New battery cells developed by Australia’s Graphene Manufacturing Group and the University of Queensland are said to charge up to 70 times faster than lithium-ion cells and have triple the battery life.
Atomically thin materials are a promising alternative to silicon-based transistors; now researchers can connect them more efficiently to other chip elements.
Moore’s Law, the famous prediction that the number of transistors that can be packed onto a microchip will double every couple of years, has been bumping into basic physical limits. These limits could bring decades of progress to a halt, unless new approaches are found.
One new direction being explored is the use of atomically thin materials instead of silicon as the basis for new transistors, but connecting those “2D” materials to other conventional electronic components has proved difficult.
The Duke team tested the nanoparticle vaccine by injecting it into macaque monkeys, finding that it provides total protection against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Additionally, the vaccine created antibodies against SARS, bat coronaviruses and the more contagious variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.
May 17—Duke University researchers are developing a vaccine that could provide protection against multiple kinds of coronaviruses, according to a study published last week in Nature, a leading scientific journal. The vaccine, which was developed at Duke’s Human Vaccine Institute, uses nanoparticles to show the immune system 24 copies of a specific part of the virus’ spike protein that attaches to human cells. An additional substance promotes the creation of antibodies that attack that part of the virus.
Influenza, commonly known as the flu virus, places a substantial burden on public health in the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that influenza has resulted in about 9 million to 45 million diseases, 140000 to 810000 hospitalizations, and 12000 to 61000 deaths each year over the past decade.
Though flu vaccines are readily available to the public, they need to be remodeled and administered every year to combat new viral variants, which can undermine vaccine efficacy. Because of this, scientists have aimed to develop a universal vaccine that can protect against all influenza strains, and that can last for many years.
Now, researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) developed a universal flu vaccine candidate using small particles (nanoparticles), which can induce a long-lasting immune response.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in turning specially prepared graphene flakes either into insulators or into superconductors by applying an electric voltage. This technique even works locally, meaning that in the same graphene flake regions with completely different physical properties can be realized side by side.
The production of modern electronic components requires materials with very diverse properties. There are isolators, for instance, which do not conduct electric current, and superconductors which transport it without any losses. To obtain a particular functionality of a component one usually has to join several such materials together. Often that is not easy, in particular when dealing with nanostructures that are in widespread use today.
A team of researchers at ETH Zurich led by Klaus Ensslin and Thomas Ihn at the Laboratory for Solid State Physics have now succeeded in making a material behave alternately as an insulator or as a superconductor – or even as both at different locations in the same material – by simply applying an electric voltage. Their results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology. The work was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research QSIT (Quantum Science and Technology).
Transitioning from fossil fuels to a clean hydrogen economy will require cheaper and more efficient ways to use renewable sources of electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen.
But a key step in that process, known as the oxygen evolution reaction or OER, has proven to be a bottleneck. Today it’s only about 75% efficient, and the precious metal catalysts used to accelerate the reaction, like platinum and iridium, are rare and expensive.
Now an international team led by scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has developed a suite of advanced tools to break through this bottleneck and improve other energy-related processes, such as finding ways to make lithium-ion batteries charge faster. The research team described their work in Nature today.
In work that could someday turn cell phones into sensors capable of detecting viruses and other minuscule objects, MIT researchers have built a powerful nanoscale flashlight on a chip.
Their approach to designing the tiny light beam on a chip could also be used to create a variety of other nano flashlights with different beam characteristics for different applications. Think of a wide spotlight versus a beam of light focused on a single point.
For many decades, scientists have used light to identify a material by observing how that light interacts with the material. They do so by essentially shining a beam of light on the material, then analyzing that light after it passes through the material. Because all materials interact with light differently, an analysis of the light that passes through the material provides a kind of “fingerprint” for that material. Imagine doing this for several colors — i.e., several wavelengths of light — and capturing the interaction of light with the material for each color. That would lead to a fingerprint that is even more detailed.
Researchers at CRANN (The Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices), and the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin, today announced that a magnetic material developed at the Centre demonstrates the fastest magnetic switching ever recorded.
The team used femtosecond laser systems in the Photonics Research Laboratory at CRANN to switch and then re-switch the magnetic orientation of their material in trillionths of a second, six times faster than the previous record, and a hundred times faster than the clock speed of a personal computer.
This discovery demonstrates the potential of the material for a new generation of energy efficient ultra-fast computers and data storage systems.
In a feat worthy of a laboratory conceived by J.K. Rowling, MIT researchers and colleagues have turned a “magic” material composed of atomically thin layers of carbon into three useful electronic devices. Normally, such devices, all key to the quantum electronics industry, are created using a variety of materials that require multiple fabrication steps. The MIT approach automatically solves a variety of problems associated with those more complicated processes.
As a result, the work could usher in a new generation of quantum electronic devices for applications including quantum computing. Further, the devices can be superconducting, or conduct electricity without resistance. They do so, however, through an unconventional mechanism that, with further study, could give new insights into the physics of superconductivity. The researchers report their results in the May 3, 2021 issue of Nature Nanotechnology.
“In this work we have demonstrated that magic angle graphene is the most versatile of all superconducting materials, allowing us to realize in a single system a multitude of quantum electronic devices. Using this advanced platform, we have been able to explore for the first time novel superconducting physics that only appears in two dimensions,” says Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT and leader of the work. Jarillo-Herrero is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory.
Chemical organization in reaction-diffusion systems offer a strategy to generate materials with ordered morphologies and architecture. Periodic structures can be formed using molecules or nanoparticles. An emerging frontier in materials science aims to combine nanoparticles and molecules. In a new report on Science Advances, Amanda J. Ackroyd and a team of scientists in chemistry, physics and nanomaterials in Canada, Hungary and the U.S. noted how solvent evaporation from a suspension of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) and L-(+)-tartaric acid [abbreviated L-(+)-TA] caused the phase separation of precipitation to result in the rhythmic alteration of CNC-rich, L-(+)-TA rings. The CNC-rich regions maintained a cholesteric structure, while the L-(+)-TA-rich bands formed via radially elongated bundles to expand the knowledge of self-organizing reaction-diffusion systems and offer a strategy to design self-organizing materials.
Chemical organization
The process of self-organization and self-assembly occurs universally in non-equilibrium systems of living matter, geochemical environments, materials science and in industry. Existing experiments that lead to periodic structures can be divided into two groups including the classical Liesegang-type experiments and chemical organization via periodic precipitation to generate materials with ordered morphologies and structural hierarchy. In this work, Ackroyd et al. developed a strategy for solvent evaporation to phase separate an aqueous solution of tartaric acid/cellulose nanocrystals [L-(+)-TA/CNC or TA/CNC] for its subsequent precipitation to result in a rhythmic alternation of CNC-rich or CNC-depleted ring-type regions. The team developed a kinetic model which agreed with the experimental results quantitatively. The work expands the range of self-organizing reaction-diffusion systems to pave the way for periodically structured functional materials.
