NTNU – Faculty of Natural Sciences and Technology – Page 3

Learn about the possibilities within aquaculture

The demand for seafood is growing, and the Norwegian goal is to become the world’s main seafood nation.

Recruiting smart, young brains
This is reflected by initiatives from the Government, from the aquaculture industry and related industries, and not the least from ongoing research activities. Building research based competence in the marine sector is important for these objectives.

The industry needs to recruit a lot of smart, young brains, and a crucial factor is recruitment on all levels: studies, research and work force in aquaculture and marine biology and technology.

Student day at Aqua Nor 2015
As a part of presenting the diversity and opportunities of the field, students from Trondheim and the rest of Norway are invited to visit the aquaculture trade show “Aqua Nor 2015” free of charge on Friday 21st of August.

Here is a unique chance to learn and explore what the aquaculture sector represents.

I recommend all of you with an interest in aquaculture and marine biology – and also those of you who do not still know that you are interested – to use this opportunity to get more acquainted with a steady growing and important field.

Read more about the AquaNor Student day.
Download invitation (pdf) (bring as ticket. Probably it is a good idea to bring your student card as well)

Programme

The organizers have made the following programme:

Opening and welcome (10.30 a.m.)
Presentations (10.30-12.00 a.m). OBS – in Norwegian.
Mingling and networking
Sampling seafood products
Meetings with various exhibitors

Venue: Trondheim Spektrum (map)

Ready for holidays and then the next semester

My respect to all of you who want to know more about PhD life here at NTNU and also to the people who have already followed my previous blog posts. Since I haven’t written any posts since New Year, I feel that this is a good time for a new report, now that the holiday period is starting.

After the first semester, I passed both exams. In the second semester, most of us had only one course. That was a chance for me to have more time for laboratory work and to make new results which is of course my main goal. I think most of us like these times when we are wearing our lab coats with a smile on our faces going to the lab, instead of sitting and preparing a new …n+1 exam. But to be honest, after passing all the exams, I am feeling a little bit “stronger” and the best part is when I can apply some new theoretical knowledge in practice.

Last exam was in May, and most of us passed. From that moment until summer vacation, which is starting for me in the middle of July, I will work 100% on research. Beside exams, lab work, weekly meetings and other everyday duties, we have meetings every few months with people from other Universities who are working on the same project that we are. Usually these meetings are in Oslo, and during these events, we are presenting recent results, sharing experiences and solving issues if someone has any. We are observing the development and progress of our work and it is very enjoyable.

Currently, people are slowly starting to go on holidays and since bachelor and master students have already gone home, the building is becoming so quiet. We are also excited to go on holidays and we are talking about our plans for the summer and maybe starting to be not so efficient like we were only one week earlier. Since we are a quite big department, booking of equipment is required and this can sometimes be a problem if you are in a hurry. But now that all the equipment is available, it is not so tricky to book the furnace or other instruments. This helps a great deal and gives me more pleasure working in the lab.

Besides work, we are spending time hiking and chilling out in nature together. Probably everybody knows that the nature in Norway is fabulous and it would be a pity if we do not utilize this opportunity, especially now that the days are so much longer than in the winter.

In my next blog post, I will write more about the scientific research part and everything related to it.

Have a nice summer and best regards.

Prestigious grant to Physics Professor Arne Brataas

Professor Arne Brataas at the Department of Physics was recently awarded the prestigious ERC grant from the European Research Council. Only three researchers from NTNU have previously received the grant including NT Professor Bernt-Eirik Sæther at the Department of Biology. The other two are Nobel Prize winners Edvard and May-Britt Moser. The scholarship is individual and will contribute 19 million NOK over five years to Brataas’ research.

Arne Brataas belongs to the theoretical physics research group and is an internationally recognized researcher in areas such as spintronics. Spintronics is a field within electronics where researchers study the electron spin and its associated magnetic moment and fundamental charge. The energy consumption is minimal and manipulating electron spin opens up new areas of use and functionality. Today, the technology is used in devices such as electronic storage media. Brataas is studying this phenomenon in different materials and situations to develop the international research further.

– It is a very nice recognition from the European Research Council. The grant makes it possible to take even more risks in this relatively unexplored theme where there is such a great potential, Brataas says to Adresseavisen.

Arne Brataas became a professor at the Department of Physics when he was only 33 years old. He has held postdoctoral positions at TU Delft and Harvard University. He is also Chairman of the Kavli prize committee in nanoscience 2013-2019

Creating new energy from heat loss

Have you thought about how much energy that disappears with the hot water you shower in? Or, to turn it around, how much could be saved if we manage to collect this energy before the water goes down the drain?

Energy loss
In industry, there are also many processes where significant amounts of energy is lost as heat. Take for example the metals industry, where raw materials are processed in furnaces heated up to 1000’s of degrees before they are cooled down. There will be major environmental and economic benefits from utilizing this energy. Thermoelectric materials may be the key.

Thermoelectric materials
Thermoelectric materials have the wonderful property that they can convert heat directly into electric power, and will therefore be highly relevant in this kind of processes. They make it possible to produce electrical energy by utilizing heat that would otherwise be lost.

At the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at NTNU, researchers are trying to develop thermoelectric materials based on oxides. Oxides are stable in air up to very high temperatures and are therefore suitable for industrial processes where temperatures can be very high.

energy-loss-blog — Photo: Sandra Skjærvø/NTNU

Learning about oxides
The picture shows PhD candidate Sathya P. Singh instructing 5th grade students at the department.

Students are learning how to measure some important thermoelectric properties of an oxide that shows promising properties in terms of potential “harvesting” of waste heat.

Someday, this type of oxide might be the basis for energy savings both in industry and in private homes.

Marine pollution researchers gathered in Trondheim

Trondheim, Norway is the venue of the 18th International symposium on Pollutant Responses in Marine Organisms (PRIMO18). We look forward to receive our research colleagues from all over the world, all sharing the same goal: protecting and preserving our natural environment.

The symposium contributes to building bridges, not only between scientific disciplines, but also between scientific disciplines and policy making.

The overall scientific theme of PRIMO18 is “Integrated Solutions for Sustainable Environmental Health”, and among the themes presented and discussed are:

Climate change and adaptation
Oil and gas toxicity
Ecotoxicology in tropical and polar regions
Nanotoxicology, metal toxicity, mixture toxicity and emerging compunds
Cellular absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination
Higher level outcomes of molecular/cellular effects

In addition, the participants will benefit from innovations in biomarker research that targets sustainable solutions, response and adaptation to environmental pollution.

More information can be found on www.primo18.com

Augustine Aruwke is the convenor and chairman of the international and local committees of PRIMO18

Beer brewing competence at the lab

There has been an exponential interest and growth in home beer brewing over the lasts years, and more and more small-scale microbreweries are entering the commercial marked. As a microbrewer you can now get a helping hand from the university, where there is microbial expertise and analytical resources few labs can match.

A little more than two years ago, several PhD students at the Department of Biotechnology at NTNU came up with a brilliant initiative – to start a beer brewing activity at the department.

Beer is not only one of the oldest biotechnology products around, in our modern society it is also one of the largest when measured in production volume and sales revenues. Of course the department with it’s long history in industrial microbiology and biotechnology is the ideal place, both to produce beer of superior quality, but also to monitor, control and analyse at the molecular level all the different steps in the beer making process.

Beer brewing at the laboratory — Student Martin Borud is adding hops to the boling wort, while PhD student Magnus Hattrem is studying mashing temperature profiles together with student Eirin Korvald. Photo: Department of Biotechnology bioteknologi / NTNU

There are several objectives of the department brewery:

To build expertise that can be valuable for the Norwegian beer industry, from the home brewer to the largest industrial actors.
Creating a social meeting place for students and employees at the Department.
To offer master’s and student projects.

From starting out with one kettle and the most primitive start-up kit, our Brew lab now has two production lines each with capacity of 50 liters per batch. Many successful batches of beer have been produced as part of the technical training but also to gain experience in design of recipes.

The sensory analysis is important. Here student Martin Borud is tasting eight different Brown Ales brewed at different mashing temperatures and with different yeasts. Photo: Department of Biotechnology/NTNU

Furthermore, the first student projects have been completed. Eirin and Martin (see pictures) were studying sugar profiles as function of mashing and fly sparge temperatures, and how this affected sensory qualities of the finished product when fermented with different beer yeasts strains.
Eirin continued her studies during the Master’s project and in January 2015 she submitted the first Master’s thesis in beer production in the Department’s history.

Our plan for the department brewery is to establish ourselves as a resource center, especially on the microbiology and analytical part, for Norwegian beer brewers, from the self-learned home brewer to commercial actors. We are currently developing protocols for simple yeast propagation for the home brewer, also to prepare yeast in optimal physiological conditions before pitching the wort.

This text has also been posted on the blog NTNU Techzone

Superconducting spintronics

New and enhanced effects in spintronics emerge when using superconducting materials. The right combination of materials that merge superconductivity and spintronics creates, for instance, a flow of spins that has zero resistance. This could eventually lead to new types of functionality in low-temperature technology.

Whereas electronics is the foundation for modern technology, the field of spintronics (or spin-dependent electronics) has in the recent decades proven to hold a real potential for generating technological advancements that may not only complement, but even replace conventional semiconductor-transistor based devices. The giant magnetoresistance effect is one of the most well-known direct implementation of spintronics in everyday appliances, in this particular case pertaining to harddrive technology and magnetic random access memory.

Superconductivity and magnetic order
The general objective of spintronics is to find ways to generate, manipulate, and detect spin flow. At first glance, spintronics might seem completely incompatible with superconducting order since superconductors in general expel magnetic fields and are comprised of spinless Cooper pairs as the fundamental building block.

Remarkably, it turns out that superconductivity can adapt to the presence of magnetic order by creating an unusual type of spin-polarized superconductivity. This type of pairing is robust not only toward impurity scattering, but also toward the paramagnetic limitation of a magnetic field.

As shown by the illustration above: When a superconductor is placed in proximity to a magnetic material, superconducting correlations will leak into the ferromagnet due to quantum mechanical tunneling. These correlations typically decay very quickly inside the ferromagnet. However, when there exists a magnetic inhomogeneity such as a domain wall near the interface, a new type of spin-polarized superconductivity emerges which can survive in the ferromagnet over very large distances.

Merging superconductivity and spintronics
Now, traditional studies that combine spintronics and superconductivity have mainly investigated injection of spin-polarized quasiparticles into superconductors. However, a synergy between superconducting and magnetic material turns out to be possible through the creation of spin-polarized superconductivity, as described above. This type of superconductivity can arise at carefully engineered superconductor interfaces with ferromagnetic materials.

There is presently intense activity focused on identifying materials combinations that merge superconductivity and spintronics to enhance device performance or even create new types of functionality. The results look very promising. It has been shown, for example, that superconducting order can strongly improve central effects in spintronics such as magnetoresistance and spin injection.

New possibilities
The intersection between superconductivity and magnetism represents an exciting research arena. On the one hand, it hosts very rich fundamental quantum physics – on the other hand, it also holds the potential for creating novel types of quantum-based technology in low temperature nanoelectronics.

The illustration a) shows a schematic overview of different ways to use superconducting spintronics, both in equilibrium and non-equilibrium. Different types of common experimental setups are depicted in b)-d).

Publication
In a recent publication in Nature Physics, me and my colleague Jason W. Robinson (Cambridge University) discuss how spintronics effects can be improved when using superconducting materials:
Superconducting spintronics. J. Linder & J. W. A. Robinson, Nature Physics 11, 307–315 (2015) doi:10.1038/nphys3242.

The beauty of eels

Tora Bardals picture JAPANESE EEL DEVELOPMENT was published in Scientific American January 2015 issue.

The picture is among the 12 stunning images from the 2014 Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition, that were selected for publication.

The Olympus BioScapes Competition is widely recognized as the world’s foremost showcase for outstanding images and movies of life science subjects captured through light microscopes. Researchers and microscope enthusiasts from about 70 countries submit nearly 2500 still images and movies to this competition each year. The beauty, power and importance of science as portrayed by these incredible images and movies captivated this year’s panel of judges and is delighting viewers worldwide.

The picture JAPANESE EEL DEVELOPMENT is also selected to be part of the 2014 Olympus BioScapes traveling exhibit. The exhibit will travel to universities and museums across the American continent in 2015.

Congratulations to Tora Bardal (Dept. of Biology) for her great achievements and for her contribution to spread information about the marine science research at NTNU!

Nanoscience meets Gulliver’s Travels

Photo from 20th Century Fox. Gulliver's travels from 2010, with Jack Black in the leading role, here in Lilliput-land. — Photo from 20th Century Fox. Gulliver’s travels from 2010, with Jack Black in the leading role, here in Lilliput-land.

Wars fought over eggs:
In Jonathan Swift’s famous book from 1726, and from the 2010 movie, Gulliver is shipwrecked at the island Lilliput where very tiny people live. It turns out that these Lilliputians are in war for something that seems absolutely absurd: the correct side of breaking a boiled egg.

One population believes that the correct side is the larger end and therefore they are in war with the other population. They believe that all eggs need to be broken at the smaller end. Gulliver is flabbergasted as these eggs are so tiny that he can’t even see the difference. Moreover, for the taste it wouldn’t matter at which side you break the eggs, does it? Swift used this egg-quarrel as a metaphor to criticize the political conflicts between Catholics and Protestants.

But how absurd is this story?

Knowledge on nanoscale
Through our research at the applied theoretical chemistry group at NTNU we have, for the first time, developed an accurate method based on both molecular simulations and theory. The method can predict heat and mass transfer through curved interfaces at the nanoscale. Whereas curvature is mostly insignificant for these processes for macroscopic objects, at the nanoscale things are completely different. The interfaces of nanobubbles and nanodroplets conduct heat in an uneven way depending on their shape and size.

We have calculated how the heat conductance is distributed at the interface of such nano-objects. Our work, which was recently published in the prestigious Physical Review Letters, shows examples like an oblate spheroidal droplet, a prolate spheroidal bubble, and a toroidal bubble; things that respectively look like a nanosized M&M candy, rugby ball, and a doughnut.

This knowledge is of fundamental importance since it will for instance help to understand the shape of snowflakes formed from tiny ice seeds, or how gas bubbles grow, which often start out from nanosized cavities. In addition, the theory will also be useful for designing the next generation nanodevices with specific properties. For instance, the method could be useful in the development of heat diodes and heat-transistors.

Size does matter
Now, coming back to the story of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. Was the reason for this war really that absurd? Gulliver’s reasoning that is doesn’t matter for the taste is certainly true for our macroscopic eggs, but given the small size of the eggs in Lilliput-land, we might expect a different heat current at the two sides when the egg is being boiled. According to our method will the small end side of the egg be hard boiled and the larger end will be soft boiled.

Hence, although the average taste of the egg is independent of at which side you open it, it will matter for the first bite. And let’s be frank, the average taste of a dinner will not change if you start with dessert and end with the main meal, the gastronomical experience will be different. Still not enough to start a war, but the whole egg-quarrel is maybe not as absurd as Gulliver thought.

Blog text written by Titus van Erp and Øivind Wilhelmsen

Meet Nanno, the very important algae

In my PhD project, I study the microalgae Nannochloropsis oceanica. My goal is to get a better understanding of how the genetic regulation of the lipid production in the microalgae is affected by different environmental conditions.

You cannot really see Nannochloropsis or other microalgae with the naked eye (they range in sizes from 2-100 µm). Therefore, I chose to illustrate the algae species I am working with as a cartoon represented by a little friend of mine; Nanno.

Have you ever seen a really green ocean? That greenish color you can see in the water is partly because of billions of algae that are growing there. You can see those algal communities on satellite pictures.

What you should remember that is special about algae is that they can get energy for reproduction and growth from sunlight, using photosynthesis! While growing, algae capture carbon dioxide (CO2). In fact, algae is fixing more than 40% of the worlds carbon (CO2).

Why are microalgae so interesting to humans?
Not only do they produce components that are industrially interesting, but also because algae can be used in a way no other plant/eukaryote can. They can be grown in bioreactors or ponds in the desert or other marginal land and they don’t need freshwater. Therefore algae don’t compete with agriculture and with human food sources such as crops does.

What components do humans get from algae and how?
For example, in the long run the idea is to use their lipids as an alternative source of bioenergy – see here

Some algae species can also be a source for the healthy omega-3-fatty acids, like those you can find in fish.

I hope you enjoyed the insight of the, for humans meaningful, life story of Nannochloropsis!