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Ultrafast electron microscope in Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory.

Ultrafast electron microscope opens up new avenues for the development of sensors and quantum devices.

Everyone who has ever been to the Grand Canyon can relate to having strong feelings from being close to one of nature’s edges. Similarly, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have discovered that nanoparticles of gold act unusually when close to the edge of a one-atom.

Devices in the submillimetre range – so-called “nano-supercapacitors” – allow the shrinkage of electronic components to tiny dimensions. However, they are difficult to produce and do not usually incorporate biocompatible materials. Corrosive electrolytes, for example, can quickly discharge themselves in the event of defects and contamination.

So-called “biosupercapacitors” (BSCs) offer a solution. These have two outstanding properties: full biocompatibility, which means they can be used in body fluids such as blood, and compensation for self-discharge behaviours through bio-electrochemical reactions. In other words, they can actually benefit from the body’s own reactions. This is because, in addition to typical charge storage reactions of a supercapacitor, redox enzymatic reactions and living cells naturally present in the blood can increase the performance of a device by 40%.

Shrinking these devices down to submillimetre sizes, while maintaining full biocompatibility, has been enormously challenging. Now, scientists have created a prototype that combines both essential properties.

The scientists behind the new device were working within the realm of nano-supercapacitors (nBSC), which are conventional capacitors but scaled down to the sub-millimeter scale. Developing these types of devices is tricky enough, but the researchers sought to make one that could work safely in the human body to power tiny sensors and implants, which requires swapping out problematic materials and corrosive electrolytes for ones that are biocompatible.

These devices are known as biosupercapacitors and the smallest ones developed to date is larger than 3 mm³, but the scientists have made a huge leap forward in terms of how tiny biosupercapacitors can be. The construction starts with a stack of polymeric layers that are sandwiched together with a light-sensitive photo-resist material that acts as the current collector, a separator membrane, and electrodes made from an electrically conductive biocompatible polymer called PEDOT: PSS.

This #COVID19 is quite weird it just keeps evolving. In a weird way it is pushing evolution through our immune system. The only thing I know that is similar is like the flu or a bigger organism like cancer. Based on this information the virus just keeps evolving not dying off. Among the weird stuff it doesn’t effect cats or most animals or plants. Basically we either need a universal vaccine which is still being developed or we may need quantum radar to kill off the virus in our bodies when it comes out either that or foglet armor to not breathe it in like Ironman. I find it is just an odd virus as essentially it evolves so fast past even human beings abilities to fend it off even with suits it seems to spread so fast that it cannot be completely contained. From dogs that sniff it out it seems sorta everywhere. I know minor things like high dosages of vitamin c work with zinc and probiotics which was the first way to battle it when it didn’t become this whole pandemic because oddly enough it wasn’t a big deal in previous years because the 19th version of the virus. I know some things that kill it off are ultra violet and lysol as well as bleach. So it makes me think it is more a bioweapon where the universal vaccine would work. But oddly enough I am uncertain if it really dies off especially if it is airborne. If we can destroy the virus by reprogramming it to be sterile or innert or even for it to just kill itself off with crispr like we have done with mosquitoes to stop malaria. We can easily make new vaccines which is good but nearly every year or so there is an entirely new version. This isn’t new but it sorta is like the flu. But there are some theories that I sorta have where it seems to be near heat sources where it grows. Like my uncle who had the virus which we had him turn off electricity and also do vitamin c probiotics and zinc which did work. He ended up getting an antibody naturally this way. I personally got the vaccine and found that it does work but when the new delta version came out it did the same as the last one it sorta just randomly evolves for some reason even smells similar but oddly enough it still remains even after all the lysol. So to me it seems like a bioweapon that is self evolving which is we could use the mechanism to essentially evolve ourselves taking the components of it. If this was a nanobot swarm I would say it spreads from radio waves or something but this virus keeps spreading in odd ways like even from the sky. Which sorta makes me believe that it is sorta being manipulated maybe by a signal perhaps or it has its own program inside it. It reminds me of a Grey goo nanobot swarm that keeps evolving but the biological virus version. I mean it could actually be an exterrestial virus there was a meteorite that came around then and odd things that followed from the meteorite like dogs attacking people and cats attacking people even huge mountain lions. Which makes me think of a sorta an invasion of something. We need to maybe get the viruses input and output to find what it is going to do next. All and all seems odd because even other viruses don’t evolve or like fly or spread that fast. Ideally we should have cyborg nanobots running through Ironman in avengers endgame but so far our best better is treating it like the flu pumping out a new vaccine each year till we know a universal vaccine like using henreitta lacks immortal unlimited cell division cells like they did with polio. But till then we need to keep watching the virus as seems sorta more than it appears based on its original version.

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I am pleased to announce that my lead-author review paper has been published in ACS Nano! If you are interested in learning about the convergence of synthetic biology and adenoviral gene therapy, I encourage you to check out my paper.

If you cannot access the full text, I have also posted a local copy at the following link: https://logancollinsblog.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/synthet…s-2021.pdf.

#ACS #ACSNano #SyntheticBiology #GeneTherapy #Biology #Biotech #Science #Biotechnology #Nanotechnology #Adenovirus #Engineering #Virology

Continue reading “Synthetic Biology Approaches for Engineering Next-Generation Adenoviral Gene Therapies” »

COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and existing gene therapies, including those built with the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool, are delivered into cells with viral vectors or lipid nanoparticles. A research team led by CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, Ph.D., of the Broad Institute has developed a new mRNA delivery system that harnesses a human protein.

The system, dubbed SEND, leverages the ability of a human protein called PEG10 to bind to its own mRNA and form a protective capsule around it. In a new study published in Science, Zhang and colleagues engineered PEG10 to take on RNA cargoes of their choice and successfully delivered the system to mouse and human cells.

The findings support SEND as an efficient delivery platform for RNA-based gene therapies that can be repeatedly dosed, the researchers suggested. Because SEND uses a protein that’s produced naturally in the body, it may not trigger immune responses that can render gene therapies ineffective, the team said.

US startup has combined radioactive isotopes from nuclear waste with ultra-slim layers of nanodiamond to create a battery that purportedly can 28,000 years, Tibi Puiu reported for ZME Science last week.

Artificial camouflage is the functional mimicry of the natural camouflage that can be observed in a wide range of species^1,2,3. Especially, since the 1800s, there were a lot of interesting studies on camouflage technology for military purposes which increases survivability and identification of an anonymous object as belonging to a specific military force^4,5. Along with previous studies on camouflage technology and natural camouflage, artificial camouflage is becoming an important subject for recently evolving technologies such as advanced soft robotics^1,6,7,8 electronic skin in particular^9,10,11,12. Background matching and disruptive coloration are generally claimed to be the underlying principles of camouflage covering many detailed subprinciples¹³, and these necessitate not only simple coloration but also a selective expression of various disruptive patterns according to the background. While the active camouflage found in nature mostly relies on the mechanical action of the muscle cells^14,15,16, artificial camouflage is free from matching the actual anatomies of the color-changing animals and therefore incorporates much more diverse strategies^{17,18,19,20,21,22}, but the dominant technology for the practical artificial camouflage at visible regime (400–700 nm wavelength), especially RGB domain, is not fully established so far. Since the most familiar and direct camouflage strategy is to exhibit a similar color to the background^23,24,25, a prerequisite of an artificial camouflage at a unit device level is to convey a wide range of the visible spectrum that can be controlled and changed as occasion demands^26,27,28. At the same time, the corresponding unit should be flexible and mechanically robust, especially for wearable purposes, to easily cover the target body as attachable patches without interrupting the internal structures, while being compatible with the ambient conditions and the associated movements of the wearer^29,30.

System integration of the unit device into a complete artificial camouflage device, on the other hand, brings several additional issues to consider apart from the preceding requirements. Firstly, the complexity of the unit device is anticipated to be increased as the sensor and the control circuit, which are required for the autonomous retrieval and implementation of the adjacent color, are integrated into a multiplexed configuration. Simultaneously, for nontrivial body size, the concealment will be no longer effective with a single unit unless the background consists of a monotone. As a simple solution to this problem, unit devices are often laterally pixelated^12,18 to achieve spatial variation in the coloration. Since its resolution is determined by the numbers of the pixelated units and their sizes, the conception of a high-resolution artificial camouflage device that incorporates densely packed arrays of individually addressable multiplexed units leads to an explosive increase in the system complexity. While on the other hand, solely from the perspective of camouflage performance, the delivery of high spatial frequency information is important for more natural concealment by articulating the texture and the patterns of the surface to mimic the microhabitats of the living environments^31,32. As a result, the development of autonomous and adaptive artificial camouflage at a complete device level with natural camouflage characteristics becomes an exceptionally challenging task.

Our strategy is to combine thermochromic liquid crystal (TLC) ink with the vertically stacked multilayer silver (Ag) nanowire (NW) heaters to tackle the obstacles raised from the earlier concept and develop more practical, scalable, and high-performance artificial camouflage at a complete device level. The tunable coloration of TLC, whose reflective spectrum can be controlled over a wide range of the visible spectrum within the narrow range of temperature^33,34, has been acknowledged as a potential candidate for artificial camouflage applications before^21,34, but its usage has been more focused on temperature measurement^35,36,37,38 owing to its high sensitivity to the temperature change. The susceptible response towards temperature is indeed an unfavorable feature for the thermal stability against changes in the external environment, but also enables compact input range and low power consumption during the operation once the temperature is accurately controlled.

Majoranas particles found.

Majorana particles have been getting bad publicity: a claimed discovery in ultracold nanowires had to be retracted. Now Leiden physicists open up a new door to detecting Majoranas in a different experimental system, the Fu-Kane heterostructure, they announce in Physical Review Letters.

Majorana particles are quasiparticles: collective movements of particles (electrons in this case) which behave as single particles. If detected in real life, they could be used to build stable quantum computers.

Continue reading “Stripes give away Majoranas” »