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Category: nanotechnology – Page 182

A joint research team from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and the University of Tokyo discovered an unusual topological aspect of sodium chloride, commonly known as table salt, which will not only facilitate the understanding of the mechanism behind salt’s dissolution and formation, but may also pave the way for the future design of nanoscale conducting quantum wires.

There is a whole variety of advanced materials in our daily life, and many gadgets and technology are created through the assembly of different materials. Cellphones, for example, adopted a combination of many different substances—glass for the monitor, aluminum alloy for the frame, and metals like gold, silver and copper for their internal wiring. But nature has its own genius way of ‘cooking’ different properties into one wonder material, or what is known as ‘topological material’.

Topology, as a mathematical concept, studies what aspects of an object are robust under a smooth deformation. For instance, we can squeeze, stretch, or twist a T-shirt, but the number its openings would still be four so long as we do not tear it apart. The discovery of topological phases of matter, highlighted by the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, suggests that certain quantum materials are inherently a combination of electrical insulators and conductors. This could necessitate a conducting boundary even when the bulk of the material is insulating. Such materials are neither classified as a metal nor an insulator, but a natural assembly of the two.

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Drilling with the beam of an electron microscope, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory precisely machined tiny electrically conductive cubes that can interact with light and organized them in patterned structures that confine and relay light’s electromagnetic signal. This demonstration is a step toward potentially faster computer chips and more perceptive sensors.

The seeming wizardry of these structures comes from the ability of their surfaces to support collective waves of electrons, called plasmons, with the same frequency as but with much tighter confinement. The light-guiding structures are measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter—100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

“These nanoscale cube systems allow extreme confinement of light in specific locations and tunable control of its energy,” said ORNL’s Kevin Roccapriore, first author of a study published in the journal Small. “It’s a way to connect signals with very different length scales.”

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A newly created nano-architected material exhibits a property that previously was just theoretically possible: it can refract light backward, regardless of the angle at which the light strikes the material.

This property is known as negative refraction and it means that the refractive index—the speed that light can travel through a given material—is negative across a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum at all angles.

Refraction is a common property in materials; think of the way a straw in a glass of water appears shifted to the side, or the way lenses in eyeglasses focus light. But negative refraction does not just involve shifting light a few degrees to one side. Rather, the light is sent in an angle completely opposite from the one at which it entered the material. This has not been observed in nature but, beginning in the 1960s, was theorized to occur in so-called artificially periodic materials—that is, materials constructed to have a specific structural pattern. Only now have fabrication processes have caught up to theory to make a reality.

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FeaturedRead our 3 books at https://lifeboat.com/ex/books.

The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards the Singularity.

Lifeboat Foundation is pursuing a variety of options, including helping to accelerate the development of technologies to defend humanity, such as new methods to combat viruses, effective nanotechnological defensive strategies, and even self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.

We believe that, in some situations, it might be feasible to relinquish technological capacity in the public interest (for example, we are against the U.S. government posting the recipe for the 1918 flu virus on the internet). We have some of the best minds on the planet working on programs to enable our survival. We invite you to join our cause!

Visit our site at https://lifeboat.com. Participate in our programs at https://lifeboat.com/ex/programs. Follow our Twitter feed at https://twitter.com/LifeboatHQ and our GETTR feed at https://gettr.com/user/LifeboatHQ. Watch our YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/lifeboathq. Read our blog at https://lifeboat.com/blog. Join our LinkedIn group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/35656. Subscribe to our newsletter at https://lifeboat.com/newsletter.cgi.

Interact with the author of “The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen—and What to Do” at https://www.facebook.com/groups/thehumanracetothefuture.

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If you are a scientist, willing to share your science with curious teens, consider joining Lecturers Without Borders!

Established by three scientists, Luibov Tupikina, Athanasia Nikolau, and Clara Delphin Zemp, and high school teacher Mikhail Khotyakov, Lecturers Without Borders (LeWiBo) is an international volunteer grassroots organization that brings together enthusiastic science researchers and science-minded teens. LeWiBo founders noticed that scientists tend to travel a lot – for fieldwork, conferences, or lecturing – and realized scientists could be a great source of knowledge and inspiration to local schools. To this end, they asked scientists to volunteer for talks and workshops. The first lecture, delivered in Nepal in 2017 by two researchers, a mathematician and a climatologist, was a great success. In the next couple of years, LeWiBo volunteers presented at schools in Russia and Belarus; Indonesia and Uganda; India and Nepal. Then, the pandemic forced everything into the digital realm, bringing together scientists and schools across the globe. I met with two of LeWiBo’s co-founders, physicist Athanasia Nikolaou and math teacher Mikhail Khotyakov, as well as their coordinator, Anastasia Mityagina, to talk about their offerings and future plans.

Julia Brodsky: So, how many people volunteer for LeWiBo at this time?

Anastasia Mityagina: We have over 200 scientists in our database. This year alone, volunteers from India, Mozambique, Argentina, the United States, France, Egypt, Israel, Brazil, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Botswana, Portugal, Croatia, Malaysia, Spain, Colombia, Italy, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Poland, the United Kingdom, Austria, Albania, Iran, Mexico, Russia, and Serbia joined us. Their areas of expertise vary widely, from informatics, education, and entrepreneurship, to physics, chemistry, space and planetary sciences, biotechnology, oceanography, viral ecology, water treatment, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, astrobiology, neuroscience, and sustainability. We collaborate with hundreds of schools, education centers, and science camps for children in different parts of the world. In addition, our network includes more than 50 educational associations in 48 countries that help us reach out to approximately 8,000 schools worldwide.

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The strong new adhesive is the handiwork of scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), who used polystyrene-b-poly(ethylene-co-butylene)-b-polystyrene, or SEBS, as their starting point. This rubbery polymer can be found in toothbrushes, handlebar grips and diapers, and the researchers were able to equip it with powerful new capabilities by making tweaks to its chemical structure.

This was achieved through a process known as dynamic crosslinking, which enables the bridging of typically incompatible materials. The scientists used the technique to couple silica nanoparticles and the polymer with the help of compounds called boronic esters, resulting in a novel crosslinked composite material they’ve called SiNP. The boronic esters are key to the reusability of the adhesive, as they enable the crosslinked bonds to be formed and broken repeatedly.

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Church points to factors that helped make such a success of three of the top COVID-19 vaccine technologies. For one thing, they all used gene therapy technologies, and each was a new method relative to the past and to each other. For instance, the AstraZeneca vaccine was based on an adenovirus capsid containing double-stranded DNA as opposed to an adeno-associated virus (AAV) of the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccine, while the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were based on single-stranded mRNA inside lipid nanoparticles.

“Implementation science is the unsung handmaiden of biomedical discovery!”

Secondly, each of them was approved by the FDA 10 times faster than the vast majority of therapeutic products, and finally, the cost per vaccine has been as low as $2 per dose for the United Nations’ COVAX global access program. That’s about a million times cheaper than Zolgensma, he says, referring to the AAV gene therapy medication used to treat spinal muscular atrophy. So since “any one of these could spark a revolution,” according to Church, imagine what could happen in the next 12 months if all four factors pertain again?

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Researchers from the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the Cnr and the Politecnico di Milano have built a battery which, following the laws of quantum physics, has a recharge time that is inversely related to the amount of stored energy.

Quantum batteries are a new class of energy storage devices that operate according to the principles of quantum physics, the science that studies the infinitely small where the laws of classical physics do not always apply. Tersilla Virgili of the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the National Research Council (Cnr-Ifn) and Giulio Cerullo of the Physics Department of the Politecnico di Milano have shown that it is possible to manufacture a type of quantum battery where the charging power increases faster by increasing the battery capacity. The work, carried out together with other international research groups, was published in Science Advances.

“Quantum batteries have a counter-intuitive property in which the recharge time is inversely related to the battery capacity, that is the amount of stored electrical charge,” explains Virgili. “This leads to the intriguing idea that the charging power of quantum batteries is super-extensive, meaning that it increases faster with battery size.”

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At just 1/1000th of a millimeter, nanoparticles are impossible to see with the naked eye. But, despite being small, they’re extremely important in many ways. If scientists want to take a close look at DNA, proteins, or viruses, then being able to isolate and monitor nanoparticles is essential.

Trapping these particles involves tightly focusing a to a point that produces a strong electromagnetic field. This beam can hold particles just like a pair of tweezers but, unfortunately, there are natural restrictions to this technique. Most notable are the size restrictions—if the particle is too small, the technique won’t work. To date, optical tweezers have been unable to hold particles like individual proteins, which are only a few nanometers in diameter.

Now, due to recent advances in nanotechnology, researchers in the Light-Matter Interactions for Quantum Technologies Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have developed a technique for precise nanoparticle trapping. In this study, they overcame the natural restrictions by developing optical tweezers based on —a synthetic material with specific properties that do not occur naturally. This was the first time that this kind of metamaterial had been used for single nanoparticle trapping.

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Cancer cells send out nanotubes to suck mitochondria from immune cells, finds a November 18 study in Nature Nanotechnology. The pilfered organelles allow the cancer cells to replenish their power while weakening T cells—a finding that could lead to new avenues for assailing tumors.

“It’s surprising that the transfer of mitochondria happened between different cell types, intriguingly between immune cells and cancer cells,” writes cancer biologist Ming Tan of China Medical University in Taiwan, who was not involved in this study, in an email to The Scientist. While researchers have observed mitochondrial transfer between cells before, most cases occurred between two cells of the same type. “Moreover, the mitochondrial transfer appears to have a significant impact on tumor cells escaping from immune surveillance,” Tan adds. “This is exciting because [of] its potential therapeutic implications.”

See “Nanotubes Link Immune Cells”.

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