Researchers at the University of Virginia have made significant advancements in understanding how heat flows through thin metal films, critical for designing more efficient computer chips.
This study confirms Matthiessen’s rule at the nanoscale, enhancing heat management in ultra-thin copper films used in next-generation devices, thereby improving performance and sustainability.
Breakthrough in Chip Technology.
Researchers recently made a groundbreaking discovery on the nanoscale: a new type of quasiparticle found in all magnetic materials, no matter their strength or temperature. These new properties shake up what researchers previously knew about magnetism, showing it’s not as static as once believed.
“Emergent topological quasiparticle kinetics in constricted nanomagnets,” was published in Physical Review Research. The researchers include Deepak Singh and Carsten Ullrich from the University of Missouri’s College of Arts and Science, along with their teams of students and postdoctoral fellows.
“We’ve all seen the bubbles that form in sparkling water or other carbonated drink products,” said Ullrich, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy. “The quasiparticles are like those bubbles, and we found they can freely move around at remarkably fast speeds.”
Pervasive micropollutants in aquatic environments pose significant threats to global water supply safety. Here, authors achieved permeate concentrations below the detection limit (2.5 ng/L) using a CNT-based electrochemical membrane, with the contributions of adsorption and degradation distinguished.
Researchers are shining a light on cancer cells’ energy centers—literally—to damage these power sources and trigger widespread cancer cell death. In a new study, scientists combined strategies to deliver energy-disrupting gene therapy using nanoparticles manufactured to zero in only on cancer cells. Experiments showed the targeted therapy is effective at shrinking glioblastoma brain tumors and aggressive breast cancer tumors in mice.
The research team overcame a significant challenge to break up structures inside these cellular energy centers, called mitochondria, with a technique that induces light-activated electrical currents inside the cell. They named the technology mLumiOpto.
“We disrupt the membrane, so mitochondria cannot work functionally to produce energy or work as a signaling hub. This causes programmed cell death followed by DNA damage—our investigations showed these two mechanisms are involved and kill the cancer cells,” said co-lead author Lufang Zhou, professor of biomedical engineering and surgery at The Ohio State University. “This is how the technology works by design.”
Researchers at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have made a significant advance in the field of molecular robotics by developing custom-designed and programmable nanostructures using DNA origami.
This innovative approach has potential across a range of applications, from targeted drug delivery systems to responsive materials and energy-efficient optical signal processing. The method uses ‘DNA origami’, so-called as it uses the natural folding power of DNA, the building blocks of human life, to create new and useful biological structures.
As a proof-of-concept, the researchers made more than 50 nanoscale objects, including a ‘nano-dinosaur’, a ‘dancing robot’ and a mini-Australia that is 150 nanometres wide, a thousand times narrower than a human hair.
University of Central Florida (UCF) researcher Debashis Chanda, a professor at UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center, has developed a new technique to detect long wave infrared (LWIR) photons of different wavelengths or “colors.”
The research was recently published in Nano Letters.
The new detection and imaging technique will have applications in analyzing materials by their spectral properties, or spectroscopic imaging, as well as thermal imaging applications.
Astrocytes are star-shaped glial cells in the central nervous system that support neuronal function, maintain the blood-brain barrier, and contribute to brain repair and homeostasis. The evolution of these cells throughout the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is still poorly understood, particularly when compared to that of neurons and other cell types.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Harvard Medical School and Abbvie Inc. set out to fill this gap in the literature.
Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, provides one of the most detailed accounts to date of how different astrocyte subclusters respond to AD across different brain regions and disease stages, providing valuable insights into the cellular dynamics of the disease.
Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Delft University of Technology and the IMP Vienna Biocenter have discovered a new property of the molecular motors that shape our chromosomes. While six years ago they found that these so-called SMC motor proteins make long loops in our DNA, they have now discovered that these motors also put significant twists into the loops that they form.
These findings help us better understand the structure and function of our chromosomes. They also provide insight into how disruption of twisted DNA looping can affect health—for instance, in developmental diseases like “cohesinopathies.” The scientists published their findings in Science Advances.
Imagine trying to fit two meters of rope into a space much smaller than the tip of a needle—that’s the challenge every cell in your body faces when packing its DNA into its tiny nucleus. To achieve this, nature employs ingenious strategies, like twisting the DNA into coils of coils, so-called “supercoils” and wrapping it around special proteins for compact storage.