Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: chemistry – Page 19

Physicists create Bose–Einstein condensate from ultracold polar molecules

Bose–Einstein condensates are states of matter that form when particles called bosons are cooled to temperatures that are only a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (i.e., 0 Kelvin [-460°F]). In these states, particles occupy the same quantum state and exhibit interesting collective behaviors, essentially behaving as if they were a single “super-particle.”

So far, physicists have primarily created Bose–Einstein condensates using atoms. The first realization of these states with molecules was just over two decades ago, in 2003.

Producing Bose–Einstein condensates with ultracold polar molecules, cooled molecules in which positive and negative charges are separate, has proved particularly challenging. This is partly due to chemical reactions that can cause a loss of these molecules while they are being cooled.

A Simple Twist Could Unlock a New Generation of Electronics

Scientists can now twist large oxide crystals into new materials with potentially powerful electronic properties.

A carefully chosen twist can transform how a material behaves. Researchers have now found a way to apply that principle to large sheets of crystalline oxides, opening a potential route toward electronic materials with structures and properties that can be designed with unusual precision.

The approach gives scientists control over the angle between two stacked oxide layers while creating strong chemical bonds where they meet. Unlike many earlier twistronic materials, the resulting structures can also be produced across areas large enough to be more relevant for practical devices.

Pulling Graphite Out of Thin Air

Graphite, the carbon center of your humble #2 pencil, is also an essential component in technologies such as batteries, smartphones, laptops, and industrial power equipment. Today, nearly all of this critical mineral has to be mined and processed and, in the United States, imported.

But now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and Estonia’s National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics have shown a promising way to convert waste carbon pulled from the air into graphite, opening up a potential alternative to mining. The work was published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers built a custom microscope setup to watch a process known as molten-salt electrolysis, which uses electricity and hot liquid salts to turn carbon dioxide into solid carbon. For the first time, researchers were able to watch the process in real time inside the corrosive, 500-degree-Celsius molten salts while the system was running.

Tiny infrared chip could improve detection of gases and heat

Infrared cameras can be used to spot useful information that our eyes can’t see, such as gases escaping from a pipeline, chemicals in the atmosphere, or heat leaking from a building. But sensing infrared light in sophisticated ways still requires expensive and bulky systems.

Now MIT researchers have created a chip-based optical device that can dynamically control incoming infrared light, to act as a tunable lens that gathers additional information for infrared cameras. Each microscopic pixel of the device’s lens can control infrared light independently, allowing it to change its focus and help cameras detect different signals without moving parts.

The system is described in a paper published in Nature Communications. The researchers also explain how they built a lab-scale demonstration using mostly conventional manufacturing processes in a semiconductor chip factory, suggesting the approach could be implemented at industrial scales.

Bioceramic-coated implant improves osteoporotic fracture healing through timed magnesium release

Seoul National University (SNU) College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Nathaniel S. Hwang, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has developed a bioceramic fracture fixation material that promotes bone regeneration by precisely controlling the timing of magnesium ion (Mg²⁺) release to suppress inflammatory immune responses during osteoporotic fracture healing.

The research team discovered that magnesium ions do not always promote bone regeneration; rather, their effects on immune responses and bone healing vary depending on the timing and duration of release. Based on this finding, the team proposed a fracture fixation material that releases magnesium ions according to the stages of healing and demonstrated its bone regeneration efficacy through animal experiments.

Furthermore, the study suggests the possibility of advancing fracture treatment materials beyond simple mechanical fixation devices into therapeutic technologies that actively regulate immune responses according to healing stages. The newly developed material is expected to be applied to next-generation orthopedic medical devices and personalized bone regeneration therapies for patients with osteoporotic fractures.

Strain turns non-chiral crystals left- or right-handed on demand

Mechanical strain is one of the most common tools used to tailor the properties of materials. In piezoelectric materials, stretching or compressing a crystal generates an electrical polarization. In piezomagnetic materials, it induces magnetization. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) and the University of Oxford have now discovered that mechanical strain also induces chirality in non-chiral crystals, opening a new direction to control this property on demand and potentially imprint chiral electronic properties. This work has just been published in Nature.

Chirality is an important property of matter. It is defined as a property of objects that cannot be superimposed on their mirror images through any combination of rotations or translations, much like distinct left and right hands. In chiral crystals, the spatial arrangement of atoms gives rise to a specific handedness, with the crystal structure twisting along one propagation direction in a way similar to a screw.

As a consequence, propagation in one direction, for example, of an electrical current, may experience different resistance than propagation in the opposite direction. This effect also influences certain chemical reactions and biological processes, which select for one specific handedness. In this sense, the ability to control chirality on demand, turning a right-handed structure into a left-handed one, is highly desirable.

Stable DNA building blocks enable faster oligonucleotide synthesis without oxidation

The chemical synthesis of oligonucleotides (ONs) is central to modern molecular biology, diagnostics and nucleic acid therapeutics. While demand for high-quality ONs is increasing, the conventional synthetic method has long-standing efficiency challenges. Widely adopted P(III)-phosphoramidite-based ON synthesis requires an oxidation step after every nucleotide coupling cycle and uses moisture-sensitive building blocks, adding complexity to the workflow and slowing the process.

Early studies of ON synthesis showed that pentavalent phosphorus [P(V)] chemistry could form linkages between nucleotides. However, practical limitations, including unstable intermediates, slow coupling, harsh deprotection or poor performance during chain elongation, prevented these methods from replacing P(III)-based phosphoramidite chemistry.

A recent study led by Associate Professor Noriko Saito-Tarashima of the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Tokushima University in Japan, along with Nana Mihara, a doctoral student from the same institution, investigated whether nucleoside 3′-phosphorofluoridates [P(V)–F] could be used as stable building blocks for ON synthesis without requiring a separate oxidation step.

JCI Direct pharmacological targeting of asparagine synthetase to overcome resistance to Lasparaginase in ALL therapy

Herman B. Wells Center for Pediatric Research.

2Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Pharmacology, and.

3Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

Two attosecond flashes capture electrons in motion

Electronic motion sets the stage for virtually every light-induced process in nature, from the first step of a chemical reaction to the flow of charge in a solid. Yet these processes unfold so rapidly that they can be observed only with flashes of light lasting a few hundred attoseconds—billionths of a billionth of a second.

Most previous attosecond experiments combined an attosecond pulse in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) with a longer, often intense near-infrared pulse. Such fields can disturb the system under investigation and obscure its intrinsic electronic response. In the new approach, both the pump and probe are attosecond extreme-ultraviolet pulses, providing a potentially much cleaner view of the underlying dynamics.

The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Helical nanoparticles trigger cancer alarms and deliver gene therapy

Cancer cells survive by hiding from the immune system’s surveillance. A KAIST research team has developed a new anticancer platform that makes cancer cells send out their own danger signals—prompting immune cells to attack—while simultaneously delivering gene therapy. The approach is expected to offer a new treatment strategy that combines cancer immunotherapy and gene therapy in a single nanoparticle.

Immunogenic cell death (ICD) is a process in which dying cancer cells send danger signals to nearby immune cells, prompting them to attack. A polypeptide is a polymer made of a long chain of amino acids.

A team led by Professor Yeu-Chun Kim from the KAIST Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering developed a “helical polypeptide nanoparticle” platform that induces severe stress inside cancer cells to trigger immunogenic cell death while also delivering a range of gene therapeutics into the cells. The findings are published in the journal Biomaterials.