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Engineers have designed a tiny battery, smaller than a grain of sand, to power microscopic robots for jobs such as drug delivery or locating leaks in gas pipelines.

A tiny battery designed by MIT engineers could enable the deployment of cell-sized, autonomous robots for drug delivery within in the human body, as well as other applications such as locating leaks in gas pipelines.

The new battery, which is 0.1 millimeters long and 0.002 millimeters thick — roughly the thickness of a human hair — can capture oxygen from air and use it to oxidize zinc, creating a current with a potential of up to 1 volt. That is enough to power a small circuit, sensor, or actuator, the researchers showed.

“We think this is going to be very enabling for robotics,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study. “We’re building robotic functions onto the battery and starting to put these components together into devices.”

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Dr. Scott England: “As the aurora intensifies, you see more lights, but along with that, there’s more energy entering the atmosphere, so it makes the atmosphere near the poles very hot, which starts to push air away from the poles and towards the equator.”

How do powerful geomagnetic storms from the Sun influence the Earth’s atmosphere? This is what two separate studies (Karan et al. (2024) and Evans et al. (2024)) published in Geophysical Research Letters hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how the geomagnetic storm that occurred between May 10–12, 2024—resulting in worldwide aurorae—impacted the Earth’s thermosphere, which is the Earth’s upper atmosphere extending approximately 70 miles to 130 miles above the Earth’s surface. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the short-and long-term effects of geomagnetic storms on the Earth’s atmosphere and how this could influence activities on the surface.

“The northern lights are caused by energetic, charged particles hitting our upper atmosphere, which are impacted by numerous factors in space, including the sun,” said Dr. Scott England, who is an associate professor in the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech and a co-author on both studies. “During solar geomagnetic storms, there’s a lot more of these energetic charged particles in the space around Earth, so we see a brightening of the northern lights and the region over which you can see them spreads out to include places like the lower 48 states that usually don’t see this display.”

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New study shows ‘#Dancing #Molecules’ can #Regenerate #Cartilage in 3 days.

In the new study, the treatment activated gene expression needed to regenerate cartilage in just 4h. After 3 days, cells produced protein components for cartilage regeneration…

In November 2021, Northwestern University researchers introduced an injectable new therapy, which harnessed fast-moving “dancing molecules,” to repair tissues and reverse paralysis after severe spinal cord injuries.

Now, the same research group has applied the therapeutic strategy to damaged human cartilage cells. In the new study, the treatment activated the gene expression necessary to regenerate cartilage within just four hours. And, after only three days, the human cells produced protein components needed for cartilage regeneration.

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A view into how nanoscale building blocks can rearrange into different organized structures on command is now possible with an approach that combines an electron microscope, a small sample holder with microscopic channels, and computer simulations, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan and Indiana University.

The approach could eventually enable smart materials and coatings that can switch between different optical, mechanical and electronic properties.

“One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon in nature is in chameleons,” said Tobias Dwyer, U-M doctoral student in chemical engineering and co-first author of the study published in Nature Chemical Engineering (“Engineering and direct imaging of nanocube self-assembly pathways”). “Chameleons change color by altering the spacing between nanocrystals in their skin. The dream is to design a dynamic and multifunctional system that can be as good as some of the examples that we see in biology.”

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Entanglement is a fundamental concept in quantum information theory and is often regarded as a key indicator of a system’s “quantumness”. However, the relationship between entanglement and quantum computational power is not straightforward. In a study posted on the arXiv preprint server, physicists in Germany, Italy and the US shed light on this complex relationship by exploring the role of a property known as “magic” in entanglement theory. The study’s results have broad implications for various fields, including quantum error correction, many-body physics and quantum chaos.

Traditionally, the more entangled your quantum bits (qubits) are, the more you can do with your quantum computer. However, this belief – that higher entanglement in a quantum state is associated with greater computational advantage – is challenged by the fact that certain highly entangled states can be efficiently simulated on classical computers and do not offer the same computational power as other quantum states. These states are often generated by classically simulable circuits known as Clifford circuits.

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