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Category: nanotechnology – Page 3

In a remarkable feat of chemistry, a Northwestern University-led research team has developed the first two-dimensional (2D) mechanically interlocked material.

Resembling the interlocking links in chainmail, the nanoscale material exhibits exceptional flexibility and strength. With further work, it holds promise for use in high-performance, light-weight body armor and other uses that demand lightweight, flexible and tough materials.

Publishing on Jan. 17 in the journal Science, the study marks several firsts for the field. Not only is it the first 2D mechanically interlocked , but the novel material also contains 100 trillion mechanical bonds per 1 square centimeter—the highest density of mechanical bonds ever achieved.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) once seemed like a fantastical construct of science fiction, enabling characters to deploy spacecraft to neighboring galaxies with a casual command. Humanoid AIs even served as companions to otherwise lonely characters. Now, in the very real 21st century, AI is becoming part of everyday life, with tools like chatbots available and useful for everyday tasks like answering questions, improving writing, and solving mathematical equations.

AI does, however, have the potential to revolutionize —in ways that can feel like but are within reach.

At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists are already using AI to automate experiments and discover new materials. They’re even designing an AI scientific companion that communicates in ordinary language and helps conduct experiments. Kevin Yager, the Electronic Nanomaterials Group leader at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), has articulated an overarching vision for the role of AI in scientific research.

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“Proteins are the molecular machinery that helps the body to function — and malfunction. Their role in disease is crucial, but rarely simple. Knowing which are associated with a particular disease can help doctors and scientists to spot it earlier and narrow down potential treatments,” writes Tom Whipple in The Times, as he describes the potential impact of a new study from UK Biobank that is the world’s largest exploration of all the proteins in the human body.

Thermo Fisher’s Olink Proteomics Explore HT platform, which enables precise analysis of proteins in the human body, will play a key role in the work. Researchers will use our technology to study the role proteins play in many types of diseases. Their findings will fuel the discovery of new protein biomarkers that could predict, diagnose and treat diseases. The study “has the potential to transform healthcare by the end of this decade,” says Dr. Chris Whelan, who is leading a group of pharmaceutical companies working on the project.

‘Treasure trove’ of samples provided by UK volunteers has the potential to transform healthcare by the end of this decade, say scientists.

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Stimulating dopamine-producing brain cells wirelessly with gold nanoparticles has proven effective at treating mice with Parkinson’s disease, even reversing a portion of their neurological damage.

Researchers from the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology of China (NCNST) say it’s a significant step forward for using brain simulation to tackle Parkinson’s in humans, a neurodegenerative condition that affects more than 10 million people worldwide.

Deep inside the brains of those with the condition, dopamine-producing neurons take a major hit as insoluable clumps of a protein called alpha-synuclein accumulate, gradually depriving patients of an ability to control their movements.

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To describe how matter works at infinitesimal scales, researchers designate collective behaviors with single concepts, like calling a group of birds flying in sync a “flock” or “murmuration.” Known as quasiparticles, the phenomena these concepts refer to could be the key to next-generation technologies.

In a recent study published in Science Advances, a team of researchers led by Shengxi Huang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and materials science and nanoengineering at Rice, describe how one such type of quasiparticle—polarons—behaves in tellurene, a nanomaterial first synthesized in 2017 that is made up of tiny chains of tellurium atoms and has properties useful in sensing, electronic, optical and .

“Tellurene exhibits dramatic changes in its electronic and optical properties when its thickness is reduced to a few nanometers compared to its bulk form,” said Kunyan Zhang, a Rice doctoral alumna who is a first author on the study. “Specifically, these changes alter how electricity flows and how the material vibrates, which we traced back to the transformation of polarons as tellurene becomes thinner.”

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Physicists have spent more than a century measuring and making sense of the strange ways that photons, electrons, and other subatomic particles interact at extremely small scales. Engineers have spent decades figuring out how to take advantage of these phenomena to create new technologies.

In one such phenomenon, called , pairs of photons become interconnected in such a way that the state of one instantly changes to match the state of its paired photon, no matter how far apart they are.

Nearly 80 years ago, Albert Einstein referred to this phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” Today, entanglement is the subject of research programs across the world—and it’s becoming a favored way to implement the most fundamental form of quantum information, the qubit.

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A team of physicists led by The City College of New York’s Lia Krusin-Elbaum has developed a novel technique that uses hydrogen cations (H+) to manipulate relativistic electronic bandstructures in a magnetic Weyl semimetal—a topological material where electrons mimic massless particles called Weyl fermions. These particles are distinguished by their chirality or “handedness” linked to their spin and momentum.

In the magnetic material MnSb₂Te₄, researchers unveiled a fascinating ability to “tune” and enhance the chirality of electronic transport by introducing , reshaping on-demand the energy landscapes—called Weyl nodes—within the material. This finding could open a breadth of new quantum device platforms for harnessing emergent topological states for novel chiral nano-spintronics and fault-tolerant quantum computing. Entitled “Transport chirality generated by a tunable tilt of Weyl nodes in a van der Waals topological magnet,” the study appears in the journal Nature Communications.

The tuning of Weyl nodes with H+ heals the system’s (Mn-Te) bond disorder and lowers the internode scattering. In this process—which The City College team tests in the Krusin Lab using angularly-resolved electrical transport—electrical charges move differently when the in-plane is rotated clockwise or counterclockwise, generating desirable low-dissipation currents. The reshaped Weyl states feature a doubled Curie temperature and a strong angular transport chirality synchronous with a rare field-antisymmetric longitudinal resistance—a low-field tunable ‘chiral switch’ that is rooted in the interplay of topological Berry curvature, chiral anomaly and a hydrogen-mediated form of Weyl nodes.

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A recently-discovered class of magnets called altermagnets has been imaged in detail for the first time thanks to a technique developed by physicists at the University of Nottingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy in the UK. The team exploited the unique properties of altermagnetism to map the magnetic domains in the altermagnet manganese telluride (MnTe) down to the nanoscale level, raising hopes that its unusual magnetic ordering could be controlled and exploited in technological applications.

In most magnetically-ordered materials, the spins of atoms (that is, their magnetic moments) have two options: they can line up parallel with each other, or antiparallel, alternating up and down. These arrangements arise from the exchange interaction between atoms, and lead to ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism, respectively.

Altermagnets, which were discovered in 2024, are different. While their neighbouring spins are antiparallel, like an antiferromagnet, the atoms hosting these spins are rotated relative to their neighbours. This means that they combine some properties from both types of conventional magnetism. For example, the up, down, up ordering of their spins leads to a net magnetization of zero because – as in antiferromagnets – the spins essentially cancel each other out. However, their spin splitting is non-relativistic, as in ferromagnets.

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The shape and morphology of a cell play a key role in the biological function. This corresponds to the principle of “form follows function,” which is common in modern fields of design and architecture. The transfer of this principle to artificial cells is a challenge in synthetic biology. Advances in DNA nanotechnology now offer promising solutions. They allow the creation of novel transport channels that are large enough to facilitate the passage of therapeutic proteins across cell membranes.

In this emerging field, Prof. Laura Na Liu, Director of the 2nd Physics Institute at the University of Stuttgart and Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (MPI-FKF), has developed an innovative tool for controlling the shape and permeability of lipid membranes in synthetic cells. These membranes are made up of that enclose an aqueous compartment and serve as simplified models of biological membranes. They are useful for studying membrane dynamics, protein interactions, and lipid behavior.

The work is published in Nature Materials.

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Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have created nanostructured alumina surfaces which are strongly antibacterial but can be used to culture cells. They found that anodic porous alumina (APA) surfaces prepared using electrochemistry in concentrated sulfuric acid had unprecedented resistance to bacterial growth, but did not hamper cell cultures.

The work is published in the journal Langmuir.

The team’s technology promises to have a big impact on regenerative medicine, where high quality cell cultures without bacterial contamination may be produced without antibiotics.

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