Lifeboat Foundation

Mobile phones and computers are currently responsible for up to 8% of the electricity use in the world. This figure has been doubling each past decade but nothing prevents it from skyrocketing in the future. Unless we find a way for boosting energy efficiency in information and communications technology, that is. An international team of researchers, including Ikerbasque Research Associate Alexey Nikitin (DIPC), has just published in Nature ¹ a breakthrough in quantum physics that could deliver exactly that: electronics and communications technology with ultralow energy consumption.

Future information and communication technologies will rely on the manipulation of not only electrons but also of light at the nanometer-scale. Squeezing light to such a small size has been a major goal in nanophotonics for many years. Particularly strong light squeezing can be achieved with polaritons, quasiparticles resulting from the strong coupling of photons with a dipole-carrying excitation, at infrared frequencies in two-dimensional materials, such as graphene and hexagonal boron nitride. Polaritons can be found in materials consisting of two-dimensional layers bound by weak van der Waals forces, the so-called van der Waals materials. These polaritons can be tuned by electric fields or by adjusting the material thickness, leading to applications including nanolasers, tunable infrared and terahertz detectors, and molecular sensors.

But there is a major problem: even though polaritons can have long lifetimes, they have always been found to propagate along all directions (isotropic) of the material surface, thereby losing energy quite fast, which limits their application potential.

Type: Novel lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-encapsulated mRNA vaccine encoding for a prefusion stabilized form of the Spike (S) protein.

Status: Moderna said May 29 the first patients in both cohorts were dosed in the company’s Phase II trial (NCT04405076) assessing mRNA-1273. The study is designed to evaluate the safety, reactogenicity and immunogenicity of two vaccinations of mRNA-1273, given 28 days apart. plans to enroll 600 healthy participants across two cohorts: 300 adults ages 18–55 years, and 300 ages 55 years and up. Participants will be assigned to placebo, a 50 μg or a 100 μg dose at both vaccinations, and will be followed through 12 months after the second vaccination.

Rice University scientists have developed an easy and affordable tool to count and characterize nanoparticles.

Scientists create smallest semiconductor laser that works in visible range at room temperature.

An international team of researchers led by researchers from ITMO University announced the development of the world’s most compact semiconductor laser that works in the visible range at room temperature. According to the authors of the research, the laser is a nanoparticle of only 310 nanometers in size (which is 3,000 times less than a millimeter) that can produce green coherent light at room temperature. The research article was published in ACS Nano.

This year, the international community of optical physicists celebrates the anniversary of a milestone event: 60 years ago, in the middle of May, American physicist Theodor Maiman demonstrated the operation of the first optical quantum generator — a laser. Now, Sixty years later, an international team of scientists published a work where they demonstrated experimentally the world’s most compact semiconductor laser that operates in the visible range at room temperature. This means that the coherent green light that it produces can be easily registered and even seen by a naked eye using a standard optical microscope.

““This is the first time we can actually see the dynamics of light while it is trapped in nanomaterials, rather than relying on computer simulations,” Technion-Israel researcher Kangpeng Wang said in a press release.”

Scientists can now observe what they previously needed to simulate or model.

A team including researchers from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo has successfully captured video of single molecules in motion at 1,600 frames per second. This is 100 times faster than previous experiments of this nature. They accomplished this by combining a powerful electron microscope with a highly sensitive camera and advanced image processing. This method could aid many areas of nanoscale research.

When it comes to film and video, the number of images captured or displayed every second is known as the frames per second or fps. If video is captured at high fps but displayed at lower fps, the effect is a smooth slowing down of motion which allows you to perceive otherwise inaccessible details. For reference, films shown at cinemas have usually been displayed at 24 frames per second for well over 100 years. In the last decade or so, special microscopes and cameras have allowed researchers to capture atomic-scale events at about 16 fps. But a new technique has increased this to a staggering 1,600 fps.

Sometimes, breaking rules is not a bad thing. Especially when the rules are apparent laws of nature that apply in bulk material, but other forces appear in the nanoscale.

“Nature knows how to go from the small, atomic scale to larger scales,” said Melik Demirel, professor of engineering science and mechanics and holder of the Lloyd and Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair in Biomimetic Materials. “Engineers have used mixing rules to enhance properties, but have been limited to a single scale. We’ve never gone down to the next level of hierarchical engineering. The key challenge is that there are apparent forces at different scales from molecules to bulk.”

Composites, by definition, are composed of more than one component. Mixture rules say that, while the ratios of one component to another can vary, there is a limit on the physical properties of the composite. According to Demirel, his team has broken that limit, at least on the nanoscale.

A team of scientists from Stanford University is working with researchers at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility located at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to develop a gene-targeting, antiviral agent against COVID-19.

Last year, Stanley Qi, an assistant professor in the departments of bioengineering, and chemical and systems biology at Stanford University and his team had begun working on a technique called PAC-MAN—or Prophylactic Antiviral CRISPR in human cells —that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to fight influenza.

But that all changed in January, when news of the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Qi and his team were suddenly confronted with a mysterious new virus for which no one had a clear solution. “So we thought, ‘Why don’t we try using our PAC-MAN technology to fight it?’” said Qi.

Taking inspiration from nature’s nanotech that creates the stunning color of butterfly wings, a University of Central Florida researcher is creating technology to make extremely low-power, ultra-high-definition displays and screens that are easier on the eyes.

The new technology creates digital displays that are lit by surrounding light and are more natural looking than current display technologies that rely on energy-intensive bright lights hidden behind screens. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This display is more of a natural look than your current computer or smartphone screens,” said Debashis Chanda, an associate professor in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and principal investigator of the research. “It is like seeing a portrait on the wall at your house. It doesn’t have that glare or extra light. It is more like looking at the natural world.”