Scientists and engineers are developing high-performance materials from eco-friendly sources like plant waste. A key component, lignocellulose—found in wood and many plants—can be easily collected and chemically modified to improve its properties.
By using these kinds of chemical changes, researchers are creating advanced materials and new ways to design and build sustainably. With about 181.5 billion tons of wood produced globally each year, it’s one of the largest renewable material sources.
Scientists at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation, in collaboration with the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, have developed a new nanoparticle therapy that tackles obesity through two complementary mechanisms: converting energy-storing white fat into calorie-burning beige fat while simultaneously reducing obesity-related inflammation.
Their findings, published in the Journal of Controlled Release, are detailed in an article titled “Apigenin-loaded nanoparticles for obesity intervention through immunomodulation and adipocyte browning.” This innovative approach addresses key limitations of current obesity treatments by precisely targeting adipose tissue with apigenin-loaded nanoparticles—enhancing therapeutic effects while minimizing potential side effects.
The research team, led by Dr. Alireza Hassani Najafabadi and Dr. Ryan M. Pearson, engineered specialized PLGA nanoparticles to deliver the natural compound apigenin directly to fat tissue. This targeted delivery system ensures optimal therapeutic effects while minimizing potential side effects throughout the body.
Scientists in Germany have crafted “skyrmion bags” of light—complex vortex-like structures—on the surface of gold by cleverly manipulating how laser beams interact with nano-etched patterns.
This unusual feat not only adds a surprising twist to the physics of light but also hints at future technologies that could break the limits of current microscopes.
Skyrmion light bags: a new breakthrough
In 2023, EPFL researchers succeeded in sending and storing data using charge-free magnetic waves called spin waves, rather than traditional electron flows. The team from the Lab of Nanoscale Magnetic Materials and Magnonics, led by Dirk Grundler, in the School of Engineering, used radiofrequency signals to excite spin waves enough to reverse the magnetization state of tiny nanomagnets.
When switched from 0 to 1, for example, this allows the nanomagnets to store digital information, a process used in computer memory, and more broadly, in information and communication technologies.
This work was a big step toward sustainable computing, because encoding data via spin waves (whose quasiparticles are called magnons) could eliminate the energy loss, or Joule heating, associated with electron-based devices. But at the time, the spin wave signals could not be used to reset the magnetic bits to overwrite existing data.
A U of A engineering researcher is using sunlight and semiconductor catalysts to produce hydrogen by splitting apart water molecules into their constituent elements.
“The process to form the semiconductor, called thermal condensation polymerization, uses cheap and Earth-abundant materials, and could eventually lead to a more efficient, economical path to clean energy than existing solar technologies,” says project lead Karthik Shankar of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, an expert in the field of photocatalysis.
In a collaboration between the U of A and the Technical University of Munich, results of the research were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
A UNSW study published today in Nature Communications presents an exciting step towards domain-wall nanoelectronics: a novel form of future electronics based on nano-scale conduction paths, and which could allow for extremely dense memory storage.
FLEET researchers at the UNSW School of Materials Science and Engineering have made an important step in solving the technology’s primary long-standing challenge of information stability.
Domain walls are “atomically sharp” topological defects separating regions of uniform polarisation in ferroelectric materials.
A discovery by an international team of scientists has revealed room-temperature ferroelectric and resistive switching behaviors in single-element tellurium (Te) nanowires, paving the way for advancements in ultrahigh-density data storage and neuromorphic computing.
Published in Nature Communications, this research marks the first experimental evidence of ferroelectricity in Te nanowires, a single-element material, which was previously predicted only in theoretical models.
“Ferroelectric materials are substances that can store electrical charge and keep it even when the power is turned off, and their charge can be switched by applying an external electric field—a characteristic essential for non-volatile memory applications,” points out co-corresponding author of the paper Professor Yong P. Chen, a principal investigator at Tohoku University’s Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR) and a professor at Purdue and Aarhus Universities.
However, when photons are contained within structures that are smaller than their wavelength, these measures collapse into each other, and so the definition is of total angular momentum (TAM). It’s this feature, only occurring for photons confined in this way, that has now been entangled for the first time.
Researchers at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology used gratings to confine photons within a circular or spiral nanoscale platform and mapped their states, entangling the TAMs of pairs of photons before scattering them to free space. Entangling TAMs might seem like a minor development, seeing that SAMs and OAMs have each been entangled before, but the authors write: “We observe that entanglement in TAM leads to a completely different structure of quantum correlations of photon pairs, compared with entanglement related to the two constituent angular momenta.”
Quantum entanglement is considered key to quantum computing. The authors propose their work could lead to information processing conducted using the entangled TAMs of photons confined to chips. Entangling TAMs allows quantum processors based around photons to be smaller than would be possible if one of the properties that only emerges under less confined conditions was used. That potentially enables the miniaturization of future quantum computers.
Researchers from Max Born Institute have demonstrated a successful way to control and manipulate nanoscale magnetic bits—the building blocks of digital data—using an ultrafast laser pulse and plasmonic gold nanostructures. The findings were published in Nano Letters.
All-optical, helicity-independent magnetization switching (AO-HIS) is one of the most interesting and promising mechanisms for this endeavor, where the magnetization state can be reversed between two directions with a single femtosecond laser pulse, serving as “0s” and “1s” without any external magnetic field or complex wiring. This opens up exciting possibilities for creating memory devices that are not only faster and more robust but also consume far less power.
Ultrafast light-driven control of magnetization on the nanometer-length scale is key to achieving competitive bit sizes in next-generation data storage technology. However, it is currently not well understood to what extent basic physics processes such as heat transfer at the nanoscale and the propagation of magnetic domain walls limit the minimum achievable bit size.