Lifeboat Foundation

A series of buzzing, bee-like “loop-currents” could explain a recently discovered, never-before-seen phenomenon in a type of quantum material. The findings from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder may one day help engineers to develop new kinds of devices, such as quantum sensors or the quantum equivalent of computer memory storage devices.

The quantum material in question is known by the chemical formula Mn₃Si₂Te₆. But you could also call it “honeycomb” because its manganese and tellurium atoms form a network of interlocking octahedra that look like the cells in a beehive.

Physicist Gang Cao and his colleagues at CU Boulder synthesized this molecular beehive in their lab in 2020, and they were in for a surprise: Under most circumstances, the material behaved a lot like an insulator. In other words, it didn’t allow electric currents to pass through it easily. When they exposed the honeycomb to magnetic fields in a certain way, however, it suddenly became millions of times less resistant to currents. It was almost as if the material had morphed from rubber into metal.

Water Droplets Hold the Secret Ingredient for Building Life. Chemists uncover key to early Earth chemistry, which could unlock paths to speed up chemical synthesis for…

face_with_colon_three circa 2021.

Think about where our energy comes from: drilling rigs and smokestacks, windmills and solar panels. Lithium-ion battery packs might even come to mind.

We probably don’t think about the farms that comprise over one-third of Earth’s total land area. But farms can also be an energy source. Barcelona-based battery company Bioo is generating electricity from the organic matter in soil and creating biological batteries that can power agricultural sensors, a growing 1.36 billion dollar global market.

Continue reading “How biological batteries can generate renewable energy from soil” »

The same four chemical building blocks behind almost all life on earth could one day be used replace traditional computer storage.

Prof. Ehud Pines (pictured above) is an iconoclast. What else can you call a scientist who spent 17 years doggedly pursuing the solution to an over 200-year-old chemistry problem that he felt never received a satisfying answer using methods no other scientist thought could lead to the truth? Now, he is vindicated as the prestigious Angewandte Chemie journal published a cover article detailing how his experiment was replicated by another research group while being x-rayed to reveal the solution Prof. Pines has argued for all along.

The question at hand is: How does a proton move through water? In 1,806, Theodor Grotthuss proposed his theory, which became known as the Grotthuss Mechanism. Over the years, many others attempted an updated solution realizing that strictly speaking, Grotthuss was incorrect, but it remained the standard textbook answer. Until now.

Prof. Ehud Pines suggested, based on his experimental studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the Department of Chemistry, together with his PhD student Eve Kozari, and theoretical studies by Prof. Benjamin Fingerhut on the structure of Prof. Pines’ protonated water clusters, that the proton moves through water in trains of three water molecules. The proton train “builds the tracks” underneath them for their movement and then disassembles the tracks and rebuilds them in front of them to keep going. It’s a loop of disappearing and reappearing tracks that continues endlessly. Similar ideas were put forward by a number of scientists in the past, however, according to Prof. Pines, they were not assigned to the correct molecular structure of the hydrated proton which by its unique trimeric structural properties leads to promoting the Grotthuss mechanism.

The question of how precisely protons move through water in an electric field has fascinated scientists for centuries. Now, more than 200 years after the last major insight into the phenomenon, scientists have some clarity.

In 1,806, Theodor Grotthuss put forward a hypothesis, which came to be known as the Grotthuss mechanism for ‘proton jumping’, about how a charge might flow through a solution of water.

While Grotthuss’s hypothesis was very forward-thinking for its time – coming before protons, or even the actual structure of water, were even known about – modern-day researchers have long known that it didn’t provide a complete understanding of what happened at a molecular level.

Summary: Administering a chemical compound called synthetic retinoids to the retina helped restore brain networks associated with vision and prompted the growth of two times more neurons, effectively restoring vision in adult mouse models of the genetic visual disorder LCA.

Source: UC Irvine.

A discovery about how some visually impaired adults could start to see offers a new vision of the brain’s possibilities.

Antibiotics are standard treatments for fighting dangerous bacterial infections. Yet the number of bacteria developing a resistance to antibiotics is increasing. Researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of São Paulo are overcoming this resistance with light.

The researchers tailored antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT)—a chemical reaction triggered by visible light—for use on antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains. Results showed the treatment weakened bacteria to where low doses of current antibiotics could effectively eliminate them.

“Using aPDT in combination with antibiotics creates a synergy of interaction working together for a solution,” said Vladislav Yakovlev, University Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M and co-director of the project. “It’s a step in the right direction against resistant bacteria.”

A team of researchers at Northwestern University has devised a new platform for gene editing that could inform the future application of a near-limitless library of CRISPR-based therapeutics.

Using chemical design and synthesis, the team brought together the Nobel-prize winning technology with therapeutic technology born in their own lab to overcome a critical limitation of CRISPR. Specifically, the groundbreaking work provides a system to deliver the cargo required for generating the gene editing machine known as CRISPR-Cas9. The team developed a way to transform the Cas-9 protein into a spherical nucleic acid (SNA) and load it with critical components as required to access a broad range of tissue and cell types, as well as the intracellular compartments required for gene editing.

The research, published today in a paper titled, “CRISPR Spherical Nucleic Acids,” in the publication Journal of the American Chemical Society, and shows how CRISPR SNAs can be delivered across the cell membrane and into the nucleus while also retaining bioactivity and gene editing capabilities.