Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: chemistry – Page 381

Researchers identify the physical mechanism that can kill bacteria with gold nanoparticles

Finding alternatives to antibiotics is one of the biggest challenges facing the research community. Bacteria are increasingly resistant to these drugs, and this resistance leads to the deaths of more than 25,000 around the world. Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, the University of Grenoble (France), the University of Saarland (Germany) and RMIT University (Australia) have discovered that the mechanical deformation of bacteria is a toxic mechanism that can kill bacteria with gold nanoparticles. The results of this research have been published in the journal Advanced Materials and are a breakthrough in researchers’ understanding the antibacterial effects of nanoparticles and their efforts to find new materials with bactericide properties.

Since the times of Ancient Egypt, gold has been used in a range of medical applications and, more recently, as for diagnosing and treating diseases such as cancer. This is due to the fact that gold is a chemically inert material, that is, it does not react or change when it comes into contact with an organism. Amongst the scientific community, nanoparticles are known for their ability to make tumors visible and for their applications in nanomedicine.

This new research shows that these chemically inert nanoparticles can kill thanks to a physical mechanism that deforms the cell wall. To demonstrate this, the researchers have synthesized in the laboratory in the shape of an almost perfect sphere and others in the shape of stars, all measuring 100 nanometres (8 times thinner than a hair). The group analyzed how these particle interact with living bacteria. “We find that the bacteria become deformed and deflate like a ball that is having the air let out before dying in the presence of these nanoparticles,” explained Vladimir Baulin, researcher at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the URV. The researchers state the bacteria seem to have died after a massive leak, “as if the cell wall had spontaneously exploded.”

Reversing Senescence Through The Skin — Dr. Carolina Reis, CEO & Co-Founder, OneSkin Technologies

Dr. Carolina Reis Oliveria, is the CEO and Co-Founder of OneSkin Technologies, a biotechnology platform dedicated to exploring longevity science.

Carolina holds her Ph.D. in Immunology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in collaboration with the Rutgers University, where she conducted research with pluripotent stem cells as a source of retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) cells, as well as the potential of RPE-stem cells derived as toxicological models for screening of new drugs with intra-ocular applications.

She founded a company called CELLSEQ solutions in Brazil which develops tools to revolutionize the safety and toxicology assays performed by pharmaceutical, cosmetic, agro-chemical and food industries, with technology based on stem cells and big data analysis.

She is an alumnus of IndieBio, the world’s leading biotechnology accelerator.

In 2016, Carolina relocated to Silicon Valley from Latin America to co-found OneSkin, and to lead the development of the company’s technologies.

Chemists re-engineer a psychedelic to treat depression and addiction in rodents

“Researchers report today that they’ve created a nontoxic and nonhallucinogenic chemical cousin of ibogaine that combats depression and addictive behaviors in rodents. The work provides new hope that chemists may one day be able to create medicines for people that offer the purported therapeutic benefits of ibogaine and other psychoactive compounds without their side effects.”

Analog of ibogaine could hold hope for humans.

Dr. Yu Shrike Zhang — Symbiotic Tissue Engineering — Harvard Medical School

Dr yu shrike zhang phd is assistant professor at harvard medical school and associate bioengineer at brigham and women’s hospital.

Dr. Zhang’s research interests include symbiotic tissue engineering, 3D bio-printing, organ-on-a-chip technology, biomaterials, regenerative engineering, bioanalysis, nanomedicine, and biology.

His scientific contributions have been recognized by over 40 regional, national and international awards. He has been invited to deliver more than 110 lectures worldwide, and has served as reviewer for more than 500 manuscripts for as many as 50 journals.

Dr. Zhang is serving as Editor-in-Chief for Microphysiological Systems, and is Associate Editor for Bio-Design and Manufacturing, Nano Select, Aggregate, and Essays in Biochemistry.

He is also on the Editorial Board of Biofabrication, Bioprinting, Advanced Healthcare Materials, Discover Materials, BMC Biomedical Engineering, Materials Today Bio, and Chinese Chemical Letters, the Editorial Advisory Board of Heliyon and Biomicrofluidics, the International Advisory Board of Advanced NanoBiomed Research and Advanced Materials Technologies, and the Advisory Panel of Nanotechnology.

Dr. Zhang has his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology / Emory, his M.S. in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, and his B.Eng. in Biomedical Engineering Southeast University in China.

Continue reading “Dr. Yu Shrike Zhang — Symbiotic Tissue Engineering — Harvard Medical School” | >

Tiny water-based robot is powered by light and can walk, move cargo and even dance

A new robot created by researchers at Northwestern University looks and behaves like a tiny aquatic animal, and could serve a variety of functions, including moving things place to place, catalyzing chemical reactions, delivering therapeutics and much more. This new soft robot honestly looks a heck of a lot like a lemon peel, but it’s actually a material made up of 90% water for the soft exterior, with a nickel skeleton inside that can change its shape in response to outside magnetic fields.

These robots are very small — only around the size of a dime — but they’re able to perform a range of tasks, including walking at the same speed as an average human, and picking up and carrying things. They work by either taking in or expelling water through their soft components, and can respond to light and magnetic fields thanks to their precise molecular design. Essentially, their molecular structure is crafted such that when they’re hit by light, the molecules that make them up expel water, causing the robot’s “legs” to stiffen like muscles.

Aquatic robot inspired by sea creatures walks, rolls, transports cargo

Northwestern University researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind life-like material that acts as a soft robot. It can walk at human speed, pick up and transport cargo to a new location, climb up hills and even break-dance to release a particle.

Nearly 90% water by weight, the centimeter-sized moves without complex hardware, hydraulics or electricity. Instead, it is activated by light and walks in the direction of an external rotating .

Resembling a four-legged octopus, the robot functions inside a water-filled tank, making it ideal for use in aquatic environments. The researchers imagine customizing the movements of miniature robots to help catalyze different chemical reactions and then pump out the valuable products. The robots also could be molecularly designed to recognize and actively remove unwanted particles in specific environments, or to use their mechanical movements and locomotion to precisely deliver bio-therapeutics or cells to specific tissues.

New tools ‘turn on’ quantum gases of ultracold molecules

JILA researchers have developed tools to “turn on” quantum gases of ultracold molecules, gaining control of long-distance molecular interactions for potential applications such as encoding data for quantum computing and simulations.

The new scheme for nudging a down to its lowest energy state, called quantum degeneracy, while suppressing that break up finally makes it possible to explore exotic quantum states in which all the molecules interact with one another.

The research is described in the Dec. 10 issue of Nature. JILA is a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder.

Researchers capture roaming molecular fragments in real time

The observation of a chemical reaction at the molecular level in real time is a central theme in experimental chemical physics. An international research team has captured roaming molecular fragments for the first time. The work, under the supervision of Heide Ibrahim, research associate at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), was published in the journal Science.

The research group of the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre of INRS, with support of Professor François Légaré, has used the Advanced Laser Light Source (ALLS). They have succeeded in shooting the first molecular film of “roamers”—hydrogen fragments, in this case—that orbit around HCO fragments) during a chemical reaction by studying the photo-dissociation of formaldehyde, H2CO.

Researchers develop unique process for producing light-matter mixture

In groundbreaking new research, an international team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has developed a unique process for producing a quantum state that is part light and part matter.

The discovery provides fundamental new insights for more efficiently developing the next generation of quantum-based optical and electronic devices. The research could also have an impact on increasing efficiency of nanoscale chemical reactions.

The research is published in Nature Photonics.

Research group has made a defect-resistant superalloy that can be 3D-printed

In recent years, it has become possible to use laser beams and electron beams to “print” engineering objects with complex shapes that could not be achieved by conventional manufacturing. The additive manufacturing (AM) process, or 3D printing, for metallic materials involves melting and fusing fine-scale powder particles—each about 10 times finer than a grain of beach sand—in sub-millimeter-scale “pools” created by focusing a laser or electron beam on the material.

“The highly focused beams provide exquisite control, enabling ‘tuning’ of properties in critical locations of the printed object,” said Tresa Pollock, a professor of materials and associate dean of the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. “Unfortunately, many advanced metallic alloys used in extreme heat-intensive and chemically corrosive environments encountered in energy, space and nuclear applications are not compatible with the AM process.”

The challenge of discovering new AM-compatible materials was irresistible for Pollock, a world-renowned scientist who conducts research on advanced metallic materials and coatings. “This was interesting,” she said, “because a suite of highly compatible alloys could transform the production of having high economic value—i.e. materials that are expensive because their constituents are relatively rare within the earth’s crust—by enabling the manufacture of geometrically complex designs with minimal material waste.

/* */