)
Lunar mining may be in our not-so-distant future, as evidence of rare earth elements is clear, and China tightens its exports, increasing demand worldwide.
“We know there are local concentrations of REE on the moon,” Carle Pieters, a planetary scientist in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University, and principal investigator for NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, told Space.com. “[W]e have not sampled these REE concentrations directly, but can readily detect them along a mixing line with many of the samples we do have.”
According to a Missouri University of Science and Technology press release, Leslie Gertsch, a space mining expert and deputy director of the Rock Mechanics and Explosives Research Center at Missouri S&T believes that mining in space is essential to the survival of our species.
According to Gertsch, REE are not presently detectable by remote instruments. However, thorium is a known lunar element and leads Gertsch to conclude that associated rare earth elements exist on the moon’s surface due to similar geochemical properties that caused them to crystallize under the same conditions.
“Presumably REE mixtures could be produced on the moon and shipped to Earth for more specific separation. Neither potential mining methods nor the economics of this particular approach have been studied, to my knowledge,” Gertsch concluded.
Gertsch believes that the moon was actually a part of the Earth and exists now as an aftermath of a collision. If this is true, the moon would naturally share common resources with the Earth.
However, just the presence of REE wouldn’t, by itself, trigger a lunar mining stampede. There is plenty of earthly REE around, including in the U.S. The problem with REE is that typically they aren’t found in “veins” or other heavy concentrations. Thus, even the term “concentration” must be used in the relative sense, i.e., China’s ores aren’t rich with REE but have relatively higher concentrations of REE than the U.S. Because refining the ores is a difficult and expensive process, the value and benefit of purifying REE-containing ores is determined by the market value of specific REE contained therein.
Thus, one big question is whether the lunar concentrations are significantly better than on earth, and whether the full cost of transportation, mining and refining lunar REE make sense. Dale Boucher, director of innovation at Northern Center for Advanced Technology, summed the situation up, telling Space.com, ”It seems that there is significant quantity of REE’s in North America, [it's] just not profitable to refine them … yet. What value is the strategic element in this? Can one put a price on this? If so, it may be economically viable to explore the moon and extract the REE.”
Pieters says its conceivable to her that mining on the moon could occur 20-50 years from now.
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Video of the week: Ceramics and ceramic engineering at Missouri S&T
Although this video is a little old, the age isn’t obvious (other than a few hints in some of the captions) and it remains a great video regarding ceramics in general and provides an overview of ceramic engineering careers and the programs offered at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Mo. It was produced by the Discovery Channel and the school, and features student interviews and lab demonstrations. It also features comments by a slightly younger (but not by much) Dick Brow.
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