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Round Rock-based motor company Infinitum Electric is expanding as it steps up production and breaks into the electric vehicle business.

The company is growing its footprint and workforce on the back of an $80 million funding round, which it announced this week. The financial infusion brings the company’s funding to date to $135 million.

Infinitum Electric was founded in 2016 in Austin by CEO Ben Schuler and moved to Round Rock in 2019. The motors include circuit boards that cut down on some of the costly equipment required in traditional motors, making Infinitum’s motors more efficient, smaller and quieter than traditional motors, according to the company.

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The unexpected discovery of “ghost” fossils belonging to tiny, ancient organisms could provide insights about how life reacts to climate change in Earth’s oceans.

Looking through a powerful microscope, researchers were stunned to see the impressions left by single-celled plankton, or fossilized nannoplankton, that lived millions of years ago – especially since they were analyzing something else.

A study detailing the findings published Thursday in the journal Science.

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Circa 2014

For most of us, even one bite of chocolate is enough to send our taste buds into ecstasy. Now, scientists have concocted a process to make these dark, dulcet morsels look as decadent as they taste.

Switzerland-based company Morphotonix has given traditional Swiss chocolate-making a colorful twist: It’s devised a method to imprint shiny holograms onto the sweet surfaces — sans harmful additives. Which means when you tilt the goodies from side to side, rainbow stars and swirly patterns on the chocolate’s surface dance and shimmer in the light.

Typically, holograms are laser-imprinted onto a flat, metallic surface such as aluminum; the rainbow-colored hologram appears when light hits the surface at a certain angle (Think of the security sticker on the back of your credit card). But aluminum-drenched chocolate doesn’t sound very appetizing, so confectioners pour the chocolate into a mold etched with a patchwork of minuscule bumps, or microstructures, that bend light at specific angles — embedding a hologram directly onto its surface.

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Circa 2020 Electricity free grow lights using quantum dot leds.

While costs are coming down for controlled environment agriculture, electricity remains one of the highest because it has to power the LEDs that provide the lighting formula for plant growth. But a materials science company called UbiQD wants to change that by replacing electricity with a more efficient means of lighting: quantum dots.

Quantum dots are semiconductor nanoparticles that can transport electrons. When exposed to UV lighting, these particles emit lights of various colors, and can be adjusted in size to emit a specific color. For example, larger particles emit redder wavelengths, while smaller ones shift to blue.

Via its UbiGro product, UbiQD uses a patented quantum dot technology to create a layer of lighting in greenhouses. Quantum dots are embedded into a film that is installed beneath a greenhouse cover. When illuminated by sunlight, the film converts shorter wavelengths (UV and blue) to longer ones (red/orange), the latter being the most photosynthetically efficient wavelengths.

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From TVs, to solar cells, to cutting-edge cancer treatments, quantum dots are beginning to exhibit their unique potential in many fields, but manufacturing them at scale would raise some issues concerning the environment. Scientists at Japan’s Hiroshima University have demonstrated a greener path forward in this area, by using discarded rice husks to produce the world’s first silicon quantum dot LED light.

“Since typical quantum dots often involve toxic material, such as cadmium, lead, or other heavy metals, environmental concerns have been frequently deliberated when using nanomaterials,” said Ken-ichi Saitow, lead study author and a professor of chemistry at Hiroshima University. “Our proposed process and fabrication method for quantum dots minimizes these concerns.”

The type of quantum dots pursued by Saitow and his team are silicon quantum dots, which eschew heavy metals and offer some other benefits, too. Their stability and higher operating temperatures makes them one of the leading candidates for use in quantum computing, while their non-toxic nature also makes them suitable for use in medical applications.

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Investigators uncovered a diagnostic method to identify receptors on cancer cells in the blood, then engineered a cell-based therapy to target and kill tumor cells in the brain, paving the way to clinical testing.

Glioblastomas (GBMs) are highly aggressive cancerous tumors of the brain and spinal cord. Brain cancers like GBM are challenging to treat because many cancer therapeutics cannot pass through the blood-brain barrier, and more than 90% of GBM tumors return after being surgically removed, despite surgery and subsequent chemo-and radiation therapy being the most successful way to treat the disease. In a new study led by investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, scientists devised a novel therapeutic strategy for treating GBMs post-surgery by using stem cells taken from healthy donors engineered to attack GBM-specific tumor cells. This strategy demonstrated profound efficacy in preclinical models of GBM, with 100 percent of mice living over 90 days after treatment. Results will be published today (May 19, 2022) in the journal Nature Communications.

“This is the first study to our knowledge that identifies target receptors on tumor cells prior to initiating therapy, and using biodegradable, gel-encapsulated, ‘off-the-shelf’ engineered stem cell based therapy after GBM tumor surgery,” said Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, director of the Center for Stem Cell and Translational Immunotherapy (CSTI) and the vice chair of research in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Brigham and faculty at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI).

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