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Category: chemistry – Page 153

Squids and octopuses are masters of camouflage, blending into their environment to evade predators or surprise prey. Some aspects of how these cephalopods become reversibly transparent are still “unclear,” largely because researchers can’t culture cephalopod skin cells in the lab.

Today, however, researchers report that they have replicated the tunable transparency of some squid skin cells in mammalian cells, which can be cultured. The work could not only shed light on basic squid biology, but also lead to better ways to image many cell types.

The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person March 26–30, and features more than 10,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics.

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The transformative changes brought by deep learning and artificial intelligence are accompanied by immense costs. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT algorithm costs at least $100,000 every day to operate. This could be reduced with accelerators, or computer hardware designed to efficiently perform the specific operations of deep learning. However, such a device is only viable if it can be integrated with mainstream silicon-based computing hardware on the material level.

This was preventing the implementation of one highly promising accelerator—arrays of electrochemical random-access memory, or ECRAM—until a research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign achieved the first material-level integration of ECRAMs onto . The researchers, led by graduate student Jinsong Cui and professor Qing Cao of the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, recently reported an ECRAM device designed and fabricated with materials that can be deposited directly onto silicon during fabrication in Nature Electronics, realizing the first practical ECRAM-based deep learning accelerator.

“Other ECRAM devices have been made with the many difficult-to-obtain properties needed for deep learning accelerators, but ours is the first to achieve all these properties and be integrated with silicon without compatibility issues,” Cao said. “This was the last major barrier to the technology’s widespread use.”

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A study published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry investigated the changes in gene expressions during an overfeeding episode. It demonstrated that supplementation of grape polyphenols in healthy lean men modulates the expression of genes related to adipose tissue angiogenesis.

Research Paper: Adipose tissue angiogenesis genes are down-regulated by grape polyphenols supplementation during a human overfeeding trial. Image Credit: Basico / Shutterstock.

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Eukaryotes generate the energy for survival through cellular respiration in mitochondria by a process known as the oxidative phosphorylation. In this process, nutrients and oxygen are converted into a chemical form of energy: ATP. This is achieved with a proton gradient built up by the electron transport chain inside mitochondria.

The gradient is driven by a series of four respiratory complexes in the inner mitochondrial . A new study published in Nature combined tomography and molecular simulations to shed light on bioenergetic macro-assemblies and how they shape mitochondrial membranes. It identified that in Tetrahymena thermophila—a free-living single cell eukaryote found in ponds and lakes—all four respiratory complexes are associated.

Continue reading “Exploring a massive supercomplex in mitochondria comprising all four respiratory complexes” | >

The unique radiation emitted by heated or electrified elements has been converted into sound, enabling us to hear the distinctive chord each element produces. Although the idea has been tried before, advances in technology have now made it possible for a far more complete and subtle sonification of the periodic table.

When elements are energized electrons can jump to higher energy levels. Eventually, they return to their ground state, releasing a photon in the process. The wavelength of the photon depends on the size of the energy gap between the excited state and the ground state – more energy produces higher frequency/shorter wavelength light.

The discovery of this fact has proven crucial for our understanding of the universe. We can identify the elements in a star billions of light-years away from the distinctive wavelengths it emits, known as its emission spectra. At the American Chemical Society’s Spring Conference over the weekend, the University of Indiana’s W. Walker Smith demonstrated the result if every element’s electromagnetic spectrum is converted to sound.

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“People study cells in the context of their biology and biochemistry, but cells are also simply physical objects you can touch and feel,” Guo says. “Just like when we construct a house, we use different materials to have different properties. A similar rule must apply to cells when forming tissues and organs. But really, not much is known about this process.”

His work in cell mechanics led him to MIT, where he recently received tenure and is the Class of ’54 Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

At MIT, Guo and his students are developing tools to carefully poke and prod cells, and observe how their physical form influences the growth of a tissue, organism, or disease such as cancer. His research bridges multiple fields, including cell biology, physics, and mechanical engineering, and he is working to apply the insights from cell mechanics to engineer materials for biomedical applications, such as therapies to halt the growth and spread of diseased and cancerous cells.

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Photosynthesis is the process that plants, algae, and even certain species of bacteria use to convert sunlight into oxygen and chemical energy stored as sugar (aka gluclose). But what are the mechanisms behind one of nature’s most profound processes?

These are questions that a team of researchers led by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) hope to answer as they used quantum chemical calculations to examine a photosynthesis protein complex known as photosystem I (PSI) in hopes of better understanding the complete process of photosynthesis and how plants are able to convert sunlight to energy, specifically pertaining to how chlorophylls and the reaction center play their roles in the process.

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When people suffer spinal cord injuries and lose mobility in their limbs, it’s a neural signal processing problem. The brain can still send clear electrical impulses and the limbs can still receive them, but the signal gets lost in the damaged spinal cord.

The Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE)—a collaboration of San Diego State University with the University of Washington (UW) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—is working on an implantable brain chip that can record neural electrical signals and transmit them to receivers in the limb, bypassing the damage and restoring movement. Recently, these researchers described in a study published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports a critical improvement to the technology that could make it more durable, last longer in the body and transmit clearer, stronger signals.

The technology, known as a brain-computer interface, records and transmits signals through electrodes, which are tiny pieces of material that read signals from brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters. By recording brain signals at the moment a person intends to make some movement, the interface learns the relevant electrical signal pattern and can transmit that pattern to the limb’s nerves, or even to a prosthetic limb, restoring mobility and motor function.

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Plants use photosynthesis to harvest energy from sunlight. Now researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have applied this principle as the basis for developing new sustainable processes which in the future may produce syngas (synthetic gas) for the large-scale chemical industry and be able to charge batteries.

Syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, is an important intermediate product in the manufacture of many chemical starter materials such as ammonia, methanol and synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. “Syngas is currently made almost exclusively using fossil ,” says Prof. Roland Fischer from the Chair of Inorganic and Organometallic Chemistry.

A yellow powder, developed by a research team led by Fischer, is to change all that. The scientists were inspired by photosynthesis, the process plants use to produce chemical energy from light. “Nature needs carbon dioxide and water for photosynthesis,” says Fischer. The nanomaterial developed by the researchers imitates the properties of the enzymes involved in photosynthesis. The “nanozyme” produces syngas using carbon dioxide, water and light in a similar manner.

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A team of chemists, engineers, material scientists and physicists from Princeton University, Rutgers University and the University of Regensburg has developed a chemical exfoliation technique to produce single-molecule-thick tungsten disulfide ink. The group describes their technique in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

As research continues into the creation of truly useful quantum computers, scientists continue to search for new materials that could support such machines. In this new effort, the research team looked into finding ways to print very cold circuits inside quantum computers using superconducting ink.

The new method involved a material consisting of layers of disulfide and potassium. The researchers exfoliated the material by dunking it into a sulfuric acid solution. This dissolved the potassium and left behind single-molecule layers of tungsten disulfide. The final step involved rinsing the acid and remnants in it, leaving the layers of tungsten suspended in a tub of water. In this state, the researchers found that the layers of tungsten disulfide could be used as a form of ink that could be printed onto various types of surfaces, such as plastic, silicon or glass. This left a one-molecule-thick coating on the material.

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