Lifeboat Foundation

“It doesn’t have just a static function. It has a bank of sensors that measure chemicals in the blood and feeds that information back to the device,” Kurtz says.

Other startups are getting in on the game. Nephria Bio, a spinout from the South Korean-based EOFlow, is working to develop a wearable dialysis device, akin to an insulin pump, that uses miniature cartridges with nanomaterial filters to clean blood (Harhay is a scientific advisor to Nephria). Ian Welsford, Nephria’s co-founder and CTO, says that the device’s design means that it can also be used to treat acute kidney injuries in resource-limited settings. These potentials have garnered interest and investment in artificial kidneys from the U.S. Department of Defense.

For his part, Burton is most interested in an implantable device, as that would give him the most freedom. Even having a regular outpatient procedure to change batteries or filters would be a minor inconvenience to him.

In a forward-looking article, George Church, PhD, from Harvard University and the Wyss Institute, proposes the use of picogram to nanogram-scale probes that can land, replicate, and produce a communications module at the destination to explore nearby stars.

The fascinating new article is published in a special issue on “Interstellar Objects in Astrobiology” of the peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology.

“One design is a highly reflective light sail, traveling a long straight line toward the gravitational well of a destination star, and the photo-deflected to the closest non-luminous mass – ideally a planet or moon with exposed liquid water,” states Dr. Church.

It acted with rudimentary intelligence, learning, evolving and communicating with itself to grow more powerful.

A new model by a team of researchers led by Penn State and inspired by Crichton’s novel describes how biological or technical systems form complex structures equipped with signal-processing capabilities that allow the systems to respond to stimulus and perform functional tasks without external guidance.

“Basically, these little nanobots become self-organized and self-aware,” said Igor Aronson, Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Mathematics at Penn State, explaining the plot of Crichton’s book. The novel inspired Aronson to study the emergence of collective motion among interacting, self-propelled agents. The research was recently published in Nature Communications.

Whether the light in our living spaces is on or off can be regulated in everyday life simply by reaching for the light switch. However, when the space for the light is shrunk to a few nanometers, quantum mechanical effects dominate, and it is unclear whether there is light in it or not. Both can even be the case at the same time, as scientists from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) and the University of Bielefeld show in the journal Nature Physics (“Identifying the quantum fingerprint of plasmon polaritons”).

“Detecting these exotic states of quantum physics on the size scales of electrical transistors could help in the development of optical quantum technologies of future computer chips,” explains Würzburg professor Bert Hecht. The nanostructures studied were produced in his group.

The technology of our digital world is based on the principle that either a current flows or it does not: one or zero, on or off. Two clear states exist. In quantum physics, on the other hand, it is possible to disregard this principle and create an arbitrary superposition of the supposed opposites. This increases the possibilities of transmitting and processing information many times over. Such superposition states have been known for some time, especially for the particles of light, so-called photons, and are used in the detection of gravitational waves.

As devices get smaller and more powerful, the risk of them overheating and burning out increases substantially. Despite advancements in cooling solutions, the interface between an electronic chip and its cooling system has remained a barrier for thermal transport due to the materials’ intrinsic roughness.

Material after graphene coating. (Image: CMU)

Sheng Shen, a professor of mechanical engineering Opens in new window, has fabricated a flexible, powerful, and highly-reliable material to efficiently fill the gap (ACS Nano, “3D Graphene-Nanowire “Sandwich” Thermal Interface with Ultralow Resistance and Stiffness”).

A new study led by DAI Qing’s team from the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Javier Abajo from the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Spain has shown a gate-tunable nanoscale negative refraction of polaritons in the mid-infrared range through a van der Waals heterostructure of graphene and molybdenum trioxide. The atomically thick heterostructures weaken scattering losses at the interface while enabling an actively tunable transition of normal to negative refraction through electrical gating.

The work was published in Science (“Gate-tunable negative refraction of mid-infrared polaritons”).

Basic principle of the “polariton transistor”. The van der Waals heterostructure is constructed by decorating graphene on the molybdenum trioxide, and the antenna stimulates the polariton to transmit through the interface to form negative refraction. (Image: DAI Qing et al.)

Two types of nanotechnology, metalenses and metamaterials, could soon make Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak a reality.

These are the molecular machines inside your body that make cell division possible. Animation by Drew Berry at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. http://wehi.tv.

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Joshua Abenir, Tony Fadell, Donal Botkin, Jeff Straathof, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen.

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Nanoscale defects and mechanical stress cause the failure of solid electrolytes.

A group of researchers has claimed to have found the cause of the recurring short-circuiting issues of lithium metal batteries with solid electrolytes. The team, which consists of members from Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, aims to further the battery technology, which is lightweight, inflammable, energy-dense, and offers quick-charge capabilities. Such a long-lasting solution can help to overcome the barriers when it comes to the adoption of electric vehicles around the world.

A study published on January 30 in the journal Nature Energy details different experiments on how nanoscale defects and mechanical stress cause solid electrolytes to fail.

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