Cambridge researchers have engineered a solar-powered “artificial leaf” that mimics photosynthesis to make valuable chemicals sustainably. Their biohybrid device combines organic semiconductors and enzymes to convert CO₂ and sunlight into formate with high efficiency. It’s durable, non-toxic, and runs without fossil fuels—paving the way for a greener chemical industry.
With the rapid expansion of the global solar energy industry, the number of solar panels has surged in recent years. However, pollutants accumulating on panel surfaces can significantly reduce energy conversion efficiency while traditional cleaning methods are highly water-intensive.
In response to this challenge, an international research team led by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has successfully developed a breakthrough technology, called “liquid droplet mops,” that uses only a minimal amount of water to effectively remove dust and pollutants from solar panel surfaces, significantly enhancing cleaning efficiency while conserving water.
The study was led by Professor Steven Wang, Associate Vice President (Resources Planning) and Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Energy and Environment. The project was conducted in collaboration with Professor Omar Matar from the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Imperial College London. The findings are published in Nature Sustainability.
Scientists have found a way to boost terahertz technology using particles thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand. Research published in Scientific Reports by Loughborough University’s Emergent Photonics Research Center shows how a sparse layer of nanoparticles can make materials that produce terahertz radiation more efficient.
Terahertz radiation sits between microwaves and infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum and has a range of potential uses. It can “see” through materials like clothing or plastic and detect chemical fingerprints, with applications in security screening, medical imaging, materials testing, and wireless communications.
But existing devices are limited by how efficiently they can generate terahertz waves.
Cancer cells excel at evading detection, but subtle chemical differences set them apart from healthy cells. Now, a team of scientists from Wageningen University & Research and Van Andel Institute has identified a way to exploit this distinction. Using a variant of CRISPR, a modern tool for editing DNA, they distinguished tumor DNA from healthy DNA and selectively cut only the former. The study, published today in Nature, is an early but promising step toward a cancer therapy that targets and destroys tumor cells with high precision.
The new method relies on methyl groups, small chemical tags attached to DNA that regulate whether genes are on or off. This process, called DNA methylation, is altered in cancer cells and can act as a molecular “fingerprint” that differentiates malignant cells from healthy ones.
A new study finds the proteins responsible for controlling which genes are expressed in a genome do more than simply turn a gene on or off. Essentially, each type of protein that interacts with a gene produces different behaviors—a finding with ramifications for everything from biomedical therapeutics to biological computing. A paper on the study, “Epigenome Regulators Imbue a Single Eukaryotic Promoter with Diverse Gene Expression Dynamics,” is published in the journal iScience.
At issue are “epigenome regulators.” Every organism’s genome is made up of DNA. But that DNA is bound up with many different proteins into very compact structures. The proteins that are bound to the DNA are called the epigenome, and they control which parts of the DNA get expressed. Your blood cells, nerve cells, and skin cells all have the same DNA, but perform very different functions. That’s because different parts of the DNA sequence are being expressed in each cell—and that is largely controlled by which proteins are bound to different parts of the DNA in each cell.
“We already knew that the proteins in the epigenome control the way DNA is expressed,” says Albert Keung, corresponding author of the study and an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. “Our goal here was to look at a single gene and quantify the full range of ways that the gene could be expressed by different proteins.” Keung is the Goodnight Distinguished Scholar in Innovation in Biotechnology and Biomolecular Engineering and director of biotechnology programs in NC State’s Integrative Sciences Initiative.
Researchers in the UC Santa Barbara Materials Department have uncovered the elusive quantum mechanism by which energetic electrons break chemical bonds inside microelectronic devices—a detrimental process that slowly degrades performance over time. The discovery, published as an Editors’ Suggestion in Physical Review B, explains decades-old experimental puzzles and moves scientists closer to engineering more reliable devices.
A tiny antibody component could fundamentally transform the treatment of cystic fibrosis: For the first time, researchers have succeeded in developing a so-called nanobody that penetrates directly into human cells and can repair the chloride channel most commonly affected in cystic fibrosis. The innovative therapeutic approach was developed in collaboration between teams from Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP). The results have now been published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.
The clinical picture of cystic fibrosis—also known as CF—is caused by genetic defects in the so-called CFTR channel. This channel regulates water and salt transport in the lung mucosa and ensures the production of sufficiently fluid mucus. In about 90% of cystic fibrosis patients, a mutation known as F508del is present in the CFTR channel, meaning that a single amino acid is missing at position 508 in its protein chain. This change causes CFTR to fold incorrectly and break down prematurely inside the cell, rather than functioning as a channel in the cell membrane of the airways.
As a result, patients have thick mucus in their lungs, and pathogens can no longer be effectively cleared. The consequence is chronic infection and inflammation of the airways, leading to a progressive loss of lung function—in the worst-case scenario, this necessitates a lung transplant.
Using a renewable energy source has multiple benefits, including reducing harmful emissions and dependence on fossil fuels while increasing efficiency. But many renewable energy sources have a higher cost than fossil fuels due to the materials needed to make them usable, such as platinum group metals (PGMs), and the high cost of storage.
A team of researchers led by Gang Wu, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is working to change that. The team is creating a heterostructure catalyst for an anion-exchange membrane water electrolyzer (AEMWE) that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from renewable sources. They created the catalyst with two phosphides that gave them an efficient method to extract hydrogen, a valuable yet low-cost source of zero-emissions fuel. The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Wu’s team has been looking for alternatives to catalysts that use expensive platinum group metals. In this research, their idea began with using sunlight, wind or water to create electricity that they could then use to separate hydrogen from water.