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Category: nanotechnology

Using Moon Regolith to Build Lunar Habitats

“Our results show that you can take a material that is inherently challenging and convert it into something structurally beneficial,” said Dr. Denizhan Yavas. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30488/using-moon-reg…habitats-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30488/using-moon-reg…habitats-2)

How can lunar dust (officially called regolith) be used to build future habitats on the Moon? This is what a recent study published in Advanced Engineering Materials hopes to address as a pair of researchers investigated how a novel technique for how lunar regolith could strengthen advanced composite materials. This study has the potential to help reduce the cost of shipping building materials to the Moon for future habitats by using available resources.

For the study, the researchers used lunar regolith simulant, a common substitute for lunar regolith since the latter is in low supply, to examine whether it could be used as a reinforcer for a common aerospace building material called polymer composites. The motivation for this study came from previous lunar regolith research that explored repelling lunar dust using nanoscale polymer surfaces. This is because lunar dust is highly abrasive, as the Apollo astronauts found out, and repelling it could prove beneficial for future astronauts.

Now, the researchers aspired to exploit this abrasiveness to their benefit for developing next generation building material on the Moon. In the end, the researchers found the lunar regolith simulant strengthened both the impact resistance and toughness of the polymers between 30 to 40 percent. Both attributes will be crucial to maintaining lunar habitats due to the Moon’s much harsher environment than Earth, specifically regarding micrometeorite strikes and solar radiation.

Extreme stability in ultrafast nanomagnetism aids the development of faster data storage

For the first time, researchers have mapped how the boundaries of magnetic nanostructures behave on extremely short timescales. The work of physicist Johan Mentink of Radboud University shows that these boundaries are much more stable than previously thought. This insight will aid the development of future ultra-fast and compact data storage.

Every magnet consists of tiny magnets, known as spins. When a material is magnetic, these spins all point in the same direction. Using ultra-short laser pulses, the spins in magnetic materials can change direction in a very short time. This so-called ultrafast nanomagnetism is important for, for example, hard drives, on which information is stored using magnetic bits. To make this storage faster and smaller, it is essential to understand exactly what happens at the nanoscale.

Using a new imaging technique capable of tracking processes down to the nanometer and femtosecond scale, Mentink and colleagues have researched the behavior of domain boundaries—thin walls of about 1 nanometer that separate magnetic domains. Multiple spins pointing in the same direction form a domain.

Engineered internal architecture of core-shell lipid nanoparticles promotes efficient mRNA endosomal release

Li et al. show that putting gold nanoparticles inside of LNPs causes marked improvements in endosomal escape efficiency, describe a likely mechanism, and test their complexes with two therapeutic contexts in mice. A simple innovation which could greatly enhance LNP delivery!

Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs) effectively deliver mRNA to cells but suffer have low levels of endosomal release. Here the authors report on core-shell LNPs with ionizable lipid–coated gold nanoparticle cores with enhanced pH-responsive membrane disruption, endosomal escape, and cytosolic mRNA delivery improving therapeutic efficiency.

Carbon nanotubes are closing the gap on copper conductivity

Carbon nanotubes are one technology that many observers believe hasn’t quite lived up to the extreme hype that surrounded them when they first appeared on the scene in the late 1990s. At that time, much was made of their extraordinary electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties, with predictions that they would revolutionize materials science, electronics, and daily life. But could we be closer to realizing some of that promise?

In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers describe a method for adding a chemical to carbon nanotube bundles that brings them closer to copper’s ability to conduct electricity.

Carbon nanotubes are nanoscale hollow cylinders of carbon atoms, a structure that allows electricity to flow through them with very low resistance. However, when you bundle millions of them together, as you would need for practical applications like power lines and electrical wiring, they lose some of their exceptional conductivity. Electrons move easily along individual nanotubes, but transferring charge between neighboring tubes in a bundle is much less efficient.

High-resolution imaging shines light on nanoscale nuclear organization

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have implemented an advanced microscopy technique to visualize multiple biomolecules inside the nucleus of a cancer cell simultaneously at incredibly high resolution. The biomolecules they visualized include critical components of the cell’s transcription machinery and proteins that provide structural support to the nucleus—providing one of the first detailed maps of nuclear organization.

The human body is composed of trillions of cells. Each cell is an intricately organized meshwork of millions of proteins, nucleic acids, and many other molecules vital for the cell’s health. “Building novel technologies to visualize many biomolecules in individual cells is crucial to push the boundaries of biological research,” says Mahipal Ganji, Assistant Professor at the Department of Biochemistry (BC) and corresponding author of the study published in Nature Communications. Conventional imaging techniques, however, allow scientists to visualize only two or three biomolecules in each cell at a time.

In the study, the researchers turned to a microscopy technique called DNA-Points Accumulation for Imaging in Nanoscale Topography (DNA-PAINT), which allows for the visualization of biomolecules inside cells at incredible detail—far beyond the limits of conventional microscopes. It uses small fluorescent DNA fragments or tags that briefly attach to specific targets inside the cell and light up like tiny, blinking signals when a laser beam is shined on them.

Light near surface of ultra-thin optical fibers can sort twisted nanoparticles

Many important objects in the world can be divided into two categories based on their chirality or handedness, including molecules important for life such as amino acids. Such chiral objects (formally defined as objects which are not identical to their mirror images) are often characterized by a structure which twists in a given direction.

An everyday example of a chiral object is a screw. A right-handed screw moves into a material when rotated clockwise, but its mirror image (i.e., a left-handed screw) moves out.

Just as right-and left-handed screws behave differently when turned, chiral particles behave differently when exposed to light with a circular polarization. This fact allows them to be sorted in principle, which is expected to be important for applications such as drug development, where the handedness of a chiral molecule determines how it interacts with biological systems.

How electron structure affects light responses in moiré materials

In materials science, if you can understand the “texture” of a material—how its internal patterns form and shift—you can begin to design how it behaves. That’s the focus of the work of Zhenglu Li, assistant professor in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Li’s recently published paper in PNAS, titled “Moiré excitons in generalized Wigner crystals,” demonstrates that the way electrons organize themselves inside a material determines how that material responds to light—and how this organization can be engineered.

“Moiré” is a word that will be familiar to anyone who follows fashion. In the context of textiles, it refers to a larger-scale interference pattern that appears when two repeating patterns are slightly misaligned. Imagine brushing a swatch of velvet in different directions; the material reveals different properties depending on how it is ruffled.

Likewise, in the context of nanoscale materials science, an independent, shimmering or wavelike pattern is formed when two overlapping atomically thin layers are overlaid at an acute angle. The new pattern, moiré superlattice, changes how electrons move, which can give the material unusual properties.

First direct nanomagnet measurement finds switching attempts far slower than long-assumed

A compass always points north—or does it? Magnets normally maintain a stable direction of magnetization, pointing from south to north (S→N). However, this direction can change under strong magnetic fields or heat. For example, a compass placed near a strong magnet may no longer point in the right direction.

Magnets can also lose their magnetism when exposed to high levels of heat. This isn’t just relevant to wayfinding during your camping trips—if the magnets in hard drives and memory storage devices are affected, it could mean losing all of your precious data.

Researchers at Tohoku University sought to better understand the intricate ways in which this thermally-activated switching occurs in nanomagnets, and successfully measured it experimentally for the very first time. The results are published in Communications Materials.

Scientists invent artificial neurons that ‘talk’ to real brain cells, paving way to better brain implants

Engineers have printed tiny, artificial neurons that can “talk” to mouse brain cells, and the development could pave the way to innovations in computing and medicine.

The work, published April 15 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, adds to a growing field that aims to build computers that mimic the inner workings of the brain.

Quasiparticles reveal a magneto-optical transport phenomenon

Excitons are being explored in materials science and information technology as a means of storing light. These luminous quasiparticles move through individual layers of quantum materials and can absorb and emit light with high efficiency. They form when a laser pulse excites an electron, leaving behind a positively charged “hole.” The electron and hole attract each other and behave together like a new, independent particle. When the quasiparticle recombines, it emits light and can be detected in high-tech laboratories.

Excitons in ultrathin quantum materials have been intensively studied for more than a decade, including by Alexey Chernikov and his team. At the Cluster of Excellence ctd.qmat—Complexity, Topology and Dynamics in Quantum Matter—at the Universities of Würzburg and Dresden, Chernikov and an international research team based in Dresden have now made a surprising discovery: excitons can be carried along by the magnetic excitations of a quantum material and, as a result, accelerated to ultrahigh speeds. The findings are published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“The fact that the motion of optical particles can be controlled by magnetism is new. Until now, we only knew that the transport of electrons could be controlled by the magnetic order in a quantum material—this is how some sensors in smartphones work, for example. This newly discovered link between optics and magnetism could open up entirely new technological possibilities,” explains Florian Dirnberger, head of an Emmy Noether Junior Research Group at the Technical University of Munich and formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Alexey Chernikov’s Chair of Ultrafast Microscopy and Photonics, where he was responsible for carrying out the research project.

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