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Oct 4, 2024

Beyond ‘one pore at a time’: New method of generating multiple, tunable nanopores

Posted by in categories: engineering, nanotechnology

But these exciting applications have been limited in part by the tedious process of tunneling individual sub-nanometer pores one by one.

“If we are to ever scale up 2D material membranes to be relevant for applications outside the laboratory, the ‘one at a time’ method just isn’t feasible,” said recent UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) Ph.D. graduate Eli Hoenig. “But, even within the confines of laboratory experiment, a nanoporous membrane provides significantly larger signals than a single pore, increasing the sensitivity.”

Hoenig is first author of a paper recently published in Nature Communications that found a novel path around this longstanding problem. Under PME Asst. Prof. Chong Liu, the team created a new method of pore generation that builds materials with intentional weak spots, then applies a remote electric field to generate multiple nanoscale pores all at once.

Oct 4, 2024

Targeting Glucose May Spark Neurogenesis

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, neuroscience

Summary: Neural stem cells, which create new neurons in the brain, become less active with age due to elevated glucose levels. Researchers found that by knocking out the glucose transporter gene GLUT4 in older mice, they could significantly increase the production of new neurons.

This discovery opens up potential pathways for both genetic and behavioral interventions to stimulate brain repair, including the possibility of a low-carbohydrate diet. The findings could help treat neurodegenerative diseases and aid in brain recovery after injury.

Oct 4, 2024

Scientists Discover Dual Roles of Antibodies in COVID-19 Infections

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Scientists at the University of Minnesota and the Midwest Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Center have made a surprising discovery: antibodies can have opposite effects on viral infections in human cells.

The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, enables the virus to enter human cells and is the primary target for the body’s antibodies. Previous research has shown that antibodies can either block the virus, have no effect, or, in rare cases, assist the virus in infecting cells. While antibody drugs work to block infections, this new study challenges current understanding of their mechanisms.

Published in the journal PLOS Pathogens, this study is the first to identify an antibody that can both assist and block the virus. This particular antibody helps pre-omicron variants of the virus infect cells while preventing the omicron variant from doing the same. The study also explains how the antibody aids the pre-omicron virus in invading cells while blocking the omicron virus from succeeding.

Oct 4, 2024

Wastewater bacteria can break down plastic for food, yielding new possibilities for cleaning up plastic waste

Posted by in category: food

Researchers have long observed that a common family of environmental bacteria, Comamonadacae, grow on plastics littered throughout urban rivers and wastewater systems. But exactly what these Comamonas bacteria are doing has remained a mystery.

Oct 4, 2024

Brain scan study shows what happens in the brain when a person with schizophrenia hears voices

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Patients with certain mental disorders, including schizophrenia, often hear voices in the absence of sound.


Auditory hallucinations are likely the result of abnormalities in two brain processes: a broken corollary discharge that fails to suppress self-generated sounds, and a noisy efference copy that makes the brain hear these sounds more intensely than it should. That is the conclusion of a study published October 3 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Xing Tian, of New York University Shanghai, China, and colleagues.

In the new study, researchers carried out electroencephalogram (EEG) experiments measuring the brain waves of 20 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia with and 20 patients diagnosed with who had never experienced such hallucinations.

Oct 4, 2024

Developer Shows Interactive Water Made for AR

Posted by in category: augmented reality

Noah Rayburn mixes realities.

Oct 4, 2024

A new era of solar observation: International team produces global maps of coronal magnetic field

Posted by in categories: mapping, space

For the first time, scientists have taken near-daily measurements of the sun’s global coronal magnetic field, a region of the sun that has only been observed irregularly in the past. The resulting observations are providing valuable insights into the processes that drive the intense solar storms that impact fundamental technologies, and thus lives and livelihoods, here on Earth.

Oct 4, 2024

X-rays advance understanding of Earth’s core-mantle boundary and super-Earth magma oceans

Posted by in category: space

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have revealed new details about Earth’s core-mantle boundary and similar regions found in exoplanets.

Oct 4, 2024

Traces of antimatter in cosmic rays reopen the search for ‘WIMPs’ as dark matter

Posted by in category: cosmology

One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to reveal the nature of dark matter. We know it exists (it constitutes more than 85% of the matter in the universe), but we have never seen it directly and still do not know what it is.

Oct 4, 2024

Mercury’s magnetic landscape mapped in 30 minutes

Posted by in category: space

As BepiColombo sped past Mercury during its June 2023 flyby, it encountered a variety of features in the tiny planet’s magnetic field. These measurements provide a tantalizing taste of the mysteries that the mission is set to investigate when it arrives in orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet.

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