Lifeboat Foundation

Over the past decade, teams of engineers, chemists and biologists have analyzed the physical and chemical properties of cicada wings, hoping to unlock the secret of their ability to kill microbes on contact. If this function of nature can be replicated by science, it may lead to development of new products with inherently antibacterial surfaces that are more effective than current chemical treatments.

When researchers at Stony Brook University’s Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering developed a simple technique to duplicate the cicada wing’s nanostructure, they were still missing a key piece of information: How do the nanopillars on its surface actually eliminate bacteria? Thankfully, they knew exactly who could help them find the answer: Jan-Michael Carrillo, a researcher with the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

For nanoscience researchers who seek computational comparisons and insights for their experiments, Carrillo provides a singular service: large-scale, high-resolution molecular dynamics (MD) simulations on the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL.

(NewsNation) — A new study claims to have found chemical compounds that can actually reverse the effects of aging, though so far results have been limited to animal studies.

Harvard Medical School, University of Maine and Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists collaborated on the study, published in the journal Aging. Researchers found it was possible to reverse cellular engineering rather than simply delay it.

They used six chemical compounds to reverse aging in cells, returning them to a youthful state without having them revert too far and become cancerous.

Sir Frederick Banting was clearly ahead of his time. He is also an inspiration for a new open source self-administering drug delivery device. Long before open source was an option or even a concept, the now-celebrated former Western lecturer refused to patent insulin because he wanted it to be inexpensive and widely available for the betterment of all.

Now, 100 years after Banting won the Nobel Prize for his discovery, Western researchers are at it again. A team led by engineering and Ivey Business School professor Joshua Pearce has developed a new 3D printed, completely open-source autoinjector —a device designed to deliver a single dose of medicine—for a tenth of the cost of a commercially purchased product.

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In a pioneering study, researchers from Harvard Medical School, University of Maine, and MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

Imagine a wearable patch that tracks your vital signs through changes in the color display, or shipping labels that light up to indicate changes in temperature or sterility of food items.

These are among the potential uses for a new flexible display created by UBC researchers and announced recently in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

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For many, the word “crystals” conjures images of shimmering suncatchers that create a prism of rainbow colors or semi-transparent stones thought to possess healing abilities. But in the realm of science and engineering, crystals take on a more technical definition. They’re perceived as materials whose components – be it atoms, molecules, or nanoparticles –are arranged regularly in space. In other words, crystals are defined by the regular arrangement of their constituents. Familiar examples include diamonds, table salt, and sugar cubes.

When Nicola Spaldin began studying natural sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1988, she planned on becoming a physicist, but then quickly reconsidered. “After about the second lecture I completely changed my mind,” she recalls. “I thought ‘I’m absolutely not clever enough to be a physicist.’ Everybody was very brilliant and I was not.”

Yet it seems Spaldin was vastly underestimating herself. Now a professor of materials science at ETH Zurich, she won two major awards for physics last year: the EPS Europhysics Prize and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. Both accolades cited Spaldin’s pioneering work on the theory of magnetoelectric multiferroics – materials that are both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric. These properties are rarely found together, making it very difficult to engineer substances with both, but they have many exciting potential applications, from microelectronics to medicine.

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Developing Novel DNA-Based Mechano-Technologies For Human Health — Dr. Khalid Salaita, Ph.D. — Emory University

Dr. Khalid Salaita, Ph.D. (https://www.salaitalab.com/salaita) is a Professor of Chemistry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia (USA), program faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, program member of Cancer Cell Biology at Winship Cancer Institute, and most recently is the recent winner Future Insight Prize given by Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany (https://www.emdgroup.com/en/research/open-innovation/futurei…aming.html) for his cutting edge work in the area of mechanobiology.

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Researchers in the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering have demonstrated control over an emerging material, which they consider as a possible future alternative to silicon in microelectronics. This is a timely development, because scientists and engineers face challenges in continuing the transistor shrinking trend, an important driver of computer chip performance.

The continuous performance improvement of these chips has been driven by shrinking the size of the most basic logic “Lego” piece – the transistor. Transistors are miniature switches that control the flow of electric currents, analogous to a faucet controlling the flow of water. Already in the early 1960s, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, proposed that the transistors’ miniaturization rate should allow doubling of the number of transistors per area every 2 years.