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Category: nanotechnology – Page 3

Researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have developed an innovative tool that enhances surgeons’ ability to detect and remove cancer cells during cryosurgery, a procedure that uses extreme cold to destroy tumors. This breakthrough technology involves a specialized nanoscale material that illuminates cancer cells under freezing conditions, making them easier to distinguish from healthy tissue and improving surgical precision.

Detailed in the study “Freezing-Activated Covalent Organic Frameworks for Precise Fluorescence Cryo-Imaging of Cancer Tissue” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Trabolsi research group at NYUAD designed a unique nanoscale covalent organic framework (nTG-DFP-COF) that responds to by increasing its fluorescence. This makes it possible to clearly differentiate between cancerous and healthy tissues during surgery.

The material, prepared by Gobinda Das, Ph.D., a researcher in the Trabolsi Research Group at NYUAD, is engineered to be biocompatible and low in toxicity, ensuring it interacts safely within the body. Importantly, it maintains its fluorescent properties even in the presence of ice crystals inside cells, allowing monitoring during cryosurgery.

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This method enables applications in photonics, electronics, and advanced materials for energy and environmental use.

This technique will control functional nanoparticle assembly into uniform monolayers over large surfaces.

Employing nanoparticle components is often challenging despite its versatility, especially when fabricating a device. Therefore, scientists presented an electrostatic assembly as a potential solution, where nanoparticles attach to oppositely charged surfaces.

However, this process can take a lot of work, and thus, the South Korean scientists devised the “mussel-inspired” one-shot nanoparticle assembly technique that transports materials from water in microscopic volumes to two-inch wafers in 10 seconds.

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The researchers indicate that several challenges remain. The current system operates at cryogenic temperatures, which limits practical applications. While photons themselves can function at room temperature, the quantum dot requires cooling to maintain stability. Researchers are exploring alternative materials and designs that could allow operation at higher temperatures.

Additionally, the experiment used a single quantum dot, which is not easily scalable to large numbers of qubits needed for universal quantum computing. Future work will need to integrate multiple quantum dots or alternative photon sources that can be mass-produced with high consistency.

Another limitation is the reliance on superconducting detectors with an efficiency of 79%. If detection efficiency is improved beyond 93.7%, the overall system efficiency could surpass the required threshold even further. Advancements in superconducting nanowire technology suggest this is feasible in the near future.

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This innovation sidesteps the usual size limitations, enabling strong signal reception despite its microscopic dimensions. With high tunability and real-world transmission tests proving its viability, the nano-antenna could transform communications in extreme environments.

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Stretchable display materials, which are gaining traction in the next-generation display market, have the advantage of being able to stretch and bend freely, but the limitations of existing materials have resulted in distorted screens and poor fit.

General elastomeric substrates are prone to screen due to the “Poisson’s ratio” phenomenon, in which stretching in one direction causes the screen to shrink in the vertical direction. In particular, electronics that are in close contact with the skin, such as , are at risk of wrinkling or pulling on the skin during stretching and shrinking, resulting in poor fit and performance.

A research team led by Dr. Jeong Gon Son of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and Professor Yongtaek Hong of Seoul National University have developed a nanostructure-aligned stretchable substrate that dramatically lowers the Poisson’s ratio. The work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

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The current microelectronics manufacturing method is expensive, slow and energy and resource intensive.

But a Northeastern University professor has patented a new process and printer that not only can manufacture and chips more efficiently and cheaply, it can make them at the nanoscale.

“I thought that there must be an easier way to do this, there must be a cheaper way to do this,” says Ahmed A. Busnaina, the William Lincoln Smith professor and a distinguished university professor at Northeastern University. “We started, basically, with very simple physical chemistry with a very simple approach.”

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A platform developed nearly 20 years ago previously used to detect protein interactions with DNA and conduct accurate COVID-19 testing has been repurposed to create a highly sensitive water contamination detection tool.

The technology merges two exciting fields— and nanotechnology—to create a new platform for chemical monitoring. When tuned to detect different contaminants, the technology could detect the metals lead and cadmium at concentrations down to two and one parts per billion, respectively, in a matter of minutes.

The paper was published this week in the journal ACS Nano and represents research from multiple disciplines within Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering.

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Nanozymes are synthetic materials that have enzyme-like catalytic properties, and they are broadly used for biomedical purposes, such as disease diagnostics. However, inorganic nanozymes are generally toxic, expensive, and complicated to produce, making them unsuitable for the agricultural and food industries.

A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign research team has developed organic-material-based nanozymes that are non-toxic, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective. In two new studies, they introduce next-generation organic nanozymes and explore a point-of-use platform for molecule detection in .

“The first generation of organic-compound-based (OC) nanozymes had some minor drawbacks, so our research group worked to make improvements. The previous OC nanozymes required the use of particle stabilizing polymers having repeatable functional groups, which assured stability of the nanozyme’s nanoscale framework, but didn’t achieve a sufficiently small particle size,” said lead author Dong Hoon Lee, who completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE), part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and The Grainger College of Engineering at the U. of I.

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For the first time, researchers have used high-speed laser writing to create lines spaced just 100 nm apart on a glass substrate. The optimized printing approach could enable super-resolution 3D direct laser writing (DLW) of microlenses, photonics crystals, micro-optical devices, metamaterials and more.

DLW is an additive manufacturing technique that uses a focused laser beam to selectively solidify, or polymerize, a material with nanoscale precision. DLW typically uses multi-photon polymerization to polymerize materials in a precise, 3D manner.

“Increasing the —the minimum distance between two adjacent features—is difficult because the intense laser light can cause unwanted exposure in nearby areas during DLW,” said Qiulan Liu, a member of the research team from Zhejiang Lab and Zhejiang University in China. “However, by using a unique dual-beam optical setup and a special photoresist, we were able to overcome this challenge and achieve super-resolution DLW.”

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