Piezoelectric nanoparticles deployed inside immune cells and stimulated remotely by ultrasound can trigger the body’s disease-fighting response, according to an interdisciplinary team of Boston College researchers.
The paper is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Light-emitting semiconductors are used throughout everyday life in TVs, smartphones, and lighting. However, many technical barriers remain in developing environmentally friendly semiconductor materials.
In particular, nanoscale semiconductors that are tens of thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair (about 100,000 nanometers) are theoretically capable of emitting bright light, yet in practice have suffered from extremely weak emission. KAIST researchers have now developed a new surface-control technology that overcomes this limitation.
A KAIST research team led by Professor Himchan Cho of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has developed a fundamental technology to control, at the atomic level, the surface of indium phosphide (InP) magic-sized clusters (MSCs)—nanoscale semiconductor particles regarded as next-generation eco-friendly semiconductor materials.
One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the clumping of proteins called Tau, which form tangled fibrils in the brain. The more severe the clumping, the more advanced the disease is.
The Tau protein, which has also been linked to many other neurodegenerative diseases, is unstructured in its normal state, but in the pathological state it consists of a well-ordered rigid core surrounded by floppy segments. These disordered segments form a “fuzzy coat” that helps determine how Tau interacts with other molecules.
MIT chemists have now shown, for the first time, they can use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to decipher the structure of this fuzzy coat. They hope their findings will aid efforts to develop drugs that interfere with Tau buildup in the brain.
Researchers led by Rice University’s Guido Pagano used a specialized quantum device to simulate a vibrating molecule and track how energy moves within it. The work, published Dec. 5 in Nature Communications, could improve understanding of basic mechanisms behind phenomena such as photosynthesis and solar energy conversion.
The researchers modeled a simple two-site molecule with one part supplying energy and the other receiving it, both shaped by vibrations and their environment. By tuning the system, they could directly observe energy moving from donor to acceptor and study how vibrations and energy loss influence that transfer, providing a controlled way to test theories of energy flow in complex materials.
“We can now observe how energy moves in a synthetic molecule while independently adjusting each variable to see what truly matters,” said Pagano, assistant professor of physics and astronomy.
Foams are everywhere: soap suds, shaving cream, whipped toppings and food emulsions like mayonnaise. For decades, scientists believed that foams behave like glass, their microscopic components trapped in static, disordered configurations.
Now, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have found that foams actually flow ceaselessly inside while holding their external shape. More strangely, from a mathematical perspective, this internal motion resembles the process of deep learning, the method typically used to train modern AI systems.
The discovery could hint that learning, in a broad mathematical sense, may be a common organizing principle across physical, biological and computational systems, and provide a conceptual foundation for future efforts to design adaptive materials. The insight could also shed new light on biological structures that continuously rearrange themselves, like the scaffolding in living cells.
Quantum computers are expected to deliver dramatic gains in processing speed and capability, with the potential to reshape fields ranging from scientific research to commercial innovation.
However, those same advantages could also make these machines attractive targets for cyberattacks, according to Swaroop Ghosh, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Ghosh and co-author Suryansh Upadhyay, who recently earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from Penn State, examined these concerns in a new research paper that outlines key security weaknesses in current quantum computing systems. Published in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the study argues that protecting quantum computers will require more than software safeguards, emphasizing the importance of securing the underlying hardware as well.
