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Root canal treatment removes the infection and bacteria from the core of a tooth — the pulp chamber. These bacteria are often present within the canals of the teeth. However, proper treatment saves a badly infected natural tooth from needing to be extracted. Sufficient cleaning of the root canals is a key step of RCT. A lack of proper canal debridement can cause bacteria to thrive — a significant cause of RCT failures.

The tooth is washed with antibiotics or other chemicals that kill the bacteria to get rid of the infection. However, some teeth have complex root structures, and conventional ways of cleaning them are not enough to remove all bacteria. That’s one area where dental nanorobots can help. Nanorobots are showing promise in different steps of RCT, even better than traditional ways.

Continue reading “Dental Nanorobots: An Innovation to Improve Root Canal Treatment” »

A time crystal, as originally proposed in 2012, is a new state of matter in which the particles are in continuous oscillatory motion. Time crystals break time-translation symmetry. Discrete time crystals do so by oscillating under the influence of a periodic external parametric force, and this type of time crystal has been demonstrated in trapped ions, atoms and spin systems.

Continuous time crystals are more interesting and arguably more important, as they exhibit continuous time-translation symmetry but can spontaneously enter a regime of periodic motion, induced by a vanishingly small perturbation. It is now understood that this state is only possible in an open system, and a continuous quantum-time-crystal state has recently been observed in a quantum system of ultracold atoms inside an optical cavity illuminated with light.

In a paper published in Nature Physics, researchers at University of Southampton in the U.K. showed that a classical metamaterial nanostructure can be driven to a state that exhibits the same key characteristics of a continuous time crystal.

A proposed technique would use light and nanowires to generate electron beams with nearly pure spin polarization.

In a polarized electron beam, the particles’ spins are not randomly oriented but favor a particular direction. The polarization serves as a useful property for studying the magnetism of materials or for probing the spins of atoms or nuclei. But such a beam typically has a low degree of polarization unless it is produced at a synchrotron facility. Theorists have proposed creating these beams using laser light, but so far these approaches have involved extremely intense lasers and have not been expected to produce high polarization. Now Deng Pan of East China Normal University and Hongxing Xu of Wuhan University, China, have proposed a method that reduces the required laser intensity by up to 10 billion times compared with previous laser-based approaches and that should produce a pair of beams that are nearly 100% polarized [1].

In Pan and Xu’s proposal, a wide laser beam broadsides an array of parallel conducting nanowires with 100-nm spacing and excites them to emit electromagnetic waves. An unpolarized electron beam is sent across the array, perpendicular to the wires, about 100 nm away from them. Some electrons absorb or emit photons, causing their spins to align parallel or antiparallel to the local electric field. They also gain or lose a photon’s worth of energy. This interaction with the radiation near the wires generates two new beams with nearly pure spin polarizations and slightly different energies, allowing them to be easily separated. Pan and Xu say that the technique should be implementable with current technology and that it may even lead to new ways of manipulating electrons.

2D materials, which are finer than even the thinnest onionskin paper, have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable mechanical attributes. However, these properties dissapate when the materials are layered, thus restricting their practical applications.

“Think of a graphite pencil,” says Teng Li, Keystone Professor at the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Its core is made of graphite, and graphite is composed of many layers of graphene.

Graphene is an allotrope of carbon in the form of a single layer of atoms in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice in which one atom forms each vertex. It is the basic structural element of other allotropes of carbon, including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes, and fullerenes. In proportion to its thickness, it is about 100 times stronger than the strongest steel.

Researchers at the KIT Institute of Nanotechnology (INT) now managed to characterize the formation of the SEI with a multi-scale approach. “This solves one of the great mysteries regarding an essential part of all liquid electrolyte batteries – especially the lithium-ion batteries we all use every day,” says Professor Wolfgang Wenzel, director of the research group “Multiscale Materials Modelling and Virtual Design ” at INT, which is involved in the large-scale European research initiative BATTERY 2030+ that aims to develop safe, affordable, long-lasting, sustainable high-performance batteries for the future.

The KIT researchers report on their findings in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

To examine the growth and composition of the passivation layer at the anode of liquid electrolyte batteries, the researchers at INT generated an ensemble of over 50 000 simulations representing different reaction conditions. They found that the growth of the organic SEI follows a solution-mediated pathway: First, SEI precursors that are formed directly at the surface join far away from the electrode surface via a nucleation process.

A small team of chemists at the Russian Academy of Sciences, has found that metal atoms, not nanoparticles, play the key role in catalysts used in fine organic synthesis. In the study, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the group used multiple types of electron microscopy to track a region of a catalyst during a reaction to learn more about how it was proceeding.

Prior research has shown that there are two main methods for studying a reaction. The first is the most basic: As ingredients are added, the reaction is simply observed and/or measured. This can be facilitated through use of high-speed cameras. This approach will not work with nanoscale reactions, of course. In such cases, chemists use a second method: They attempt to capture the state of all the components before and after the reaction and then compare them to learn more about what happened.

This second approach leaves much to be desired, however, as there is no way to prove that the objects under study correspond with one another. In recent years, chemists have been working on a new approach: Following the action of a single particle during the reaction. This new method has proven to have merit but it has limitations as well—it also cannot be used for reactions that occur in the nanoworld. In this new effort, the researchers used multiple types of electron microscopy coupled with machine-learning algorithms.

An artificial photosynthesis system that combines semiconducting nanoparticles with a non-photosynthetic bacterium could offer a promising new route for producing sustainable solar-driven hydrogen fuel.

Other artificial photosynthesis systems that integrate nanomaterials into living microbes have been developed before, which reduce carbon dioxide or produce hydrogen, for example. However, usually it is the microorganism itself that makes the product via a metabolic pathway, which is aided by a light-activated nanomaterial that supplies necessary electrons.

Now, the labs of Kara Bren and Todd Krauss at the University of Rochester, US, have turned this concept on its head. They have designed a new hybrid bio-nano system that combines a finely-tuned photocatalytic semiconducting nanoparticles to make hydrogen with a bacterium which, while it does not photosynthesise or make hydrogen itself, it provides the necessary electrons to the nanomaterial to synthesise hydrogen.

Researchers designed nanoparticles that can deliver mRNA gene editing solutions directly to the lungs to address rare genetic diseases.

Year 2022 😗

Bar-Ilan University researchers have developed a new technology that enables the use of nanoparticles to assist the body’s immune system to fight cancer.

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Continue reading “The future is here: Israeli researchers develop nanotechnology to fight cancer” »