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Category: chemistry – Page 136

Computational Capabilities That Will Transform the World

By Chuck Brooks

Computing paradigms as we know them will exponentially change when artificial intelligence is combined with classical, biological, chemical, and quantum computing. Artificial intelligence might guide and enhance quantum computing, run in a 5G or 6G environment, facilitate the Internet of Things, and stimulate materials science, biotech, genomics, and the metaverse.

Computers that can execute more than a quadrillion calculations per second should be available within the next ten years. We will also rely on clever computing software solutions to automate knowledge labor. Artificial intelligence technologies that improve cognitive performance across all envisioned industry verticals will support our future computing.

Advanced computing has a fascinating and mind-blowing future. It will include computers that can communicate via lightwave transmission, function as a human-machine interface, and self-assemble and teach themselves thanks to artificial intelligence. One day, computers might have sentience.

Researchers investigate strange transient responses of organic electrochemical transistors

Organic mixed ionic–electronic conductors (OMIECs) are a highly sought-after class of materials for non-conventional applications, such as bioelectronics, neuromorphic computing, and bio-fuel cells, due to their two-in-one electronic and ionic conduction properties.

To ensure a much wider acceptance of these fascinating materials, there is a need to diversify their properties and develop techniques that allow application-specific tailoring of the features of OMIEC-based devices.

A crucial aspect of this process is to develop strategies for evaluating the various properties of these materials. However, despite the increasing popularity of OMIECs, there is a severe lack of research on the molecular orientation-dependent transient behaviors of such conductors.

Combating Alzheimer’s With Focused Ultrasound Drug Delivery

This story is part of a series on the current progression in Regenerative Medicine. This piece discusses advances in Alzheimer’s therapy.

In 1999, I defined regenerative medicine as the collection of interventions that restore normal function to tissues and organs damaged by disease, injured by trauma, or worn by time. I include a full spectrum of chemical, gene, and protein-based medicines, cell-based therapies, and biomechanical interventions that achieve that goal.

An emerging combination of focused ultrasound therapy with a recently approved medication could be our best treatment for Alzheimer’s disease to date. In the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Ali Rezai and colleagues from West Virginia University describe an approach to reduce cerebral amyloid-beta load, a biomarker for neurodegeneration, in patients with Alzheimer’s. While in its preliminary stages, the combination treatment can potentially help thousands, if not millions, suffering from the disease in the near future.

Study probes unexplored combination of three chemical elements for superconductivity

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from MIPT and China’s Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research have computationally explored the stability of the bizarre compounds of hydrogen, lanthanum, and magnesium that exist at very high pressures. In addition to matching the various three-element combinations to the conditions at which they are stable, the team discovered five completely new compounds of hydrogen and either magnesium or lanthanum only.

Published in Materials Today Physics, the study is part of the ongoing search for room-temperature superconductors, the discovery of which would have enormous consequences for power engineering, transportation, computers and more.

“In the previously unexplored system of hydrogen, lanthanum, and magnesium, we find LaMg3H28 to be the ‘warmest’ superconductor. It loses below −109°C, at about 2 million atmospheres—not a record, but not bad at all either,” the study’s principal investigator, Professor Artem R. Oganov of Skoltech, commented.

Life on Earth Uses Water as a Solvent. What are Some Other Options for Life as We Don’t Know it?

Your body’s cells use water to dissolve chemicals. It’s the same with all life on Earth. But could other fluids work as a solvent? A new paper reviews the potential for different liquid solvents to support life and proposes some surprising candidates, like liquid carbon dioxide, ammonia, and even concentrated sulfuric acid. Each of these solvents is liquid in dramatically different conditions, helping expand the possibilities for life as we don’t know it.

Accidental Discovery: How a Whiff of an Unusual Chemical Transforms Seedlings Into Super Plants

Researchers have found that treating seeds with ethylene gas increases both their growth and stress tolerance. This discovery, involving enhanced photosynthesis and carbohydrate production in plants, offers a potential breakthrough in improving crop yields and resilience against environmental stressors.

Just like any other organism, plants can get stressed. Usually, it’s conditions like heat and drought that lead to this stress, and when they’re stressed, plants might not grow as large or produce as much. This can be a problem for farmers, so many scientists have tried genetically modifying plants to be more resilient.

However plants modified for higher crop yields tend to have a lower stress tolerance because they put more energy into growth than into protection against stresses. Similarly, improving the ability of plants to survive stress often results in plants that produce less because they put more energy into protection than into growth. This conundrum makes it difficult to improve crop production.

Unlocking the Secrets of Love — Neuroscientists Have Identified the “Chemical Imprint of Desire”

When you get in the car to see your significant other for dinner, your brain’s reward center is likely flooded with dopamine, a hormone also associated with cravings for sugar, nicotine, and cocaine. This rush of dopamine motivates you to navigate through traffic to maintain that special connection. However, if the dinner is with just a work colleague, this intense flood of dopamine may be reduced to a mere trickle, according to recent research conducted by neuroscientists at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“What we have found, essentially, is a biological signature of desire that helps us explain why we want to be with some people more than other people,” said senior author Zoe Donaldson, associate professor of behavioral neuroscience at CU Boulder.

Self-assembling molecules have hidden neural network-like abilities

A new study by Dr Constantine Evans of Maynooth University and researchers at the University of Chicago and California Institute of Technology, published in Nature, shows how the molecules that build structures can do both the thinking and the doing.

We tend to separate the brain and muscle – the brain does the thinking; the muscle does the doing. The brain takes in complex information about the world, makes decisions, while muscle merely executes.

This brain-muscle separation has also shaped how we think about the working within a single cell; some molecules within cells are seen as ‘thinkers’ that take in information about the chemical environment and decide what the cell needs to do for survival; separately, other molecules are seen as the ‘muscle’, building structures needed for survival.

Ancient Power Unlocked: Scientists Discover 2.5 Billion-Year-Old Bacterial Energy Source

Biologists from Konstanz have unveiled a unique and ancient phosphorus-based bacterial metabolism. Central to this discovery are four elements: an analytical calculation dating back to the 1980s, a modern sewage treatment facility, the identification of a novel bacterial species, and a remnant from around 2.5 billion years ago.

Our story begins at the end of the 1980s, with a sheet of paper. On this sheet, a scientist calculated that the conversion of the chemical compound phosphite to phosphate would release enough energy to produce the cell’s energy carrier – the ATP molecule. In this way, it should therefore be possible for a microorganism to supply itself with energy. Unlike most living organisms on our planet, this organism would not be dependent on energy supply from light or from the decomposition of organic matter.

The scientist actually succeeded in isolating such a microorganism from the environment. Its energy metabolism is based on the oxidation of phosphite to phosphate, just as predicted by the calculation. But how exactly does the biochemical mechanism work? Regrettably, the key enzyme needed to understand the biochemistry behind the process remained hidden – and thus the mystery remained unsolved for many years. In the following three decades, the sheet stayed in the drawer, the research approach was put on the back burner. Yet the scientist couldn’t get the thought out of his head.