Northeastern University researchers have made a breakthrough drug discovery, developing the first synthetic endogenous cannabinoid compound, with repercussions for new therapeutics from pain and inflammation to cancer.
Spyros P. Nikas, an associate research professor in Northeastern’s Center for Drug Discovery, says that the discovery hinges on the distinction between two different kinds of cannabinoid chemicals, endogenous and exogenous. Exogenous cannabinoids are those produced outside the human body, like THC or CBD, both derived from the cannabis plant and present in marijuana.
Our own bodies, however, are also producing cannabinoids all the time. Called endogenous cannabinoids —or just “endocannabinoids”—these chemicals “modulate a wide range of physiological and pathophysiological responses,” Nikas says, processes that include mood, inflammation and even neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The research is published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
Researchers in the US have used quantum chemistry to explain why ozone catalysts degrade during water electrolysis.
A new computational approach developed at the University of Chicago promises to shed light on some of the world’s most puzzling materials—from high-temperature superconductors to solar cell semiconductors—by uniting two long-divided scientific perspectives.
“For decades, chemists and physicists have used very different lenses to look at materials. What we’ve done now is create a rigorous way to bring those perspectives together,” said senior author Laura Gagliardi, Richard and Kathy Leventhal Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. “This gives us a new toolkit to understand and eventually design materials with extraordinary properties.”
When it comes to solids, physicists usually think in terms of broad, repeating band structures, while chemists focus on the local behavior of electrons in specific molecules or fragments. But many important materials—such as organic semiconductors, metal–organic frameworks, and strongly correlated oxides—don’t fit neatly into either picture. In these materials, electrons are often thought of as hopping between repeating fragments rather than being distributed across the material.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have optimized and 3D-printed helix structures as optical materials for terahertz (THz) frequencies, a potential way to address a technology gap for next-generation telecommunications, non-destructive evaluation, chemical/biological sensing and more.
The printed microscale helices reliably create circularly polarized beams in the THz range and, when arranged in patterned arrays, can function as a new type of Quick Response (QR) for advanced encryption/decryption. Their results, published in Advanced Science, represent the first full parametric analysis of helical structures for THz frequencies and show the potential of 3D printing for fabricating THz devices.
Liquids and solutions are complex environments—think, for example, of sugar dissolving in water, where each sugar molecule becomes surrounded by a restless crowd of water molecules. Inside living cells, the picture is even more complex: tiny liquid droplets carry proteins or RNA and help organize the cell’s chemistry.
Despite their importance, liquid environments are notoriously difficult to study at the level of individual molecules and electrons. The core challenge is that liquids lack a fixed structure, and the ultrafast interactions between solute and solvent—where chemistry actually happens—have remained largely invisible to scientists.
For the new study, the researchers used samples from the brains of normal mice as well as living cortical brain tissue sampled with permission from six individuals undergoing surgical treatment for epilepsy. The surgical procedures were medically necessary to remove lesions from the brain’s hippocampus.
The researchers first validated the zap-and-freeze approach by observing calcium signaling, a process that triggers neurons to release neurotransmitters in living mouse brain tissues.
Next, the scientists stimulated neurons in mouse brain tissue with the zap-and-freeze approach and observed where synaptic vesicles fuse with brain cell membranes and then release chemicals called neurotransmitters that reach other brain cells. The scientists then observed how mouse brain cells recycle synaptic vesicles after they are used for neuronal communication, a process known as endocytosis that allows material to be taken up by neurons.
The researchers then applied the zap-and-freeze technique to brain tissue samples from people with epilepsy, and observed the same synaptic vesicle recycling pathway operating in human neurons.
In both mouse and human brain samples, the protein Dynamin1xA, which is essential for ultrafast synaptic membrane recycling, was present where endocytosis is thought to occur on the membrane of the synapse.
“Our findings indicate that the molecular mechanism of ultrafast endocytosis is conserved between mice and human brain tissues,” the author says, suggesting that the investigations in these models are valuable for understanding human biology.
Quantum computers will need large numbers of qubits to tackle challenging problems in physics, chemistry, and beyond. Unlike classical bits, qubits can exist in two states at once—a phenomenon called superposition. This quirk of quantum physics gives quantum computers the potential to perform certain complex calculations better than their classical counterparts, but it also means the qubits are fragile. To compensate, researchers are building quantum computers with extra, redundant qubits to correct any errors. That is why robust quantum computers will require hundreds of thousands of qubits.
Now, in a step toward this vision, Caltech physicists have created the largest qubit array ever assembled: 6,100 neutral-atom qubits trapped in a grid by lasers. Previous arrays of this kind contained only hundreds of qubits.
This milestone comes amid a rapidly growing race to scale up quantum computers. There are several approaches in development, including those based on superconducting circuits, trapped ions, and neutral atoms, as used in the new study.
The neutral-atom platform shows promise for scaling up quantum computers.