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Category: engineering – Page 4

Plant polymer lignin shows promise for future bone regeneration

A new study reveals that lignin — a natural plant polymer — can be transformed into a bioactive material that promotes the formation of bone-like minerals while supporting the growth of bone-forming cells. Inspired by the natural partnership between lignin and silica in plants, the research offers a promising step toward sustainable, plant-based materials for future bone regeneration therapies.

A naturally abundant plant material best known for giving trees and crops their strength may one day help repair broken bones, according to a new study led by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Srinath Palakurthy and Prof. Rivka Elbaum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The research demonstrates that lignin — a major structural component of plants — can be engineered into a bioactive material that encourages the formation of hydroxyapatite, the mineral that gives human bones and teeth their strength.

Published in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, the study offers a promising step toward more sustainable, plant-based alternatives to current bone graft materials, many of which are derived from animals or synthetic sources. Such materials are increasingly sought after as researchers work to develop safer, more environmentally friendly solutions for repairing damaged bone.

Physicists capture first direct evidence of a Floquet topological state

A new study published in Nature Physics reports the first direct experimental evidence of a Floquet topological state, a novel light-induced phase of matter that, until now, has existed only on paper and in simulations. Topological insulators can conduct electricity along their surface while remaining insulating throughout their bulk. Physicists have spent years developing Floquet engineering, a technique that uses intense, rapidly oscillating light fields to temporarily reshape a material’s electronic structure.

Combining the two ideas seemed like a natural next step: use light to coax an otherwise ordinary material into behaving like a topological insulator on demand. A scheme for realizing such a “Floquet topological insulator” in a semiconductor was proposed in 2011, but pinning down the effect experimentally proved elusive. The predicted state would be short-lived, easy to mistake for other light-matter effects and difficult to disentangle from a material’s ordinary electronic behavior.

Now, researchers have closed that gap using tin telluride (SnTe), a semiconductor that sits close to a topological phase transition. Using femtosecond laser pulses, the team captured direct evidence of the transition.

Membrane nanostructures reshape in water, revealing route to better ion transport

Next-generation energy devices like fuel cells and water electrolyzers depend on ion-exchange membranes that allow only water and certain ions to pass through.

The design of these membranes affects how efficient these devices can be. Understanding how the materials used in them influence their performance is key to advancing these technologies.

At the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), researchers collaborated with scientists at New York University to study the backbone chemistry of different types of ion-exchange membranes to better understand how their chemical makeup governs their structure and performance.

CarbonationEmpowered Offshore Deep Cement Mixing Enables Undredged Land

A new study in Communications Engineering reports a construction strategy that could change how offshore reclaimed land is stabilized—using carbonation to strengthen deep cement mixing from microscopic reactions to full in-situ performance.

Conventional deep cement mixing relies on mechanically blending cement and soil, but its long-term durability in waterlogged, newly dredged environments remains a challenge. The researchers propose mixing: a process that uses carbon dioxide to drive mineral formation within the cemented soil matrix, improving both strength and stability.

At the micro-scale, carbonation converts reactive components in the cement into carbonate minerals. This reaction can refine the pore structure, reduce permeability, and bind loose particles more effectively than ordinary curing alone. In practical terms, the cement-soil composite becomes less vulnerable to water ingress and chemical attack.

World’s first ‘zinc oxide spin qubit’ could advance scalable quantum devices

A research team led by SKKU professor Hosung Seo of the Department of Quantum Information Engineering and the SKKU Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology, working with the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Washington, has identified—for the first time—an atomic defect structure in the zinc oxide (ZnO) semiconductor with outstanding properties for use as a “spin qubit,” a core building block of future quantum computers, quantum communications and quantum sensors.

The results are published in PRX Quantum.

Electron spins trapped at point defects in solid-state crystals can operate at room temperature and retain quantum information for long periods, making them a leading platform not only for quantum computing but also for quantum communications and ultrasensitive quantum sensing. The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has been the most prominent candidate, but diamond is difficult to grow into large-area, high-quality crystals and is poorly suited to standard semiconductor fabrication, posing major obstacles to the integration and mass production of quantum devices.

Rotating metamaterial units could enable long-range wave control beyond conventional limits

A Seoul National University College of Engineering research team, led by Professor Joo Hwan Oh of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in collaboration with Dr. Myung Hwan Bae of the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS), has developed a new elastic metamaterial platform that enables the free design of how externally applied forces and vibrations propagate.

The team proposed a design principle that allows nonlocal metamaterials—in which forces or vibrations applied in one region can interact not only with adjacent areas but also with distant regions—to be more easily extended into diverse structural configurations.

They demonstrated experimentally that this design overcomes the longstanding issue of interference among multiple vibrations in conventional nonlocal metamaterials, enabling more precise control of the propagation and motion of elastic waves.

Molecular clock transitions tune out the noise in the hunt for new physics

Heavy polar molecules are some of the most sensitive tools physicists have for probing what lies beyond the Standard Model, the theory that describes the particles and forces we know about. But turning that sensitivity into precise, trustworthy measurements has long been held back by one stubborn problem: Stray electric and magnetic fields drown out the tiny signals researchers are actually looking for.

In new research published in Physical Review X, a team led by Yuiki Takahashi at the California Institute of Technology has found a way around this, engineering molecular states that can consistently tune out this electromagnetic noise.

Detecting the body’s magnetic fields with a low-power Ramsey-based magnetometer

Our bodies generate extremely weak magnetic fields as electric currents flow through the heart, brain and other tissues. These signals are used in magnetocardiography and magnetoencephalography to assess heart function and brain activity, respectively. These fields can be detected at room temperature using diamond sensors containing nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers, in which a carbon atom is replaced by a nitrogen atom adjacent to an empty lattice site.

However, conventional NV-center sensors typically require watt-level lasers to detect the extremely weak biomagnetic fields, which are usually below the picotesla level. These high-power lasers generate significant heat, limiting how close the sensor can be placed to biological tissue. Since biomagnetic fields rapidly weaken with distance, overcoming thermal and close-proximity challenges is essential for practical biomagnetic sensing.

A research team led by Professor Takayuki Iwasaki from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, School of Engineering, Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan, has developed a diamond quantum magnetometer using a low-power laser of just 210 mW, a light-trapping diamond waveguide and a compact microwave antenna. The new sensor limits its temperature rise to only 13 K while allowing it to be placed just 2 mm (0.08 inches) from the sample, enabling close-proximity biomagnetic measurements without compromising thermal safety.

From quantum error correction to emergent gravity: Probing holographic universes at QLab

One of the deepest ambitions in modern physics is understanding how the fabric of space and time could emerge from fundamental quantum degrees of freedom to establish a quantum theory of gravity.

In the new paper, “Observation of gravity-like signatures in holographic codes on a quantum computer,” posted to the arXiv preprint server, researchers from the National Quantum Laboratory (QLab@UMD), the Duke Quantum Center, the Virginia Tech Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering, Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, IonQ and BlueQubit have successfully simulated toy models of quantum gravity according to the AdS/CFT correspondence. The team, led by Crystal Noel and Charles Cao, includes quantum-computation pioneers John Preskill and Christopher Monroe.

Using the IonQ Forte ion-trap quantum computer, the study implements the intriguing HaPPY quantum error-correction code, which forms a bridge between quantum computing and quantum gravity. This code simulates a highly simplified model of a universe with a negative cosmological constant that features a so-called bulk-boundary correspondence, in which the properties of a higher-dimensional gravitational universe (bulk) are completely determined by a lower-dimensional quantum system without gravity living on the boundary. The team successfully demonstrated fundamental entanglement properties of these systems.

Scientists Find a More Precise Way to Grow Artificial Blood Vessels, Using Magnets

Science may one day give us a way to replace damaged and diseased parts of the body with artificial replacements – but reproducing organs and tissues in the lab isn’t easy.

That’s especially true for networks of blood vessels, which at the level of fine, thread-like capillaries are microscopic – these capillaries can be as small as 0.005 millimeters (34 times thinner than a human hair), and only let blood cells through in single file.

Researchers led by a team from MIT have now published a study in PNAS that details a way of engineering blood vessels in the lab with significantly greater precision than before.

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