(IFNs) are a family of antiviral and immunomodulatory signaling proteins produced by host cells to fight pathogens like viruses, bacteria, and tumors.
As cytokines, they alert neighboring cells to activate defenses, inhibit viral replication, and regulate immune responses.
Common uses include treating hepatitis B and C, multiple sclerosis, and certain cancers like melanoma and lymphoma.
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Researchers from Skoltech have published a paper in the journal Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena presenting an analysis of steady propagating combustion waves—from slow flames to supersonic detonation waves. The study relies on the authors’ mathematical model, which captures the key physical properties of complex combustion processes and yields accurate analytical and numerical solutions. The findings are important for understanding the physical mechanisms behind the transition from deflagration to detonation, as well as for developing safer engines, fuel combustion systems, and protection against unwanted explosions in industrial settings.
The scientists identified several main types of combustion waves. The most powerful is strong detonation —a supersonic shock wave that sharply compresses and heats the mixture, triggering a chemical reaction. This type of wave is highly stable. In weak detonations and weak deflagration waves, there is no abrupt shock front.
The chemical reaction only begins if the mixture has been preheated to a temperature where it can ignite. These regimes occur rarely, under specific conditions, and can easily break down or transition into another wave type.
A study published in the Chemical Engineering Journal proposes a new approach to environmental remediation of pharmaceutical pollutants in water flows. This approach is based on a phenomenon known as “sparks,” which refers to the sparks that appear on the surface of a metal when it is subjected to plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO).
During PEO, a metal part (in this case, aluminum) is immersed in a liquid to which an electrical voltage is applied. This results in the growth of an oxide coating. During the process, micro-electrical discharges, or sparks, appear. These sparks last for fractions of a second and cover a small area. However, they lead to very high temperatures, which is why they are nicknamed the “second sun.” This treatment is used on aluminum, magnesium, titanium, and other metal parts in the aerospace, automotive, medical, and electronics industries to create an oxide coating that improves the resistance of the material to corrosion and heat.
Nature does it again! The natural world has a knack for giving us the blueprints for some useful technologies, and the humble sea urchin is the latest contributor. Scientists have designed a new class of smart sensors by mimicking the internal architecture found in their spines.
Sea urchins are covered in movable spines that have long been thought of as a form of deterrent and protection against predators. But according to a new study published in the journal Nature, they are also sophisticated sensing tools.
Shield and sensor.
The world is never really at rest. Even in a vacuum near ultracold temperatures where all classical motion should come to a halt, you’ll find quantum fluctuations. In thin, two-dimensional materials, these include random vibrations that can alter electromagnetic fields, a feature that theorists have posited could be quite useful for modifying materials.
“It’s a holy grail we’ve been searching for decades,” said Dmitri Basov, Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia. “We believe we’ve found it.”
In a new paper published in Nature, Basov and 32 collaborators from 17 institutions came together to confirm that quantum fluctuations alone from the vacuum inside atom-thin layers of 2D materials can alter the properties of a larger nearby crystal—a theoretical possibility now experimentally realized for the first time.
Future devices will continue to probe the frontier of the very small, and at scales where functionality depends on mere atoms, even the tiniest flaw matters. Researchers at Rice University have shown that hard-to-spot defects in a widely used two-dimensional insulator can trap electrical charges and locally weaken the material, making it more likely to fail at lower voltages. The findings are published in Nano Letters.
“By showing practical ways to detect when and where these defects form, we help make future devices more reliable and repeatable,” said Hae Yeon Lee, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice, who is a corresponding author on the study.
Building ultrathin electronics such as advanced transistors, photodetectors and quantum devices involves stacking sheets of different 2D materials on top of each other into “heterostructures.” Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), prized for being atomically flat and chemically stable, is a common building block.
A new material can store energy from sunlight and convert it into hydrogen days later. The material, jointly developed by researchers from Ulm and Jena, can do this even in the dark. The process is reversible and can be reactivated several times using a pH switch. The results are published in the journal Nature Communications.
Green hydrogen is one of the most important pillars of the energy transition. It is produced from sunlight using photocatalytic processes. There are now a variety of technologies for converting and storing solar energy into chemical energy. But now, for the first time, a material that can store the energy from sunlight for several days and then release it in the form of hydrogen “at the push of a button” has been successfully developed.
“You can think of it as a combination of a solar cell and a battery at the molecular level,” explains Professor Sven Rau, who heads the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry I at Ulm University.
In many quantum materials—materials with unusual electrical and magnetic properties driven by quantum mechanical effects—electrons can organize themselves into Landau levels are essentially quantized energy states that form when charged particles move in a magnetic field.
This process, called Landau quantization, forces electrons into circular (i.e., cyclotron) motion. This motion ultimately produces evenly spaced Landau levels, which are known to underpin various physical phenomena, including the quantum Hall effect.
The quantum Hall effect is a quantum equivalent of the Hall effect that emerges in some two-dimensional (2D) materials at extremely low temperatures and under strong magnetic fields. This effect prompts electrical current to flow along the edges of a material with extremely low loss of energy.
Some computers are easy to spot. Artificial, human-built computers like those found in smartphones and laptops are abstract dynamic systems with observable computational elements like input, output, energy cost, and logical processes. Other computers aren’t so readily recognized.
Scientists have argued that many natural dynamic systems—from cells to brains to turbulence in fluids—carry out computations, too. However, it’s not always been clear what these dynamic systems are computing, or how they might be harnessed to solve tasks, says SFI Professor David Wolpert.
Minor changes in moisture level can promote lipid molecules to reorganize themselves in biomaterial or biomembranes. This can affect how the skin, lungs and tear film protect us from dehydration. This new discovery from Lund University in Sweden could be the inspiration for smart materials and new drug delivery techniques.
Imagine a membrane that separates dry air from a moist interior. When moisture levels become lower, the lipid molecules organize themselves in an adaptive way—and now researchers in Lund have characterized this process.
“What surprised me was how powerful the sorting of the lipid molecules was even at small changes in the moisture level. I had not expected this based on what we know about the systems in conditions where there is no evaporation,” says Nikol Labecka, researcher in chemistry at Lund University.