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Archive for the ‘chemistry’ category: Page 137

Mar 27, 2023

How cell mechanics influences everything

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, chemistry

“People study cells in the context of their biology and biochemistry, but cells are also simply physical objects you can touch and feel,” Guo says. “Just like when we construct a house, we use different materials to have different properties. A similar rule must apply to cells when forming tissues and organs. But really, not much is known about this process.”

His work in cell mechanics led him to MIT, where he recently received tenure and is the Class of ’54 Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

At MIT, Guo and his students are developing tools to carefully poke and prod cells, and observe how their physical form influences the growth of a tissue, organism, or disease such as cancer. His research bridges multiple fields, including cell biology, physics, and mechanical engineering, and he is working to apply the insights from cell mechanics to engineer materials for biomedical applications, such as therapies to halt the growth and spread of diseased and cancerous cells.

Mar 26, 2023

Photosynthesis Further Explained Using Quantum Chemical Calculations

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, quantum physics

Photosynthesis is the process that plants, algae, and even certain species of bacteria use to convert sunlight into oxygen and chemical energy stored as sugar (aka gluclose). But what are the mechanisms behind one of nature’s most profound processes?

These are questions that a team of researchers led by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) hope to answer as they used quantum chemical calculations to examine a photosynthesis protein complex known as photosystem I (PSI) in hopes of better understanding the complete process of photosynthesis and how plants are able to convert sunlight to energy, specifically pertaining to how chlorophylls and the reaction center play their roles in the process.

Mar 25, 2023

Big improvements to brain-computer interface

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, computing, cyborgs, engineering, neuroscience

When people suffer spinal cord injuries and lose mobility in their limbs, it’s a neural signal processing problem. The brain can still send clear electrical impulses and the limbs can still receive them, but the signal gets lost in the damaged spinal cord.

The Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE)—a collaboration of San Diego State University with the University of Washington (UW) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—is working on an implantable brain chip that can record neural electrical signals and transmit them to receivers in the limb, bypassing the damage and restoring movement. Recently, these researchers described in a study published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports a critical improvement to the technology that could make it more durable, last longer in the body and transmit clearer, stronger signals.

The technology, known as a brain-computer interface, records and transmits signals through electrodes, which are tiny pieces of material that read signals from brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters. By recording brain signals at the moment a person intends to make some movement, the interface learns the relevant electrical signal pattern and can transmit that pattern to the limb’s nerves, or even to a prosthetic limb, restoring mobility and motor function.

Mar 25, 2023

Developing smart light traps inspired by photosynthesis

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, nanotechnology, sustainability

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 ,” 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.

Mar 25, 2023

Using chemical exfoliation to produce superconducting tungsten disulfide ink

Posted by in categories: chemistry, computing, quantum physics

A team of chemists, engineers, material scientists and physicists from Princeton University, Rutgers University and the University of Regensburg has developed a chemical exfoliation technique to produce single-molecule-thick tungsten disulfide ink. The group describes their technique in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

As research continues into the creation of truly useful quantum computers, scientists continue to search for new materials that could support such machines. In this new effort, the research team looked into finding ways to print very cold circuits inside quantum computers using superconducting ink.

The new method involved a material consisting of layers of disulfide and potassium. The researchers exfoliated the material by dunking it into a sulfuric acid solution. This dissolved the potassium and left behind single-molecule layers of tungsten disulfide. The final step involved rinsing the acid and remnants in it, leaving the layers of tungsten suspended in a tub of water. In this state, the researchers found that the layers of tungsten disulfide could be used as a form of ink that could be printed onto various types of surfaces, such as plastic, silicon or glass. This left a one-molecule-thick coating on the material.

Mar 25, 2023

The Personalized Stem Cells That Could One Day Treat Parkinson’s and Heart Failure

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, neuroscience

Could an injection of lab-cultured brain cells, created from a person’s own cells, reverse symptoms of Parkinson’s disease? That’s an idea that Aspen Neuroscience Inc., a startup based in San Diego, plans to test in human trials later this year.

In patients with Parkinson’s, neurons die and lose the ability to make the chemical dopamine, leading to erratic, uncontrollable movements. Aspen Neuroscience will test if the newly injected cells can mature into dopamine producers, stopping the debilitating symptoms of this incurable disease, says Damien McDevitt, the company’s chief executive officer. Tests in animals have shown promise, the company says.

Mar 24, 2023

Asteroid discovery suggests ingredients for life on Earth came from space

Posted by in categories: biological, chemistry, space

March 21 (Reuters) — Two organic compounds essential for living organisms have been found in samples retrieved from the asteroid Ryugu, buttressing the notion that some ingredients crucial for the advent of life arrived on Earth aboard rocks from space billions of years ago.

Scientists said on Tuesday they detected uracil and niacin in rocks obtained by the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft from two sites on Ryugu in 2019. Uracil is one of the chemical building blocks for RNA, a molecule carrying directions for building and operating living organisms. Niacin, also called Vitamin B3 or nicotinic acid, is vital for their metabolism.

The Ryugu samples, which looked like dark-gray rubble, were transported 155 million miles (250 million km) back to Earth and returned to our planet’s surface in a sealed capsule that landed in 2020 in Australia’s remote outback for analysis in Japan.

Mar 24, 2023

Using high-precision quantum chemistry to study super-efficient energy transfer in photosynthesis

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, quantum physics

Photosynthesis drives all life on Earth. Complex processes are required for the sunlight-powered conversion of carbon dioxide and water to energy-rich sugar and oxygen. These processes are driven by two protein complexes, photosystems I and II. In photosystem I, sunlight is used with an efficiency of almost 100%. Here a complex network of 288 chlorophylls plays the decisive role.

A team led by LMU chemist Regina de Vivie-Riedle has now characterized these chlorophylls with the help of high-precision quantum chemical calculations—an important milestone toward a comprehensive understanding of energy transfer in this system. This discovery may help exploit its efficiency in artificial systems in the future.

The chlorophylls in I capture sunlight in an antenna complex and transfer the energy to a reaction center. There, the is used to trigger a redox process—that is to say, a whereby electrons are transferred. The quantum yield of photosystem I is almost 100%, meaning that almost every absorbed photon leads to a redox event in the reaction center.

Mar 24, 2023

An ‘ecosystem’ of tools to boost machine learning-based design of metal–organic frameworks

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, robotics/AI

A team of chemists and computer scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, the University of California and Institut des Sciences et Ingenierie Chimiques, Ecole, have developed an ecosystem of tools to boost machine-learning-based design of metal-organic frameworks.

In their study, reported in the journal ACS Central Science, Kevin Maik Jablonka, Andrew Rosen, Aditi Krishnapriyan and Berend Smit coded tools to convert data into machine learning inputs to create a system to boost machine-learning frameworks.

Reticular chemistry is the science of designing and synthesizing porous crystalline materials with certain predefined structures and properties (building blocks). These materials, known as (MOFs) have applications in gas storage, separation, catalysis, sensing and drug delivery.

Mar 24, 2023

Scientists Identify “Pioneer Peptide” That May Have Sparked Life on Earth

Posted by in categories: alien life, chemistry, physics

A team of Rutgers University scientists dedicated to pinpointing the primordial origins of metabolism – a set of core chemical reactions that first powered life on Earth – has identified part of a protein that could provide scientists clues to detecting planets on the verge of producing life.

The research, published on March 10 in the journal Science Advances.

<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.