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Category: chemistry – Page 279

Simpler graphene method paves way for new era of nanoelectronics

Ever since its discovery in 2004, graphene has received attention owing to its extraordinary properties, among them its extremely high carrier mobility. However, the high carrier mobility has only been observed using techniques that require complex and expensive fabrication methods. Now, researchers at Chalmers report on a surprisingly high charge-carrier mobility of graphene using much cheaper and simpler methods.

“This finding shows that graphene transferred to cheap and flexible substrates can still have an uncompromisingly high mobility, and it paves the way for a new era of graphene nano-electronics,” says Munis Khan, researcher at Chalmers University of Technology.

Graphene is the one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms, known as the world’s thinnest material. The material has become a popular choice in semiconductor, automotive and optoelectronic industry due to its excellent electrical, chemical, and material properties. One such property is its extremely .

Self-assembling and complex, nanoscale mesocrystals can be tuned for a variety of uses

A research team from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces reports to have found the key to controlled fabrication of cerium oxide mesocrystals. The research is a step forward in tuning nanomaterials that can serve a wide range of uses—including solar cells, fuel catalysts and even medicine.

Mesocrystals are nanoparticles with identical size, shape and crystallographic orientation, and they can be used as to create artificial nanostructures with customized optical, magnetic or electronic properties. In nature, these three-dimensional structures are found in coral, sea urchins and calcite desert rose, for example. Artificially-produced cerium oxide (CeO2) mesocrystals—or nanoceria—are well-known as catalysts, with antioxidant properties that could be useful in pharmaceutical development.

“To be able to fabricate CeO2 mesocrystals in a controlled way, one needs to understand the formation mechanism of these materials,” says Inna Soroka, a researcher in applied at KTH. She says the team used radiation chemistry to reveal for the first time the ceria mesocrystal formation mechanism.

Katie Baca-Motes — Co-Founder, Scripps Research Digital Trials Ctr — Re-Engineering Clinical Trials

Re-engineering clinical trials around participants — katie baca-motes, co-founder, scripps research digital trials center, scripps research.

Katie Baca-Motes, MBA, (https://www.scripps.edu/science-and-medicine/translational-i…aca-motes/) is Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives at the Scripps Research Translational Institute, and Co-Founder of the Scripps Research Digital Trials Center (https://digitaltrials.scripps.edu/).

Katie leads various initiatives, including launching their new Digital Trials Center, focusing on expanding the institute’s portfolio of decentralized clinical trial initiatives including: DETECT, a COVID-19 research initiative, PowerMom, a maternal health research program and PROGRESS, an upcoming T2 Diabetes/Precision Nutrition program, as well as overseeing the institute’s role in the NIH “All of Us” Research Program as a Participant Center.

The Scripps Research Translational Institute (SRTI), was founded in 2007 with the aim of individualizing healthcare by leveraging the remarkable progress being made in human genomics and combining it with the power of wireless digital technologies.

The Scripps Research Digital Trials Center, a part of SRTI, leads groundbreaking studies that address the world’s most pressing health concerns, by pioneering “site-less” clinical trials, leveraging rapidly evolving digital health technologies to re-engineer the clinical trial experience around the participant, rather than the research site.

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The Hydrogen Stream: Universal Hydrogen builds manufacturing facility in the United States

Abundant fuel cell raw materials and renewables potential could add up to a green hydrogen economy in the Philippines, according to Jose Mari Angelo Abeleda Jr and Richard Espiritu, two professors at the University of the Philippines Diliman. In a paper published in this month’s Energy Policy, they explained the country is a latecomer to the sector and should develop basic and applied knowledge for training and research. The country should also establish stronger links between industry and academia, the report’s authors suggested. “The establishment of the Philippine Energy Research and Policy Institute (Perpi) is a move towards the right direction as it will be instrumental in crafting policies and pushing for activities that will usher for more private-academ[ic] partnerships for the development of fuel cell technology in the Philippines,” the scholars wrote. “However, through enabling legislation, a separate and dedicated Hydrogen Research and Development Center (HRDC) will be pivotal in ensuring that sufficient government and private funding are provided.” The authors reported progress in the production of fuel cell membranes but few developments towards large scale production, transport, and storage facilities. “The consolidation of existing renewable energy sources for hydrogen production can also be explored in order to ensure reliable and sustainable hydrogen fuel supply,” they wrote. “This is because the country will gain more benefit if it focuses more on the application of fuel cell technology on rural electrification via renewa[ble] energy-based distributed power generation, rather than on transportation such as fuel cell vehicles.”

Paris-based energy engineering company Technip Energies and Indian energy business Greenko ZeroC Private have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to explore green hydrogen project development opportunities in the refining, petrochemicals, fertilizer, chemical, and power plant sectors in India. “The MOU aims to facilitate active engagement between the teams of Technip Energies in India and Greenko to step up collaborative opportunities on a build-own-operate (BOO) model – in which Greenko will be the BOO operator and owner of the asset and Technip Energies will support with engineering services, integration and EP/EPC [engineering and procurement/engineering, procurement and constructrion] – for pilot and commercial scale green hydrogen and related projects in India in order to offer economically feasible technology solutions to clients,” the French company wrote today.

How “bodies on a chip” can transform animal welfare

Circa 2019

When Ken-Ichiro Kamei, a microengineer at Kyoto University, goes out drinking with his friends, he usually brings along one of his “bodies on a chip.” When the topic of work inevitably comes up, he’ll whip out the chip – which looks like a lab slide, but with an added crystal-clear silicone rubber layer containing faintly visible troughs and channels – and declare, “I’m making these devices to recreate humans and animals.”

Wows inevitably ensue. “It’s like I’m a magician and my friends have asked me to do some tricks,” Kamei chuckles.

Kamei is at the forefront of a new field of biotechnology that seeks to replicate organs, systems and entire bodies on chips such as the one he likes to show off. While traditional biochemical experiments carried out on lab plates are static and isolated, the chips Kamei uses contain an interconnected system of channels, valves and pumps that allow for more complex interactions – to the point that they can mimic a living system. Recognizing the potential such chips have for revolutionizing medical research, in 2016 the World Economic Forum named “organs-on-chips” in their top 10 emerging technologies of the year. But while those specialised chips mimic particular tissues or organs, Kamei and his colleagues aim to eventually mimic whole animals. “It’s quite ambitious,” he says.

Magnetic fields can have a huge impact on reactivity of ultracold molecules

Probability of a reaction occurring increases 100-fold and points to quantum control of chemistry.

A new step towards quantum control of chemistry has been achieved by researchers in the US, who found that tuning the magnetic field applied to colliding ultracold molecules could alter the probability of them reacting or undergoing inelastic scattering a 100-fold.1 The work could potentially prove useful for producing large ensembles of molecules in the same state and investigating their properties.

At room temperature, the random thermal motion of atoms and molecules blurs the quantum nature of chemistry. In an ultracold regime, however, this thermal motion is stilled, revealing chemical interactions as quantum interference processes between matter waves. Remarkable phenomena have been seen in ultracold atomic gases, such as the creation of Bose–Einstein condensates, in which atoms all enter the quantum ground state of a trap, allowing a macroscopic view of their quantum wavefunction. Wolfgang Ketterle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose group performed the new research, shared the 2001 physics Nobel prize for the creation of this condensate.

Cooling molecules to the ground state of a trap is much trickier than cooling atoms because they can contain thermal energy in so many internal degrees of freedom, and was only achieved by Jun Ye of JILA in the US and colleagues recently.2 In 2020, Ye’s group applied an electric field to potassium–rubidium molecules, which decay into diatomic potassium and rubidium molecules. The researchers showed that, at a specific field, the molecules were excited into states forbidden by quantum mechanics and could get close enough to react. This drastically slowed the decay rate. ‘For our system, we typically think that, if the two molecules get very close together, there is close to a 100% chance that they will undergo a chemical reaction,’ explains Kyle Matsuda, Ye’s PhD student and the 2020 paper’s lead author.

The Association For Low LDL With An Increased CVD Mortality Risk Is Impacted

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Papers referenced in the video:
Association between low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and cardiovascular mortality in statin non-users: a prospective cohort study in 14.9 million Korean adults.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35218344/

Relationship between serum non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and incidence of cardiovascular disease.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21176640/

Non-HDL cholesterol paradox and effect of underlying malnutrition in patients with coronary artery disease: A 41,182 cohort study.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35168005/

Age and sex variation in serum albumin concentration: an observational study.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26071488/

Commonly used clinical chemistry tests as mortality predictors: Results from two large cohort studies.

Continue reading “The Association For Low LDL With An Increased CVD Mortality Risk Is Impacted” | >

New tool allows unprecedented modeling of magnetic nanoparticles

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new computational tool that allows users to conduct simulations of multi-functional magnetic nanoparticles in unprecedented detail. The advance paves the way for new work aimed at developing magnetic nanoparticles for use in applications from drug delivery to sensor technologies.

“Self-assembling , or MNPs, have a lot of desirable properties,” says Yaroslava Yingling, corresponding author of a paper on the work and a Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State. “But it has been challenging to study them, because computational models have struggled to account for all of the forces that can influence these materials. MNPs are subject to a complicated interplay between external magnetic fields and van der Waals, electrostatic, dipolar, steric, and .”

Many applications of MNPs require an understanding of how the nanoparticles will behave in complex environments, such as using MNPs to deliver a specific protein or drug molecule to a targeted cancer affected cell using external magnetic fields. In these cases, it is important to be able to accurately model how MNPs will respond to different chemical environments. Previous computational modeling techniques that looked at MNPs were unable to account for all of the chemical interactions MNPs experience in a given colloidal or biological environment, instead focusing primarily on physical interactions.

Synthetic synapses get more like a real brain

The human brain, fed on just the calorie input of a modest diet, easily outperforms state-of-the-art supercomputers powered by full-scale station energy inputs. The difference stems from the multiple states of brain processes versus the two binary states of digital processors, as well as the ability to store information without power consumption—non-volatile memory. These inefficiencies in today’s conventional computers have prompted great interest in developing synthetic synapses for use in computers that can mimic the way the brain works. Now, researchers at King’s College London, UK, report in ACS Nano Letters an array of nanorod devices that mimic the brain more closely than ever before. The devices may find applications in artificial neural networks.

Efforts to emulate biological synapses have revolved around types of memristors with different resistance states that act like memory. However, unlike the the devices reported so far have all needed a reverse polarity to reset them to the initial state. “In the brain a change in the changes the output,” explains Anatoly Zayats, a professor at King’s College London who led the team behind the recent results. The King’s College London researchers have now been able to demonstrate this brain-like behavior in their synaptic synapses as well.

Zayats and team build an array of gold nanorods topped with a polymer junction (poly-L-histidine, PLH) to a metal contact. Either light or an electrical voltage can excite plasmons—collective oscillations of electrons. The plasmons release hot electrons into the PLH, gradually changing the chemistry of the polymer, and hence changing it to have different levels of conductivity or light emissivity. How the polymer changes depends on whether oxygen or hydrogen surrounds it. A chemically inert nitrogen chemical environment will preserve the state without any energy input required so that it acts as non-volatile memory.

Smaller than ever—exploring the unusual properties of quantum-sized materials

The development of functional nanomaterials has been a major landmark in the history of materials science. Nanoparticles with diameters ranging from 5 to 500 nm have unprecedented properties, such as high catalytic activity, compared to their bulk material counterparts. Moreover, as particles become smaller, exotic quantum phenomena become more prominent. This has enabled scientists to produce materials and devices with characteristics that had been only dreamed of, especially in the fields of electronics, catalysis, and optics.

But what if we go smaller? Sub-nanoparticles (SNPs) with particle sizes of around 1 nm are now considered a new class of materials with distinct properties due to the predominance of quantum effects. The untapped potential of SNPs caught the attention of scientists from Tokyo Tech, who are currently undertaking the challenges arising in this mostly unexplored field. In a recent study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team of scientists from the Laboratory of Chemistry and Life Sciences, led by Dr. Takamasa Tsukamoto, demonstrated a novel molecular screening approach to find promising SNPs.

As one would expect, the synthesis of SNPs is plagued by technical difficulties, even more so for those containing multiple elements. Dr. Tsukamoto explains: “Even SNPs containing just two different elements have barely been investigated because producing a system of subnanometer scale requires fine control of the composition ratio and particle size with atomic precision.” However, this team of scientists had already developed a novel method by which SNPs could be made from different metal salts with extreme control over the total number of atoms and the proportion of each element.