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Category: chemistry – Page 218

In the deep subsurface that plunges into the Earth for miles, microscopic organisms inhabit vast bedrock pores and veins. Belowground microorganisms, or microbes, comprise up to half of all living material on the planet and support the existence of all life forms up the food chain. They are essential for realizing an environmentally sustainable future and can change the chemical makeup of minerals, break down pollutants, and alter the composition of groundwater.

While the significance of bacteria and archaea is undeniable, the only evidence of their existence in the deep comes from traces of biological material that seep through mine walls, cave streams, and drill holes that tap into aquifers.

Many scientists have assumed that the composition of microbial communities in the deep subsurface is primarily shaped by local environmental pressures on microbial survival such as temperature, acidity, and oxygen concentration. This process, environmental selection, can take years to millennia to cause significant community-level changes in slow-growing communities like the subsurface.

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Reimagining Nuclear Medicine — Dr. Stephen Moran, Ph.D., Global Program Head, Neuroendocrine Tumors & Other Radiosensitive Cancers, Advanced Accelerator Applications, Novartis

Dr. Stephen Moran, Ph.D., is Global Program Head, Neuroendocrine Tumors & Other Radiosensitive Cancers, for Advanced Accelerator Applications (AAA — https://www.adacap.com/), a Novartis company and also a member of the Oncology Development Unit Leadership Team at Novartis.

Prior to joining AAA, Dr. Moran was Global Head of Novartis Strategy, where he played a key role in defining the company’s strategy, prioritizing critical actions needed to deliver on the mission to discover new ways to extend and improve peoples’ lives. He also led numerous strategic initiatives, including gene therapy (AveXis, now Novartis Gene Therapies), RNA therapeutics (The Medicines Company), precision medicine and digital strategies.

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Researchers at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial breakthrough in the development of quantum technology.

Their research, published in Nature today, describes their observations of more than 150,000 silicon “T center” photon-spin qubits, an important milestone that unlocks immediate opportunities to construct massively scalable quantum computers and the quantum internet that will connect them.

Quantum computing has to provide computing power well beyond the capabilities of today’s supercomputers, which could enable advances in many other fields, including chemistry, , medicine and cybersecurity.

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The plant seen here will capture 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year – 100 times more than the UK’s current largest facility and equivalent to taking 20,000 cars off the roads. The £20 million investment has been completed by Northwich-based Tata Chemicals Europe, one of Europe’s leading producers of sodium carbonate, salt and sodium bicarbonate.

The project will help to unlock the future of carbon capture and utilisation, as it proves the viability of the technology at a large scale, removing CO2 from gas power plant emissions for use in high-end manufacturing applications.

In a world-first, the captured emissions are being purified to food and pharmaceutical grade, then used as raw material for a form of sodium bicarbonate that will be known as Ecokarb. This unique and innovative manufacturing process is patented in the UK, with further patents pending in key territories around the world. Ecokarb will be exported to more than 60 countries.

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Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are devices that enable direct communication/translation between biological neuronal networks (e.g. a brain or a spine) and external machines. They are currently being used as a tool for fundamental neuroscience research and also for treating neurological disorders and for manipulating neuro-prosthetic devices. As remarkable as today’s BMIs are, however, the next generation BMIs will require new hardware and software with improved resolution and specificity in order to precisely monitor and control the activities of complex neuronal networks. In this talk, I will describe my group’s effort to develop new neuroelectronic devices enabled by silicon nanotechnology that can serve as high-precision, highly multiplexed interface to neuronal networks. I will then describe the promises, as well as potential pitfalls, of next generation BMIs. Hongkun Park is a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and a Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and a member of the Harvard Center for Brain Science and Harvard Quantum Optics Center. He serves as an associate editor of Nano Letters. His research interests lie in exploring solid-state photonic, optoelectronic, and plasmonic devices for quantum information processing as well as developing new nano-and microelectronic interfaces for living cells, cell networks, and organisms. Awards and honors that he received include the Ho-Am Foundation Prize in Science, NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and the US Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

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As our devices get smaller and smaller, the use of molecules as the main components in electronic circuitry is becoming ever more critical. Over the past 10 years, researchers have been trying to use single molecules as conducting wires because of their small scale, distinct electronic characteristics, and high tunability. But in most molecular wires, as the length of the wire increases, the efficiency by which electrons are transmitted across the wire decreases exponentially. This limitation has made it especially challenging to build a long molecular wire—one that is much longer than a nanometer—that actually conducts electricity well.

Columbia researchers announced today that they have built a nanowire that is 2.6 nanometers long, shows an unusual increase in conductance as the wire length increases, and has quasi-metallic properties. Its excellent conductivity holds great promise for the field of molecular electronics, enabling electronic devices to become even tinier. The study is published today in Nature Chemistry.

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Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology designed a new type of molecular wire doped with organometallic ruthenium to achieve unprecedentedly higher conductance than earlier molecular wires. The origin of high conductance in these wires is fundamentally different from similar molecular devices and suggests a potential strategy for developing highly conducting “doped” molecular wires.

Since their conception, researchers have tried to shrink electronic devices to unprecedented sizes, even to the point of fabricating them from a few molecules. Molecular wires are among the building blocks of such minuscule contraptions, and many researchers have been developing strategies to synthesize highly conductive, stable wires from carefully designed molecules.

A team of researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology, including Yuya Tanaka, designed a novel in the form of a metal electrode-molecule-metal electrode (MMM) junction including a polyyne, an organic chain-like molecule, “doped” with a ruthenium-based unit Ru(dppe)2. The proposed design, featured in the cover of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, is based on engineering the energy levels of the conducting orbitals of the atoms of the wire, considering the characteristics of gold electrodes.

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Circa 2020

A little while ago, we covered the idea of using photovoltaic materials to drive enzymatic reactions in order to produce specific chemicals. The concept is being considered mostly because doing the same reaction in a cell is often horribly inefficient, because everything else in the cell is trying to regulate the enzymes, trying to use the products, trying to convert the byproducts into something toxic, or up to something even more annoying. But in many cases, these reactions rely on chemicals that are only made by cells, leaving some researchers to suspect it still might be easier to use living things in the end.

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Everything we know, think and feel—everything!—comes from our brains. But consciousness, our private sense of inner awareness, remains a mystery. Brain activities—spiking of neuronal impulses, sloshing of neurochemicals—are not at all the same thing as sights, sounds, smells, emotions. How on earth can our inner experiences be explained in physical terms?

Free access to Closer to Truth’s library of 5,000 videos: http://bit.ly/376lkKN

Watch more interviews on consciousness and neurology: https://bit.ly/3Re9Xc1

Peter Ulric Tse is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. He holds a BA from Dartmouth (1984; majored in Mathematics and Physics), and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University (1998).

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