Both Marie Curie and Lise Meitner, the only two women to be immortalized on the Periodic Table, celebrate the same November 7 birthday. Here are more reasons why they’re remarkable.
Circa 2009
March 19, 2009 Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, Japan, have been able to prove the existence of a “spin battery,” that could have significant applications including much faster, less expensive and use less energy consuming computer hard drives with no moving parts, and could even be developed to power cars.
A “spin battery” is “charged” by applying a large magnetic field to nano-magnets in a device called a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ). Like a toy car, the spin battery is “wound up” by applying a large magnetic field — no chemistry involved.
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Researchers at the University of Sussex have developed a glue which can unstick when placed in a magnetic field, meaning products otherwise destined for landfill, could now be dismantled and recycled at the end of their life.
Currently, items like mobile phones, microwaves and car dashboards are assembled using adhesives. It is a quick and relatively cheap way to make products but, due to problems dismantling the various materials for different recycling methods, most of these products will be destined for landfill.
However, Dr. Barnaby Greenland, Lecturer in Medicinal Chemistry, working in conjunction with Stanelco RF Technologies Ltd and Prof Wayne Hayes at the University of Reading, may have found a solution.
A study claims a new way to detect and attack cancer cells using technology traditionally reserved for solar power as the results showcased dramatic improvements.
The results published in Scientific Reports said that dramatic improvements were seen in light-activated fluorescent dyes for disease diagnosis, image-guided surgery and site-specific tumor treatment.
“We’ve tested this concept in breast, lung cancer and skin cancer cell lines and mouse models, and so far it’s all looking remarkably promising,” said Sophia, Michigan State University’s (MSU) biochemistry and molecular biologist.
Have you ever wondered how the Sun creates the energy that we get from it every day and how the other elements besides hydrogen have formed in our universe? Perhaps you know that this is due to fusion reactions where four nuclei of hydrogen join together to produce a helium nucleus. Such nucleosynthesis processes are possible solely due to the existence, in the first place, of stable deuterons, which are made up of a proton and a neutron.
Probing deeper, one finds that a deuteron consists of six light quarks. Interestingly, the strong interaction between quarks, which brings stability to deuterons, also allows for various other six-quark combinations, leading to the possible formation of many other deuteron-like nuclei. However, no such nuclei, though theoretically speculated about and searched for experimentally many times, have yet been observed.
All this may get changed with an exciting new finding, where, using a state-of-the-art first-principles calculation of lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the basic theory of strong interactions, a definite prediction of the existence of other deuteron-like nuclei has been made by TIFR’s physicists. Using the computational facility of the Indian Lattice Gauge Theory Initiative (ILGTI), Prof. Nilmani Mathur and postdoctoral fellow Parikshit Junnarkar in the Department of Theoretical Physics have predicted a set of exotic nuclei, which are not to be found in the Periodic Table. The masses of these new exotic nuclei have also been calculated precisely.
Earth-like exoplanets may be quite common in the universe, a new UCLA study suggests.
Scientists led by Alexandra Doyle, a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) graduate student of geochemistry and astrochemistry, came up with a new method to analyze the geochemistry of planets outside our solar system for the study, which was published in the journal Science this week.
“We have just raised the probability that many rocky planets are like the Earth and there’s a very large number of rocky planets in the universe,” co-author Edward Young, UCLA professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry, said in a statement.
It was a pleasure speaking to Dr. Ronald Kohanski at the 2019 Ending Age-Related Diseases conference. Dr. Kohanski joined the field of aging research in 2005 as a Program Officer for the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging. He moved on to become its Deputy Director in 2007 and has held the position ever since. Within aging research, he has focused his efforts on the areas of stem cell and cardiovascular biology.
Besides his work at the NIA, Ronald Kohanski is a co-founder and co-leader of the trans-NIH Geroscience Interest Group (GSIG) with which he has organized several summits to discuss and disseminate the group’s focus. The GSIG directs its attention toward aging as the major risk factor for most chronic age-related diseases, and Dr. Kohanski actively encourages researchers to expand studies beyond laboratory animals. He underwrites the importance of addressing the basic biology of aging explicitly in human and non-laboratory animal populations. He believes that age should be considered a fundamental parameter in research that uses animal models of chronic disease.
Dr. Kohanski was trained in the field of biochemistry. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1981, after which he conducted a postdoctoral fellowship with M. Daniel Lane at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He held a faculty position at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine for 17 years before returning to Johns Hopkins as a faculty member and researcher in the areas of enzymology and developmental biology of the insulin receptor.
Searching for new substances and developing new techniques in the chemical industry: tasks that are often accelerated using computer simulations of molecules or reactions. But even supercomputers quickly reach their limits. Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching (MPQ) have developed an alternative, analogue approach. An international team around Javier Argüello-Luengo, Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), Ignacio Cirac, Director and Head of the Theory Department at the MPQ, Peter Zoller, Director at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Innsbruck (IQOQI), and others have designed the first blueprint for a quantum simulator that mimics the quantum chemistry of molecules. Like an architectural model can be used to test the statics of a future building, a molecule simulator can support investigating the properties of molecules. The results are now published in the scientific journal Nature.
Using hydrogen, the simplest of all molecules, as an example, the global team of physicists from Garching, Barcelona, Madrid, Beijing and Innsbruck theoretically demonstrate that the quantum simulator can reproduce the behaviour of a real molecule’s electron shell. In their work, they also show how experimental physicists can build such a simulator step by step. “Our results offer a new approach to the investigation of phenomena appearing in quantum chemistry,” says Javier Argüello-Luengo. This is highly interesting for chemists because classical computers notoriously struggle to simulate chemical compounds, as molecules obey the laws of quantum physics. An electron in its shell, for example, can rotate to the left and right simultaneously. In a compound of many particles, such as a molecule, the number of these parallel possibilities multiplies. Because each electron interacts with each other, the complexity quickly becomes impossible to handle.
As a way out, in 1982, the American physicist Richard Feynman suggested the following: We should simulate quantum systems by reconstructing them as simplified models in the laboratory from individual atoms, which are inherently quantum, and therefore implying a parallelism of the possibilities by default. Today, quantum simulators are already in use, for example to imitate crystals. They have a regular, three-dimensional atomic lattice which is imitated by several intersecting laser beams, the “optical lattice.” The intersection points form something like wells in an egg carton into which the atoms are filled. The interaction between the atoms can be controlled by amplifying or attenuating the rays. This way researchers gain a variable model in which they can study atomic behavior very precisely.
