Lifeboat Foundation

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” »

Deployment of functional circuits on a 3D freeform surface is of significant interest to wearable devices on curvilinear skin/tissue surfaces or smart Internet-of-Things with sensors on 3D objects. Here we present a new fabrication strategy that can directly print functional circuits either transient or long-lasting onto freeform surfaces by intense pulsed light-induced mass transfer of zinc nanoparticles (Zn NPs). The intense pulsed light can locally raise the temperature of Zn NPs to cause evaporation. Lamination of a kirigami-patterned soft semi-transparent polymer film with Zn NPs conforming to a 3D surface results in condensation of Zn NPs to form conductive yet degradable Zn patterns onto a 3D freeform surface for constructing transient electronics. Immersing the Zn patterns into a copper sulfate or silver nitrate solution can further convert the transient device to a long-lasting device with copper or silver. Functional circuits with integrated sensors and a wireless communication component on 3D glass beakers and seashells with complex surface geometries demonstrate the viability of this manufacturing strategy.

At the University of Chicago, scientists have developed an absolutely innovative, promising treatment for COVID-19 in the form of nanoparticles with the ability to trap SARS-CoV-2 viruses inside the body and use the body’s own immune system to kill them.

The “nanotraps” lure the virus by imitating the target cells infected by the virus. When the virus gets trapped by the nanotraps, it is then sequestered from other cells and targeted for destruction by the immune system.

Theoretically, these nanotraps could be used on different variants of the virus, resulting in a promising new way to suppress the virus in the future. The therapy is still in the early stages of testing, but the researchers believe that it could be administered through a nasal spray as a treatment for COVID-19.

The jewels of the microbial world, when seen with new nano-scale imaging techniques, look like little modernist cathedrals.

Bio-Digital Twins, Quantum Computing, And Precision Medicine — Mr. Kazuhiro Gomi, President and CEO, and Dr. Joe Alexander, MD, Ph.D., Director, Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab, NTT Research.

Mr. Kazuhiro Gomi, is President and CEO of NTT Research (https://ntt-research.com/), a division of The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, commonly known as NTT (https://www.global.ntt/), a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Mr. Gomi has been at NTT for more than 30 years and was involved in product management/product development activities at the beginning of his tenure. In September of 2009, Mr. Gomi was first named to the Global Telecoms Business Power100 — a list of the 100 most powerful and influential people in the telecoms industry. He was the CEO of NTT America Inc. from 2010 to 2019 and also served on the Board of Directors at NTT Communications from 2012 to 2019. Mr. Gomi received a Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Keio University, Tokyo. Mr. Gomi is a member of the board at US Japan Council, a non-profit organization aimed at fostering a better relationship between the US and Japan.

Continue reading “Kazuhiro Gomi & Dr. Joe Alexander — Bio-Digital Twins, Quantum Computing, Precision Medicine — NTT” »

A nanoparticle diagnostic tool developed by MIT can detect cancer in urine. It could also be used in scans to detect the disease anywhere in the body.

Prior to 1970, bulletproof vests were pretty iffy, with a history extending as far as the 1500s when there were attempts to make metal armor that was bulletproof. By the 20th century there was ballistic nylon, but it took kevlar to produce garments with real protection against projectile impact. Now a 3D printed nanomaterial might replace kevlar.

A group of scientists have published a paper that interconnected tetrakaidecahedrons made up of carbon struts that are arranged via two-photon lithography.

We know that tetrakaidecahedrons sound like a modern invention, but, in fact, they were proposed by Lord Kelvin in the 19th century as a shape that would allow things to be packed together with minimum surface area. Sometimes known as a Kelvin cell, the shape is used to model foam, among other things.

When molecules are excited, they can give rise to a variety of energy conversion phenomena, such as light emission and photoelectric or photochemical conversion. To unlock new energy conversion functions in organic materials, researchers should be able to understand the nature of a material’s excited state and control it.

So far, many scientists have used spectroscopy techniques based on laser light in research focusing on excited states. Nonetheless, they were unable to use laser light to examine nanoscale materials, due to its limitations in so-called diffraction. The spectroscopic measurement methods applied to electron and scanning probe microscopes that can observe substances with atomic resolutions, on the other hand, are still underdeveloped.

Researchers at RIKEN, the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), University of Tokyo and other Institutes in Japan have recently developed a laser nanospectroscopy technique that could be used to examine individual molecules. This technique, presented in a paper published in Science, could open up new possibilities for the development of various new technologies, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs), photovoltaics and photosynthetic cells.

Electrons in metals try to behave like obedient motorists, but they end up more like bumper cars. They may be reckless drivers, but a new Cornell-led study confirms this chaos has a limit established by the laws of quantum mechanics.

The team’s paper, “T-Linear Resistivity From an Isotropic Planckian Scattering Rate,” written in collaboration with researchers led by Louis Taillefer from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada, published July 28 in Nature. The paper’s lead author is Gael Grissonnanche, a postdoctoral fellow with the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science.

Metals carry electric current when electrons all move together in tandem. In most metals, such as the copper and gold used for electrical wiring, the electrons try to avoid each other and flow in unison. However, in the case of certain “strange” metals, this harmony is broken and electrons dissipate energy by bouncing off each other at the fastest rate possible. The laws of quantum mechanics essentially play the role of an electron traffic cop, dictating an upper limit on how often these collisions can occur. Scientists previously observed this limit on the collision rate, also known as the “Planckian limit,” but there is no concrete theory that explains why the limit should exist, nor was it known how electrons reach this limit in strange metals. So Ramshaw and his collaborators set out to carefully measure it.