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In this educational film scientists and engineers explain the construction of materials beginning at an atomic scale.
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Macromolecular machines acting on genes are at the core of life’s fundamental processes, including DNA replication and repair, gene transcription and regulation, chromatin packaging, RNA splicing, and genome editing. Here, we report the increasing role of computational biophysics in characterizing the mechanisms of “machines on genes”, focusing on innovative applications of computational methods and their integration with structural and biophysical experiments. We showcase how state-of-the-art computational methods, including classical and ab initio molecular dynamics to enhanced sampling techniques, and coarse-grained approaches are used for understanding and exploring gene machines for real-world applications.
Caltech engineers have made a significant breakthrough in the field of nano-and micro-architected materials by creating a novel material composed of multiple interconnected microscale knots.
Compared to structurally identical but unknotted materials, the presence of knots in this new material significantly enhances its toughness by enabling it to absorb more energy and deform more before returning to its original shape without any damage. These new knotted materials may find applications in biomedicine as well as in aerospace applications due to their durability, possible biocompatibility, and extreme deformability.
“The capability to overcome the general trade-off between material deformability and tensile toughness [the ability to be stretched without breaking] offers new ways to design devices that are extremely flexible, durable, and can operate in extreme conditions,” says former Caltech graduate student Widianto P. Moestopo (MS ‘19, Ph.D. ’22), now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Moestopo is the lead author of a paper on the nanoscale.
An exploration in nanotechnology and how even as highly advanced as it could be, might show no technosignature or SETI detectable signal, thus if all alien civilizations convert to a nanotechnological existence, then this would solve the Fermi Paradox.
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Speaker: George Tulevski, materials science engineer at IBM Research.
The exceptional electronic properties of carbon nanotubes, coupled with their small size, makes them ideal materials for future nanoelectronic devices. The integration of these materials into advanced microprocessors requires a radical shift in fabrication from conventional top-down process to bottom-up assembly where advances in sorting and directed assembly are needed. This presentation will briefly describe the challenges to future transistor scaling, highlight the advantages of employing carbon nanotubes for digital logic and describe the recent progress in this area.
In a world first, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers have created carbon nanotube transistors that outperform state-of-the-art silicon transistors.
A big milestone for nanotechnology, this breakthrough could enable longer battery life, faster wireless communication and faster processing speeds for devices like smartphones and laptops.
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A Korean research team has developed a large-scale stretchable and transparent electrode for use as a stretchable display. The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that a research team, led by Dr. Sang-Soo Lee and Dr. Jeong Gon Son at KIST’s Photo-Electronic Hybrids Research Center, has developed a technology to fabricate a large-area (larger than an A4 sized paper) wavy silver nanowire network electrode that is structurally stretchable with a high degree of conductivity and transparency.
Transparent electrodes, through which electricity flows, are essential for solar cell-and touchscreen-based display devices. An indium tin oxide (ITO)-based transparent electrode is currently commercialized for use. The ITO-based transparent electrode is made of a thin layer of metallic oxides that have very low stretchability and is very fragile. Thus, the ITO electrode is not well suited for flexible and wearable devices, which are expected to quickly become mainstream products in the electronic device market. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a new transparent electrode with stretchability as one of its main features.
A silver nanowire is tens of nanometers in diameter, and the nano material itself is long and thin like a stick. The small size of the nanowire allows it to be bent when an external force is applied. Since it is made of silver, a silver nanowire has excellent electrical conductivity and can be used in a random network of straight nanowires to fabricate a highly transparent and flexible electrode. However, despite the fact that silver nanowire is bendable and flexible, it cannot be used as a stretchable material.
Researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology and Southern University of Science and Technology have fabricated bifunctional flexible electrochromic energy-storage devices based on silver nanowire flexible transparent electrodes.
Publishing in the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, the team used silver nanowire flexible transparent electrodes as the current collector for a bifunctional flexible electrochromic supercapacitor.
This bifunctional flexible device can exhibit its energy status through color changes, and can serve as an energy supplier for various wearable electronics, such as physiological sensors. The findings could have a widespread impact on the future development of smart windows for energy-efficient buildings.
Plants use photosynthesis to harvest energy from sunlight. Now researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have applied this principle as the basis for developing new sustainable processes which in the future may produce syngas (synthetic gas) for the large-scale chemical industry and be able to charge batteries.
Syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, is an important intermediate product in the manufacture of many chemical starter materials such as ammonia, methanol and synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. “Syngas is currently made almost exclusively using fossil raw materials,” says Prof. Roland Fischer from the Chair of Inorganic and Organometallic Chemistry.
A yellow powder, developed by a research team led by Fischer, is to change all that. The scientists were inspired by photosynthesis, the process plants use to produce chemical energy from light. “Nature needs carbon dioxide and water for photosynthesis,” says Fischer. The nanomaterial developed by the researchers imitates the properties of the enzymes involved in photosynthesis. The “nanozyme” produces syngas using carbon dioxide, water and light in a similar manner.
Corneal transplants can be the last step to returning clear vision to many patients suffering from eye disease. Each year, approximately 80,000 corneal transplantations take place in the U.S. Worldwide, more than 184,000 corneal transplantation surgeries are performed annually.
However, rejection rates for the corneal grafts can be as high as 10%. This is largely due to poor patient compliance to the medications, which require frequent administrations of topical eyedrops over a long period of time.
This becomes especially acute when patients show signs of early rejection of the transplanted corneas. When this occurs, patients need to apply topical eyedrops hourly to rescue the corneal grafts from failure.
