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What pig hearts and a little noise can teach us about designing better soft valves

Some of the best engineers and inventors are copycats. They look at how the natural world solves complex problems and use those mechanisms as the basis for innovations. But Mother Nature doesn’t always give up her secrets easily.

One of those secrets is how heart valves and other biological valves work. They keep fluids moving in one direction while preventing backflow, all without needing any active motors or powered controls to drive them. To find out how, Mengfei He of Harvard University and colleagues studied pig mitral valves.

They wanted to set up a system to see how the valve leaflets, the thin flaps of tissue that act as doors, react when fluid pushes back against them.

Nonchaotic model reveals how predictability can emerge from seemingly unpredictable dynamics

Predicting a system’s final outcome from its initial state is the ultimate goal for many physicists. In certain complex systems, however, this goal is thwarted by chaos, where even the subtlest tweaks to the initial state can lead to completely different fates, making the system almost impossible to predict.

In research published in Nature Communications, Illinois physicists developed a model showing that unpredictability can also arise in nonchaotic systems. Despite being fully deterministic, the team’s model resists computational attempts to predict its final state based on its initial configuration.

Remarkably, however, the scientists found that the model’s dynamics give rise to topological structure that can eventually be used as a reliable predictor of final fate, demonstrating that predictability itself can emerge over time.

How information is written in ferroelectric memory at the nanoscale

What happens at the nanoscale when information is written to memory? Researchers at KAIST have shown how tiny regions with a new polarization direction form while previously formed regions continue to expand in a promising ferroelectric material. By linking these nanoscale changes to electrical measurements, the team developed a model that captures both processes, offering a basis for designing faster and more stable memory.

A team led by Professor Seungbum Hong from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has identified how information is recorded in hafnium zirconium oxide (HZO), a promising material for next-generation memory.

The study, published in the journal Nano Letters, was conducted in collaboration with Professor Byung Jin Cho’s team at KAIST’s School of Electrical Engineering and researchers at NaMLab/TU Dresden in Germany.

Astronomers pinpoint the most distant fast radio burst ever detected

Astronomers have detected and traced the most distant fast radio burst ever recorded, a powerful flash of radio waves that traveled for more than 10 billion years across the cosmos before reaching Earth.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the most mysterious phenomena in astronomy. Lasting only milliseconds, they release enormous amounts of energy, but their origins remain uncertain.

The discovery, led by researchers Dr. Manisha Caleb and Dr. Themiya Nanayakkara at the University of Sydney, is published today in the journal Science.

Light-driven method puts notoriously reactive hydrogen atoms to work for chemical synthesis

Hydrogen is the simplest element in the periodic table, consisting of just one proton and one electron. In chemistry, however, the smallest of atoms is anything but simple. First produced by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir over a century ago, single hydrogen atoms (H•) are so reactive that they are almost impossible to prepare and use.

In an international collaborative effort, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, University College London and Imperial College London have found a solution to this problem. Using light, they generate hydrogen atoms under mild conditions and use them to reduce organic molecules without metals.

Their findings have been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

A trick from tardigrades could help human blood withstand freezing

Tardigrades survive conditions that would destroy most other living things: freezing, dehydration and the vacuum of space. Researchers even put tiny tattoos on them, and the animals don’t seem to mind. By learning how these critters carry on, researchers hope to find ways to protect human cells.

One potential application is red blood cell cryopreservation—a process that stores rare blood types for long periods until they are needed. Blood cells are typically treated with glycerol to stop ice crystal formation during freezing. But glycerol must be removed before a transfusion, which causes cell damage.

Tardigrades offer a simpler option: They have a protein called CAHS (cytosolic abundant heat-soluble) that they use to survive in extreme conditions. These proteins uniquely interact with trehalose, a sugar that stabilizes cell membranes and proteins. It’s often used to reduce freezer burn in frozen foods. So, Hui Yang, Leming Sun and colleagues wanted to explore whether combining CAHS proteins and trehalose could protect red blood cells in mice better than glycerol could alone.

Scientists turn handheld car gadget into wildfire early-warning tool

Researchers at King’s College London have converted an off-the-shelf product, usually used to determine whether car window tint is legal, into a scientific instrument that can measure leaf water content in seconds.

Comparable field instruments can cost many tens of thousands of pounds, while the standard laboratory approach requires leaves to be picked, oven-dried and weighed over many hours.

However, the modified device, which costs about £140 ($190) in total to build from readily available components, approached the performance of laboratory methods across six plant species, explaining at least 81% of the variation in leaf water content.

How researchers tell different quantum excitations apart in individual molecules

Molecules can be placed in a wide variety of quantum states. How can these states be distinguished in measurements when theoretical models are unreliable? Which excitation process lies behind which measurement signal?

These were precisely the questions facing Dr. Arnab Banerjee when he investigated individual cobaltocene molecules using tunneling spectroscopy. The measured spectra showed a confusing variety of excitations. Together with four colleagues in Kiel and San Sebastian (Spain), he succeeded in deciphering the data in a new way. The findings were recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters and highlighted by the editors as an “Editors’ Suggestion.”

Lensless imaging method enables long-term monitoring of living cells without staining

In a study led by Tampere University, researchers have developed a new lensless imaging method that produces precise quantitative data on living cells from a single image. The compact system can be placed inside a standard cell-culture incubator, allowing living cells to be monitored continuously for hours or even days without staining or other labels. The research is published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Researchers have developed a new lensless quantitative phase imaging method, called SF-PULSE, which combines an AI-based neural network with physics-informed image reconstruction.

The method is designed for use in a compact imaging system that can operate directly inside a standard cell-culture incubator. This allows cells to be monitored continuously for hours or even days without the need for staining or repeated removal from the incubator for imaging.

Magnetic Nanoparticles Could Help Detect and Treat Dangerous Ectopic Pregnancies

Magnetic nanoparticles could eventually help doctors both locate and treat ectopic pregnancies, after successfully targeting pregnancy-associated tissue in mice.

When a fertilized egg implants inside a fallopian tube instead of the uterus, the growing pregnancy can rupture the tube and trigger life-threatening bleeding. About 98% of these abnormal implantations occur in the fallopian tubes, making early detection and treatment critical.

This condition, known as an ectopic pregnancy, occurs when a fertilized egg implants somewhere other than the lining of the uterus. These pregnancies cannot continue normally and remain a leading cause of maternal mortality during the first trimester.

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