The Key to Mass-producing Nanomaterials

NNanoparticles form in a 3-D-printed microfluidic channel. Each droplet shown here is about 250 micrometers in diameter, and contains billions of platinum nanoparticles. CPhoto: Richard Brutchey and Noah Malmstadt, USC
Nanoparticles form in a 3-D-printed microfluidic channel. Each droplet shown here is about 250 micrometers in diameter, and contains billions of platinum nanoparticles. CPhoto: Richard Brutchey and Noah Malmstadt, USC
anoparticles can be found in everything from drug delivery formulations to pollution controls on cars to HD TV sets. With special properties derived from their tiny size and subsequently increased surface area, they're critical to industry and scientific research.

They're also expensive and tricky to make.

Now, researchers at USC have created a new way to manufacture nanoparticles that will transform the process from a painstaking, batch-by-batch drudgery into a large-scale, automated assembly line.

Bacteria Take 'RNA Mug Shots' of Threatening Viruses

Scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, the Stanford University School of Medicine and two other institutions have discovered that bacteria have a system that can recognize and disrupt dangerous viruses using a newly identified mechanism involving ribonucleic acid (RNA). It is similar to the CRISPR/Cas system that captures foreign DNA. The discovery might lead to better ways to thwart viruses that kill agricultural crops and interfere with the production of dairy products such as cheese and yogurt.

The research appears online Feb. 25 in the journal Science.

Both RNA and DNA are critical for life. In humans and many other organisms, DNA molecules act as the body's blueprints, while RNA molecules act as the construction crew—reading the blueprints, building the body and maintaining the functions of life.

Experimental Ebola Antibody Protects Monkeys

Scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and colleagues have discovered that a single monoclonal antibody—a protein that attacks viruses—isolated from a human Ebola virus disease survivor protected non-human primates when given as late as five days after lethal Ebola infection.

The antibody can now advance to testing in humans as a potential treatment for Ebola virus disease. There are currently no licensed treatments for Ebola infection, which caused more than 11,000 deaths in the 2014-2015 outbreak in West Africa. The findings are described in two articles to be published online by Science on February 25.

Iceland to Stop Hunting Whales

Good news for wildlife activists across the globe—one of the world’s last whaling companies has decided to pull the plug on its annual whale hunt this summer, because of its difficulty to market the meat.

Iceland’s Hvalur company, which has killed 155 fin whales in the waters of far North in 2015, has told Icelandic press Morgunbladid on Wednesday that Japan, its main market for fin whale, has insisted that the meat pass a full chemical analysis before going on market.

According to Hvalur’s CEO Kristjan Loftsson, Japan’s methods of testing whale meat are outdated and make it too difficult to market his products. Norway faced similar issues last year, when Japan found that the country’s whale meat violated health standards, according to Vice News.

11,000-Year-Old Engraved Pendant is Britain’s Earliest Known Mesolithic Art

When Prof. Nicky Milner, of the Univ. of York’s Dept. of Archaeology, was 15-years-old, she went on an Anglo Saxon excavation. The trip was only supposed to last three days, but the budding archaeologist ended up staying for six weeks.

“The fact that you can touch things that have been in the ground for thousands of years thrilled me,” she told R&D Magazine of her early interest in archaeology.

But five miles away from where Milner grew up sat a treasure trove of archaeological goodies. Located in North Yorkshire, the Star Carr site was famously excavated by Grahame Clark between 1949 and 1951, and changed archeologists’ understanding of people from the Mesolithic Period. The earliest known house in Britain, the oldest evidence of carpentry in Europe, and headdresses made from red deer skulls and antlers (possibly worn by shamans who communed with the animal spirit world), all were found at the site.

“People here were not passing by—they were building structures and making their homes around the edge of the lake,” said Milner, noting that these ancient people weren’t the typical nomadic hunter-gatherers.

Transparency is Key to Open Innovation

In order to compete and win in today’s global marketplace, innovation-driven companies have to find ways to create and develop products and services faster than ever before. Going outside their own four walls to source ideas and solutions in order to expedite the time-to-market cycle — commonly known as open innovation (OI) — has become a widely accepted and applied strategy for companies ranging from global chemical producers and automotive giants, to bioengineering and pharmaceutical companies, sports equipment, consumer and packaged goods makers – even state governments and the National Football League.

In the past, many organizations used open innovation as a “fix” when their R&D bench hit a roadblock or ran out of time.  Or there may have been a lone ranger in the department that went outside to source solutions - but only for his or her particular product line.  These situations required a modicum of transparency.  The seeking organization had to share enough detail about the desired solution to generate high-quality submissions from outside engineers, technologists, inventors, and research laboratories.

Genetic Tree Research Sheds New Light on Disease Outbreaks

Scientists have a new tool for unraveling the mysteries of how diseases such as HIV move through a population, thanks to insights into phylogenetics, the creation of an organism's genetic tree and evolutionary relationships.

"It turns out that three different types of transmission histories are possible between two persons who might have infected each other," said Thomas Leitner of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the corresponding author of a new paper out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Using phylogenetic inference in the epidemiological investigations of HIV transmission, we've determined that between two sampled, potentially epidemiologically linked persons, we can now evaluate the possibility that an unsampled intermediary or common source existed, even without a sample from that individual."

Like a detective inferring the existence of an unseen actor in a sequence of events, the Los Alamos team used computational phylogenetic analysis to examine how strains of HIV, both in computer modeling and compared with real-life case studies, would be transmitted.

Team Offers New, Simpler Law of Complex Wrinkle Patterns

In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Oxford University describe a new, more general law for predicting the wavelength of complex wrinkle patterns, including those found on curved surfaces, plus experimental results to support it.

The work is expected to help materials scientists to use wrinkles to sculpt surface topography, or to use the wrinkles on surfaces to infer the properties of the underlying materials such as textiles and biological tissues.

Physicist Narayanan Menon points out that the work is crucial for understanding how wrinkle wavelength depends on properties of the sheet and the underlying liquid or solid. Findings appear this month in an early online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As he explains, "Wrinkles sometimes appear in nature in the form of regular, parallel corrugations such as the furrows on your forehead or the ripples formed when you blow on a cup of hot chocolate. Physicists understand the characteristic spacing between these wrinkles, known as the wrinkle wavelength, as a compromise between the thin skin, which resists being bent into a very fine pattern, and the underlying material, which resists bulging into a coarser pattern. But our understanding is limited to cases where the wrinkles are uniform, and laid out in parallel lines on a flat surface."

Graphene Slides Smoothly Across Gold

Graphene, a modified form of carbon, offers versatile potential for use in coating machine components and in the field of electronic switches. An international team of researchers led by physicists at the University of Basel has been studying the lubricity of this material on the nanometer scale. Since it produces almost no friction at all, it could drastically reduce energy loss in machines when used as a coating, as the researchers report in the journal Science.

In the future, graphene could be used as an extremely thin coating, resulting in almost zero energy loss between mechanical parts. This is based on the exceptionally high lubricity – or so-called superlubricity – of modified carbon in the form of graphene. Applying this property to mechanical and electromechanical devices would not only improve energy efficiency but also considerably extend the service life of the equipment.

An international community of physicists from the University of Basel and the Empa have studied the above-average lubricity of graphene using a two-pronged approach combining experimentation and computation. To do this, they anchored two-dimensional strips of carbon atoms – so-called graphene nanoribbons – to a sharp tip and dragged them across a gold surface. Computer-based calculations were used to investigate the interactions between the surfaces as they moved across one another. Using this approach, the research team led by Prof. Ernst Meyer at the University of Basel is hoping to fathom out the causes of superlubricity; until now, little research has been carried out in this area.



By studying the graphene ribbons, the researchers hope to learn about more than just the slip behavior. Measuring the mechanical properties of the carbon-based material also makes sense because it offers excellent potential for a whole range of applications in the field of coatings and micromechanical switches. In future, even electronic switches could be replaced by nanomechanical switches, which would use less energy for switching on and off than conventional transistors.

The experiments revealed almost perfect, frictionless movement. It is possible to move graphene ribbons with a length of 5 to 50 nanometers using extremely small forces (2 to 200 piconewtons). There is a high degree of consistency between the experimental observations and the computer simulation.

A discrepancy between the model and reality appears only at greater distances (five nanometers or more) between the measuring tip and the gold surface. This is probably because the edges of the graphene nanoribbons are saturated with hydrogen, which was not accounted for in the simulations.

“Our results help us to better understand the manipulation of chemicals at the nano level and pave the way for creating frictionless coatings,” write the researchers.

Rutgers University Prints 3D Maps for the Blind

Located in New Brunswick, N.J., the Joseph Kohn Training Center offers the blind and visually impaired a chance to learn necessary skills for independence. From kitchen and communication skills to braille and mobility skills, attendees jump into an intensive training program that lasts 20 weeks.

However, the building maps provided to program attendees, as described by Rutgers Univ., are “clunky, old wooden maps,” and the building has “few braille labels on walls.”

Mechanical engineering student Jason Kim and Prof. Howon Lee, of the Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, are making strides to improve the maps offered to students via 3D printing.

The idea was spawned from a trip Lee took to the Korea Institute of Technology. While there, he witnessed the institute create educational materials for children with 3D printers.

The State of the Muscular Dystrophy Drug Pipeline

The path to marketing an effective drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) hit another snag earlier this week.

PTC Therapeutics, a drug maker located South Plainfield, NJ, received a Refusal to File letter from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for PTC’s DMD candidate Translarna. The document explained PTC’s marketing application needed more information to warrant an in-depth review, according to the company’s press release.

DMD is a rare genetic disorder with no cure that induces gradual muscle loss by inhibiting the growth of a protein called dystrophin. It mostly affects young boys, according to the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The lack of this protein can make it difficult for afflicted individuals to breathe or move after a certain amount of time.

Building, Living Breathing Supercomputers

The substance that provides energy to all the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of super-computers. That is what an international team of researchers led by Prof. Nicolau, the Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill, believe. They've published an article on the subject earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), in which they describe a model of a biological computer that they have created that is able to process information very quickly and accurately using parallel networks in the same way that massive electronic super computers do.

Except that the model bio supercomputer they have created is a whole lot smaller than current super-computers, uses much less energy, and uses proteins present in all living cells to function.

Companies Experiment With Build-Your-Own Smartphone Programs

If you could build your dream smartphone, what would it look like? Now suppose you could put it together yourself.

That's the promise of modular design, a new concept in smartphones that would basically let you snap together different components like Lego blocks. Say you want a great camera. Snap! A vivid screen and good sound because you watch a lot of video? Snap! But maybe you could live with a smaller battery because you spend most of your day at home or work. Snap!

Sure, phones now offer choices in color and storage. Motorola goes a bit further in letting you choose custom backs made of wood or leather. But the rest of the phone is pretty standard. You're stuck with the processor, battery and other hardware chosen by Motorola, Apple, Samsung and other tech companies.

New Trigger For Self-Powered Mechanical Movement

A new way to use the chemical reactions of certain enzymes to trigger self-powered mechanical movement has been developed by a team of researchers at Penn State University and the University of Pittsburgh. A paper describing the team's research, titled "Convective flow reversal in self-powered enzyme micropumps," is published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"These pumps provide precise control over flow rate without the aid of an external power source and are capable of turning on in response to specific chemicals in solution," said Ayusman Sen, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Penn State. "They also can remain viable and capable of turning on even after prolonged storage." Sen and Penn State Graduate Student Isamar Ortiz did the research team's experiments, which reveal that "simple reactions triggered by enzymes can be used to combine sensing and fluid pumping into single non-mechanical, self-powered, nano/microscale pumps that precisely control flow rate, and that turn on in response to specific stimuli," said Sen, who also made the initial discovery of enzyme pumps.

Will Autonomous Vehicles Increase Road Reliance?

While the driverless future has been touted as way for humanity to combat roadway accidents and diminish energy expenditure and greenhouse gas emissions, a new study from University of Leeds, University of Washington, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory claims the actual impact may be both positive and negative due to how it will change humanity’s relationship with vehicles.

“There is no doubt that vehicle automation offers several efficiency benefits, but if you can work, relax and even hold a meeting in your car that changes how you use it,” said the study’s lead author Zia Wadud, of the Univ. of Leeds, in a prepared statement. “That, in turn, may change the transport equation and the energy and environmental impact of road transport.”

Among the possible benefits, the researchers report that computer-directed driving styles may reduce energy usage up to 20 percent, traffic jams may be reduced up to 4 percent, and autonomous vehicles driving close to one another (known as platooning) can create aerodynamic savings up to 25 percent.

“There is a lot of hype around self-driving cars, much of it somewhat utopian in nature. But there are likely to be positives and negatives,” said co-author Don MacKenzie, of Univ. of Washington, in a prepared statement. “By taking a clear-eyed view, we can design and implement policies to maximize the benefits and minimalize the downsides of automated vehicles.”