A new polymer could one day deliver insulin without needles. Researchers have designed a material that slips through skin and ferries insulin into the bloodstream.
Here’s how it works.
New material slips past skin and ferries insulin into the bloodstream by Ananya Palivela.
MIT engineers designed an ultrasonic system to “shake” water out of an atmospheric water harvester.
MIT researchers designed a device that quickly recovers drinking water from an atmospheric water harvesting material. The system uses ultrasonic waves to shake the water out of the material, recovering water in minutes.
A novel magnetic material with an extraordinary electronic structure might allow for the production of smaller and more efficient computer chips in the future: the p-wave magnet. Researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) were involved in its development.
The magnetic behavior in the interior of this material results from the way the electron spins arrange themselves—in the shape of a helix. Therefore, the electric current flowing through is deflected laterally. The results are published in Nature.
Magnetism, as we experience it every day, makes us usually think of materials such as iron, nickel, or cobalt that generate permanent magnetic fields or are attracted by magnetic forces. In these ferromagnetic materials, the spins, i.e. the moments of all electrons, move in the same direction.
Background/Objectives: Radiomic features exhibit a correlation with tumor size on pretreatment images. However, on post-treatment images, this association is influenced by treatment efficacy and varies between responders and non-responders. This study introduces a novel model, called baseline-referenced Delta radiomics, which integrates the association between radiomic features and tumor size into Delta radiomics to predict chemotherapy response in liver metastases from breast cancer (BC) and colorectal cancer (CRC). Materials and Methods: A retrospective study analyzed contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) scans of 83 BC patients and 84 CRC patients. Among these, 57 BC patients with 106 liver lesions and 37 CRC patients with 109 lesions underwent post-treatment imaging after systemic chemotherapy. Radiomic features were extracted from up to three lesions per patient following manual segmentation. Tumor response was assessed by measuring the longest diameter and classified according to RECIST 1.1 criteria as progressive disease (PD), partial response (PR), or stable disease (SD). Classification models were developed to predict chemotherapy response using pretreatment data only, Delta radiomics, and baseline-referenced Delta radiomics. Model performance was evaluated using confusion matrix metrics. Results: Baseline-referenced Delta radiomics performed comparably or better than established radiomics models in predicting tumor response in chemotherapy-treated patients with liver metastases. The sensitivity, specificity, and balanced accuracy in predicting response ranged from 0.66 to 0.97, 0.81 to 0.97, and 80% to 90%, respectively. Conclusions: By integrating the relationship between radiomic features and tumor size into Delta radiomics, baseline-referenced Delta radiomics offers a promising approach for predicting chemotherapy response in liver metastases from breast and colorectal cancer.
New research shows that the magnetic part of light actively shapes how light interacts with matter, challenging a 180-year-old belief.
The team demonstrated that this magnetic component significantly contributes to the Faraday Effect, even accounting for up to 70% of the rotation in the infrared range. By proving that light can magnetically torque materials, the findings open unexpected pathways for advanced optical and magnetic technologies.
Revealing Light’s Hidden Magnetic Power
This study investigates CaCu3−xSrxTi4O12 (CCSTO) systems synthesized using the solid-state method, with x compositions of 0.00, 0.15, and 3.00. The samples were modified using 6 wt% graphene oxide (GO) and reduced GO (rGO) prepared via Hummer’s method to evaluate their performance as electrodes in supercapacitors. The results indicate that the addition of 6wt% rGO to CCTO (CCTO-6rGO) led to an improvement in specific capacitance, reaching 237.76 mF·g−1 at a scan rate of 10 mV/s, compared to 29.86 mF·g−1 for pure CCTO and only 7.83 mF·g−1 for CCTO-6GO, suggesting that rGO enhances charge storage. For the CCTO15Sr samples, CCTO15Sr-6rGO exhibited the highest specific capacitance, with 321.63 mF·g−1 at 10 mV/s, surpassing both pure CCTO15Sr (80.19 mF·g−1) and CCTO15Sr-6GO (25.73 mF·g−1). These results stem from oxygen and metal vacancies, which aid charge accumulation and ion diffusion.
Some 200 light years from Earth, the core of a dead star is circling a larger star in a macabre cosmic dance. The dead star is a type of white dwarf that exerts a powerful magnetic field as it pulls material from the larger star into a swirling, accreting disk. The spiraling pair is what’s known as an “intermediate polar” — a type of star system that gives off a complex pattern of intense radiation, including X-rays, as gas from the larger star falls onto the other one.
Now, MIT astronomers have used an X-ray telescope in space to identify key features in the system’s innermost region — an extremely energetic environment that has been inaccessible to most telescopes until now. In an open-access study published in the Astrophysical Journal, the team reports using NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) to observe the intermediate polar, known as EX Hydrae.
The team found a surprisingly high degree of X-ray polarization, which describes the direction of an X-ray wave’s electric field, as well as an unexpected direction of polarization in the X-rays coming from EX Hydrae. From these measurements, the researchers traced the X-rays back to their source in the system’s innermost region, close to the surface of the white dwarf.
Two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) ferromagnets are thin and magnetic materials in which molecules or layers are held together by weak attractive forces known as vdW forces. These materials have proved to be promising for the development of spintronic devices, systems that operate leveraging the spin (i.e., intrinsic angular momentum) of electrons, as opposed to electric charge.
A crucial parameter in the context of magnetization is the so-called Gilbert damping coefficient, which indicates how quickly a material’s magnetization loses energy and returns to a state of equilibrium after being disturbed. A lower damping coefficient is more favorable for the development of spintronics, as it means that less energy is lost once a material’s magnetization is set into motion.
Researchers at Beijing Normal University, Shanghai University and Fudan University carried out a study aimed at better understanding the underpinnings of low Gilbert damping in 2D vdW ferromagnets.