Lifeboat Foundation

Inspired by the color-changing ability of chameleons, researchers have developed a sustainable technique to 3D-print multiple, dynamic colors from a single ink.

“By designing new chemistries and printing processes, we can modulate structural color on the fly to produce color gradients not possible before,” said Ying Diao, an associate professor of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

The study appears in the journal PNAS.

The challenge of regulating the electronic structures of metal single-atoms (M-SAs) with metal nanoparticles (M-NPs) lies in the synthesis of a definite architecture. Such a structure has strong electronic metal-support interactions and maintains electron transport channels to facilitate carbon dioxide photoreduction (CO₂PR).

In a study published in Advanced Powder Materials, a group of researchers from Zhejiang Normal University, Zhejiang A&F University and Dalian University of Technology, revealed the engineering of the electron density of Pd single atoms with twinned Pd nanoparticles assisted by strong electronic interaction of the atomic metal with the support and unveiled the underlying mechanism for expedited CO₂PR.

“As one of the most promising CO₂PR semiconductors, polymeric graphitic carbon nitride (g-C₃N₄) featured with sp² π-conjugated lamellar structures can offer electronegative nitrogen atoms to anchor M-SAs, forming active metal-nitrogen moieties (M–N_x),” explained Lei Li, lead author of the study. “However, stable M–N_x configurations forbid tunability of electronic structures of M-SA sites.”

The first organized stem cell culture model that resembles all three sections of the embryonic brain and spinal cord, and produces a full model of the early stages of the human central nervous system, has been developed by a team of engineers and biologists at the University of Michigan(U-M), the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).

“Models like this will open doors for fundamental research to understand early development of the human central nervous system and how it could go wrong in different disorders,” said Jianping Fu, PhD, professor of mechanical engineering at University of Michigan.

This work is published in Nature in the paper, “A Patterned Human Neural Tube Model Using Microfluidic Gradients.”

From early in his career, Kamal Kesour understood the damaging effects of urban noise and was aware of the instrumentation used to measure and control it. He had lived in big cities, and after his PhD he went to work for an environmental consulting firm that specialized in urban noise. But it wasn’t until later, during a research position at Innovation Maritime in Canada, that he realized marine mammals can experience similarly noisy environments. This noise comes from underwater vibrations generated by shipping vessels transporting goods around the world. Kesour now has a career helping to make maritime transportation vessels less noisy.

Kesour has spent the past few years in Rimouski, Canada, at the Marine Acoustic Research Station (MARS), which lies on the banks of the St. Lawrence Estuary and is jointly led by Innovation Maritime, the Rimouski Institute of Marine Sciences, and engineering consultancy OpDAQ systems. There, he measures ambient underwater noise from ships as they pass on their way to and from the Atlantic Ocean or North America’s Great Lakes. He also conducts on-ship measurements to help pinpoint noise sources and to “fingerprint” the vibrations of individual ships. Physics Magazine caught up with Kesour to learn more about his measurements and their implications for noise pollution produced by the shipping industry.

All interviews are edited for brevity and clarity.

BWC Megastructures are types of hypothetical mega engineering projects, like artificial planets, who scope is vast, but whose practicality is debatable. To fi…

Photon-mediated entanglement in atomic ensembles coupled to cavities enables the engineering of quantum states with a graph-like entanglement structure. This offers potential advantages in quantum computation and metrology.

A new advance by Stanford engineers could lead to particle accelerators being widely available in science, medicine, and industry.

Stanford researchers are getting closer to building a tiny electron accelerator based on “accelerator-on-a-chip” technology with broad potential applications in studying physics as well as medical and industrial uses.

The researchers have demonstrated that a silicon dielectric laser accelerator, or DLA, can now both speed up and confine electrons, creating a focused beam of high-energy electrons. “If the electrons were microscopic cars, it’s as if, for the first time, we’re steering and we have our foot on the gas,” said Payton Broaddus, PhD ’23 in electrical engineering and the lead author on a paper published on February 23 detailing the breakthrough in Physical Review Letters.

Fuzziness may rule the quantum realm, but it can be manipulated to our advantage.

Nanoparticles (NPs) administered in the human body will undergo rapid surface modification upon contact with biological fluids driven by their interfacial interaction with a diverse range of biomolecules. Such spontaneous self-assembly and adsorption of proteins and other biomolecules onto the NP surface constitute what is commonly known as the protein or biomolecule corona. This surface biotransformation of the NPs modulates their biological interactions and impact on physiological systems and can influence their overall pharmacological profile. Here, we comment on how the initially considered ‘nuisance’ of the in vivo corona formation can now be considered a nanoparticle engineering tool for biomedical use, such as in endogenous tissue targeting, personalized biomarker discovery and immunomodulation.