Lifeboat Foundation

The world’s coastlines harbor a largely untapped energy source: the salinity difference between seawater and freshwater. A new nanodevice can harness this difference to generate power.

A team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has reported a design for a nanofluidic device capable of converting ionic flow into usable electric power in the journal Nano Energy. The team believes that their device could be used to extract power from the natural ionic flows at seawater-freshwater boundaries.

University of Missouri researchers’ conceptual design of a nanomaterial could potentially pave the way for new uses of nanotechnology in medicine and science.

In a recent study, scientists at the University of Missouri developed a proof of concept for a nanocapsule — a microscopic container — capable of delivering a specific “payload” to a targeted location.

While beyond the scope of this study, the discovery has the potential to revolutionize the delivery of drugs, nutrients, and other chemicals in humans and plants. The power of the forward-thinking idea for this tiny delivery mechanism comes from its inventive structure, said Gary Baker, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and study co-author.

True to form, a “strange metal” quantum material proved strangely quiet in recent quantum noise experiments at Rice University. Published this week in Science, the measurements of quantum charge fluctuations known as “shot noise” provide the first direct evidence that electricity seems to flow through strange metals in an unusual liquidlike form that cannot be readily explained in terms of quantized packets of charge known as quasiparticles.

“The noise is greatly suppressed compared to ordinary wires,” said Rice’s Doug Natelson, the study’s corresponding author. “Maybe this is evidence that quasiparticles are not well-defined things or that they’re just not there and charge moves in more complicated ways. We have to find the right vocabulary to talk about how charge can move collectively.”

The experiments were performed on nanoscale wires of a well-studied quantum critical material with a precise 1−2−2 ratio of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon (YbRh₂Si₂). The material contains a high degree of quantum entanglement that produces temperature-dependent behavior.

Human chromosomes are long polymer chains that store genetic information. The nucleus of each cell contains the entire human genome (DNA) encoded on 46 chromosomes with a total length of about 2 meters. To fit into the microscopic cell nucleus and at the same time provide constant access to genetic information, chromosomes are folded in the nucleus in a special, predetermined way. DNA folding is an urgent task at the intersection of polymer physics and systems biology.

A few years ago, as one of the mechanisms of chromosome folding, researchers put forward a hypothesis of active extrusion of loops on chromosomes by molecular motors. Although the ability of motors to extrude DNA in vitro has been demonstrated, observing loops in a living cell experimentally is a technically very difficult, almost impossible, task.

A team of scientists from Skoltech, MIT, and other leading scientific organizations in Russia and the U.S. have presented a physical model of a polymer folded into loops. The analytical solution of this model allowed scientists to reproduce the universal features of chromosome packing based on the experimental data—the image shows the peak-dip derivative curve of the contact probability.

Biological computing machines, such as micro and nano-implants that can collect important information inside the human body, are transforming medicine. Yet, networking them for communication has proven challenging. Now, a global team, including EPFL researchers, has developed a protocol that enables a molecular network with multiple transmitters.

First, there was the Internet of Things (IoT) and now, at the interface of computer science and biology, the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) promises to revolutionize medicine and health care. The IoBNT refers to biosensors that collect and process data, nano-scale Labs-on-a-Chip that run medical tests inside the body, the use of bacteria to design biological nano-machines that can detect pathogens, and nano-robots that swim through the bloodstream to perform targeted drug delivery and treatment.

“Overall, this is a very, very exciting research field,” explained Assistant Professor Haitham Al Hassanieh, head of the Laboratory of Sensing and Networking Systems in EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC). “With advances in bio-engineering, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology, the idea is that nano-biosensors will revolutionize medicine because they can reach places and do things that current devices or larger implants can’t,” he continued.

For decades, researchers have sought ways to precisely manipulate and identify individual molecules like DNA in liquid environments. Such capabilities could revolutionize areas ranging from disease diagnosis to drug development. However, the randomness of molecular movements in fluids has hindered progress.

Now, scientists from Shenzhen University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong report promising advances in optical tweezing techniques that allow exquisite control over nanoscale biological particles (Light: Science & Applications, “CRISPR-powered optothermal nanotweezers: Diverse bio-nanoparticle manipulation and single nucleotide identification”).

A The diagrammatic sketch of the three components in the solution: DNA@AuNS conjugate, CRISPR/Cas12a complex, and target ssDNA. b Optical setup, the BS, SPF, and TL are beam splitter, short pass filter, and tube lens (f = 200 mm), respectively. Additional details of the setup are provided in the Materials and Methods section. c Dispersion of the three components in the solution without optical heating. d Optothermal net force induced migration and DNA@AuNS conjugate cleavage upon optical heating, the heating laser power is 0.5 mW. e Observation of the cleavage after the optical heating is switched off. (© Light: Science & Applications) (click on image to enlarge)

Maples Scientific Publisher brings together the best original research, analyses, reviews, news updates, practice updates, and thought-provoking editorials.

MIT researchers and colleagues have demonstrated a way to precisely control the size, composition, and other properties of nanoparticles key to the reactions involved in a variety of clean energy and environmental technologies. They did so by leveraging ion irradiation, a technique in which beams of charged particles bombard a material.

They went on to show that nanoparticles created this way have superior performance over their conventionally made counterparts.

“The materials we have worked on could advance several technologies, from fuel cells to generate CO₂-free electricity to the production of clean hydrogen feedstocks for the chemical industry [through electrolysis cells],” says Bilge Yildiz, leader of the work and a professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Autoimmune disorders are among the most prevalent chronic diseases across the globe. Emerging treatments for autoimmune disorders focus on “adoptive cell therapies,” or those using cells from a patient’s own body to achieve immunosuppression. These therapeutic cells are recognized by the patient’s body as “self,” therefore limiting side effects, and are specifically engineered to localize the intended therapeutic effect.

In treating autoimmune diseases, current adoptive cell therapies have largely centered around the regulatory T cell (T_reg), which is defined by the expression of the Forkhead box protein 3, orFoxp3. Although T_regs offer great potential, using them for therapeutic purposes remains a major challenge. In particular, current delivery methods result in inefficient engineering of T cells.

T_regs only compose approximately 5%–10% of circulating peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Furthermore, T_regs lack more specific surface markers that differentiate them from other T cell populations. These hurdles make it difficult to harvest, purify and grow T_regs to therapeutically relevant numbers. Although there are additional tissue-resident T_regs in non-lymphoid organs such as in skeletal muscle and visceral adipose tissue, these T_regs are severely inaccessible and low in number.