Today’s technological innovation enables smartphone users to diagnose serious diseases such as diabetes or lung cancer quickly and effectively by simply breathing into a small gadget, a nanofiber breathing sensor, mounted on the phones.

Cell- Phones, Sensors Diagnose Diabetes

Il-Doo Kim, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) -Korea -, and his research team have recently published a cover paper entitled “Thin-Wall Assembled SnO2 Fibers Functionalized by Catalytic Pt Nanoparticles and their Superior Exhaled Breath-Sensing Properties for the Diagnosis of Diabetes,” in an academic journal, Advanced Functional Materials (May 20th issue), on the development of a highly sensitive exhaled breath sensor by using hierarchical SnO2 fibers that are assembled from wrinkled thin SnO2 nanotubes.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Cheaper clean-energy technologies could be made possible thanks to a new discovery. Research team members led by Raymond Schaak, a professor of chemistry at Penn State, have found that an important chemical reaction that generates hydrogen from water is effectively triggered — or catalyzed — by a nanoparticle made of nickel and phosphorus, two inexpensive elements that are abundant on Earth. The results of the research will be published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Schaak explained that the purpose of this nanoparticle is to help produce hydrogen from water — a process that is important for many energy-production technologies including fuel cells and solar cells. “Water is an ideal fuel, because it is cheap and abundant, but we need to be able to extract hydrogen from it,” Schaak said. Hydrogen has a high energy density and is a great energy carrier, Schaak explained, but it requires energy to produce. To make its production practical, scientists have been hunting for a way to trigger the required chemical reactions with an inexpensive catalyst. Platinum works, but it is expensive and relatively rare, so Schaak and his team have been searching for alternative materials.

“There were some predictions that nickel phosphide might be a good candidate, and we already had been working with nickel phosphide nanoparticles for several years,” Schaak said. “It turns out that nanoparticles of nickel phosphide are indeed active for producing hydrogen and are comparable to the best known alternatives to platinum.”

Source: http://news.psu.edu/

According to new research from the Monell Center – Philadelphia – and collaborating institutions, odors from human skin cells can be used to identify melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In addition to detecting a unique odor signature associated with melanoma cells, the researchers also demonstrated that a nanotechnology-based sensor could reliably differentiate melanoma cells from normal skin cells. The findings suggest that non-invasive odor analysis may be a valuable technique in the detection and early diagnosis of human melanoma.
Melanoma is a tumor affecting melanocytes, skin cells that produce the dark pigment that gives skin its color. The disease is responsible for approximately 75 percent of skin cancer deaths, with chances of survival directly related to how early the cancer is detected. Current detection methods most commonly rely on visual inspection of the skin, which is highly dependent on individual self-examination and clinical skill.
The current study took advantage of the fact that human skin produces numerous airborne chemical molecules known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, many of which are odorous.

“There is a potential wealth of information waiting to be extracted from examination of VOCs associated with various diseases, including cancers, genetic disorders, and viral or bacterial infections,” notes George Preti, PhD, an organic chemist at Monell who is one of the paper’s senior authors.
In the study, published online ahead of print in the Journal of Chromatography B, researchers used sophisticated sampling and analytical techniques to identify VOCs from melanoma cells at three stages of the disease as well as from normal melanocytes.

Source: http://www.monell.org/

Semiconductors grown on graphene at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) may be an important research breakthrough. At the centre of the research efforts are Professor Helge Weman, Professor Bjørn-Ove Fimland and post-doctoral fellow Dong-Chul Kim. The team is now working on translating the results of their basic research into an initial prototype. “Solar cell and LED technology will be the initial areas to see new products using semiconductors grown on graphene,” Dr Weman believes.

Under-priced fossil-fuel energy is the primary contributor to global warming. Sunlight is an alternative source with enormous potential, but solar energy will have to become less expensive and more efficient. Semiconductor nanowires based on graphene may just finally tip the scales in favour of solar energy.

“If semiconductor nanowires grown on graphene are used in solar cells, the same amount of sunlight can be converted to energy using one-tenth the volume of materials used in thin-film solar cells. And that means we’ve cut down on even more material by growing the semiconductors on graphene instead of on a thick semiconductor substrate. New research also shows that graphene has additional unique properties that enhance the efficiency of a solar cell,” Dr Weman explains.“We are pioneers in that we are using graphene for something other than basic research. We may already have our first prototype in place by the end of 2013, but we don’t wish to reveal what it is yet,” Dr Weman says. “The field we are working with – using graphene as a replacement for silicon and other semiconductor substrates in electronics and solar cells – entails many new opportunities“.

Source: http://www.forskningsradet.no/

Chemists at the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated a sensor technology that could significantly simplify the diagnosis and monitoring of diabetes through breath analysis alone.
Even before blood tests are administered, those with diabetes often recognize the condition’s symptoms through their breath acetone—a characteristic “fruity” odor that increases significantly with high glucose levels. The Pitt team was interested in this biomarker as a possible diagnostic tool.

“Once patients are diagnosed with diabetes, they have to monitor their condition for the rest of their lives,” said Alexander Star, principal investigator of the project and Pitt associate professor of chemistry. “Current monitoring devices are mostly based on blood glucose analysis, so the development of alternative devices that are noninvasive, inexpensive, and provide easy-to-use breath analysis could completely change the paradigm of self-monitoring diabetes.”
The research has been published in in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

Source: http://www.news.pitt.edu/

Stanford University scientists have dramatically improved the performance of lithium-ion batteries by creating novel electrodes made of silicon and conducting polymer hydrogel, a spongy substance similar to the material used in soft contact lenses and other household products. The researchers have designed a new technique for producing low-cost, silicon-based batteries with potential applications for a wide range of electrical devices.

An illustration of a new battery electrode made from a composite of hydrogel and silicon nanoparticles (Si NP). Each Si NP is encapsulated in a conductive polymer surface coating and connected to a three-dimensional hydrogel framework“

Developing rechargeable lithium-ion batteries with high energy density and long cycle life is of critical importance to address the ever-increasing energy storage needs for portable electronics, electric vehicles and other technologies,” said study co-author Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford.
The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Source: http://news.stanford.edu/

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have designed a new type of nanostructured-carbon-based catalyst that could pave the way for reliable, economical next-generation batteries and alkaline fuel cells, providing for practical use of wind- and solar-powered electricity, as well as enhanced hybrid electric vehicles. Los Alamos researchers Hoon T. Chung, Piotr Zelenay and Jong H. Won, the latter now at the Korea Basic Science Institute, describe a new type of nitrogen-doped carbon-nanotube catalyst. The new material has the highest oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) activity in alkaline media of any non-precious metal catalyst developed to date. This activity is critical for efficient storage of electrical energy. The new catalyst doesn’t use precious metals such as platinum, which is more expensive per ounce than gold, yet it performs under certain conditions as effectively as many well-known and prohibitively expensive precious-metal catalysts developed for battery and fuel-cell use. Moreover, although the catalyst is based on nitrogen-containing carbon nanotubes, it does not require the tedious, toxic and costly processing that is usually required when converting such materials for catalytic use.

“These findings could help forge a path between nanostructured-carbon-based materials and alkaline fuel cells, metal-air batteries and certain electrolyzers,” said Zelenay. “A lithium-air secondary battery, potentially the most-promising metal-air battery known, has an energy storage potential that is 10 times greater than a state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery. Consequently, the new catalyst makes possible the creation of economical lithium-air batteries that could power electric vehicles, or provide efficient, reliable energy storage for intermittent sources of green energy, such as windmills or solar panels.”

The research hax been published in a paper appearing recently in Nature Communications.

Source: http://www.lanl.gov/

Since the heart is such a del­i­cate and crit­ical organ, clin­i­cians usu­ally opt not to inter­vene with the dead cells that remain after a heart attack or car­diac dis­ease. “But we think that all heart attacks deserve some kind of treat­ment because it puts so much stress on the rest of the heart,” said Thomas Web­ster, pro­fessor and chair of the Depart­ment of Chem­ical Engi­neering at Northeastern University. “Even a square cen­timeter of dead heart tissue can put sig­nif­i­cant strain on the rest of the heart, which has to pick up the slack”, he said.

Webster’s ear­lier work demon­strated that adding nanofea­tures to an implanted med­ical device like a tita­nium knee or hip joint helps the car­ti­lage cells adhere to the device. This pro­motes tissue growth and allows the patient to heal more readily, he explained. While his team mem­bers don’t know exactly why this hap­pens, they have a good idea. They think the nanofea­tures allow the sur­face to more accu­rately mimic the nat­ural envi­ron­ment in the body, thus pro­viding more hab­it­able accom­mo­da­tions for the new cells.

But tita­nium hearts aren’t a viable option. Instead, they uti­lized a hydrogel, which they’d devel­oped pre­vi­ously, to mimic the heart cells them­selves. They added carbon nan­otubes to the hydrogel, making it con­duc­tive, and then injected the mate­rial into the heart, where it solid­i­fies at body tem­per­a­ture. Because the hydrogel is “super sticky,” it adheres extremely well to the tissue sur­face and imme­di­ately begins expanding and con­tracting in sync with the beating of the heart. While the team hasn’t yet tested the mate­rial in an animal model, it has sim­u­lated these con­di­tions in the lab.

Source: http://www.northeastern.edu/

Two independent teams (University of Caliofornia Los Angeles -UCLA- and University of California Santa Cruz -UCSC-) have developed new optics-based methods for determining the exact viral load of a sample by counting individual virus particles. These new methods are faster and cheaper than standard tests and they offer the potential to conduct the measurements in a medical office or hospital instead of a laboratory. The teams will present their latest results at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO: 2013), to be held June 9-14, in San Jose, Calif.

Photograph of 1cm x 1cm optofluidic chip for direct detection of viral nucleic acids

“Because viruses are very small–less than 100 billionths of a meter–compared to the wavelength of light, conventional light microscopy has difficulty producing an image due to weak scattering of sub-wavelength particles,” says Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA. When lighted, the team’s new nanolens-nanoparticle assembly projects a hologram that can be recorded using a CMOS imager chip (a type of semiconductor-based light detector) and digitally reconstructed to form an optical image of the particle. “The resulting image improves the field-of-view of a conventional optical microscope by two orders of magnitude,” says Ozcan.
Source: http://www.osa.org/

Physicist Florian Nitze, from Umeå University – Sweden -, has developed new catalysts to improve the capacity of fuel cells, able to power mobile phones or laptops, using environmental friendly formic acid. Fuel cells are different from batteries in that they require a constant source of fuel and oxygen to run. The technology is already commercially available but formic acid fuel cells still suffer from low power and lifetime.
The effect of a catalyst is to reduce the energy loss and to increase the rate of the chemical reactions, which leads to a higher efficiency in the fuel cell.
In his thesis, Florian Nitze has developed new catalysts based on a combination of material science and nanotechnology – engineering close to the atom level.

“Especially catalysts of palladium-nanoparticles attached to a unique helical formed carbon nanofibre proved to have a long lifetime and a very high potential to be used in formic acid fuel cells. The helical formed carbon nanofibre has a high electrical conductivity and a surface that is very easy to decorate with nanoparticles, “ says Florian Nitze.
Formic acid can be produced from renewable sources, i.e. wood, and is therefore a highly environmentally friendly alternative.
“One of the major advantages over Li-ion batteries, which are dominating the battery market, is that the charging only takes seconds by simple refueling with formic acid,” says Florian Nitze.
Source: http://www.teknat.umu.se/

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University – OHSU – have made a significant breakthrough in efforts to develop human stem cell therapies that may be used to combat numerous devastating diseases. For the first time, scientists have successfully derived embryonic stem cells by reprogramming of genetic material from skin cells while studying rhesus macaque monkeys. The breakthrough follows several previously unsuccessful attempts by the OHSU-based team and other scientific teams worldwide.

“Many scientists believe that embryonic stem cells hold great promise for treating a variety of diseases including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cardiac disease and spinal cord injuries,” explained Shoukhrat Mitalipov, Ph.D., director of the OHSU-based research team. “Using our advanced methods, it is conceivable that years from now, patients could receive therapeutic embryonic stem cells developed from their very own cells meaning that there would be no concerns about transplant rejection. Another noteworthy aspect of this research is that it does not involve the use of fertilized embryos, a topic which has been the source of a significant ethical debate in this country. ”

Neverthless “it’s a matter of time before they produce a cloned monkey,” said Jose Cibelli, a cloning expert at Michigan State University, who wasn’t involved in the study. It also means, he added, “that they are one step closer to where the efficiency is high enough that someone is willing to try” to clone a person.

The results of the work were released online by the scientific journal Nature.
Source: http://www.ohsu.edu

Imagine a bendable tablet computer or an electronic newspaper that could fold to fit in a pocket. The technology for these devices may not be so far off. Northwestern University researchers have recently developed a graphene-based ink that is highly conductive and tolerant to bending, and they have used it to inkjet-print graphene patterns that could be used for extremely detailed, conductive electrodes.
The resulting patterns are 250 times more conductive than previous attempts to print graphene-based electronic patterns and could be a step toward low-cost, foldable electronics.

“Graphene has a unique combination of properties that is ideal for next-generation electronics, including high electrical conductivity, mechanical flexibility, and chemical stability,” said Mark Hersam, professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. “By formulating an inkjet-printable ink based on graphene, we now have an inexpensive and scalable path for exploiting these properties in real-world technologies.”
A paper describing the research, has been published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
Source: http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) are the first to report that synthetic silicate nanoplatelets (also known as layered clay) can induce stem cells to become bone cells without the need of additional bone-inducing factors. Synthetic silicates are made up of simple or complex salts of silicic acids, and have been used extensively for various commercial and industrial applications, such as food additives, glass and ceramic filler materials, and anti-caking agents.

“With an aging population in the US, injuries and degenerative conditions are subsequently on the rise,” said Ali Khademhosseini, PhD, BWH Division of Biomedical Engineering, senior study author. “As a result, there is an increased demand for therapies that can repair damaged tissues. In particular, there is a great need for new materials that can direct stem cell differentiation and facilitate functional tissue formation. Silicate nanoplatelets have the potential to address this need in medicine and biotechnology.”
The study has been published online May 13, 2013 in Advanced Materials.

Source: http://www.brighamandwomens.org/

In the wake of the sobering news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, an important advance in the race to develop carbon-neutral renewable energy sources has been achieved. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. While “artificial leaf” is the popular term for such a system, the key to this success was an “artificial forest.”

Schematic shows TiO2 nanowires (blue) grown on the upper half of a Si nanowire (gray) and the two absorbing different regions of the solar spectrum

“Similar to the chloroplasts in green plants that carry out photosynthesis, our artificial photosynthetic system is composed of two semiconductor light absorbers, an interfacial layer for charge transport, and spatially separated co-catalysts,” says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, who led this research. “To facilitate solar water- splitting in our system, we synthesized tree-like nanowire heterostructures, consisting of silicon trunks and titanium oxide branches. Visually, arrays of these nanostructures very much resemble an artificial forest.”
Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/

Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast have devised a ‘magic bullet’ nanomedicine which could become the first effective treatment for Acute Lung Injury or ALI, a condition affecting 20 per cent of all patients in intensive care. Many with the condition die as a result of lung failure.
ALI patients can become critically ill and develop problems with breathing when their lungs become inflamed and fill with fluid. The new drug, a nanoparticle, measuring around one billionth of a metre. could revolutionise clinical management of patients in intensive care units. The patient can inhale it, taking the drug directly into the lungs and to the point of inflammation. Current treatments are unable to target directly the inflammation and can result in unpleasant side effects.

“Nanoparticles are perhaps one of the most exciting new approaches to drug development. Most research in the area focuses on how the delivery of drugs to the disease site can be improved in these minute carriers. Our own research in this area focuses on how nanoparticles interact with cells and how this can be exploited to produce therapeutic effects both in respiratory disease and cancer.”, said Professor Chris Scott from the School of Pharmacy, who is leading the research.

Source: http://www.qub.ac.uk/

Northwestern University scientists have struck gold in the laboratory. They have discovered an inexpensive and environmentally benign method that uses simple cornstarch – instead of cyanide — to isolate gold from raw materials in a selective manner. This green method extracts gold from crude sources and leaves behind other metals that are often found mixed together with the crude gold. The new process also can be used to extract gold from consumer electronic waste. Current methods for gold recovery involve the use of highly poisonous cyanides, often leading to contamination of the environment. Nearly all gold-mining companies use this toxic gold leaching process to sequester the precious metal.

A modern day gold rush! A new method developed at Northwestern bypasses the use of toxic cyanide for gold purification by using an eco-friendly sugar (cyclodextrin) derived from starch
“The elimination of cyanide from the gold industry is of the utmost importance environmentally,” said Sir Fraser Stoddart, the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. “We have replaced nasty reagents with a cheap, biologically friendly material derived from starch.”
Source: http://www.northwestern.edu/

Using the SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) model in Chinese macaques, a research group headed by Jean-Marie Andrieu from University PARIS V – France – with Wei Lu from University of Montpellier were able to suppress the initial activation of SIV- positive CD4+ T-lymphocytes in vivo which is the crucial step that allows SIV to initiate replication and to establish infection. They used an oral vaccine made of inactivated SIVmac239 associated with a common commensal bacterium of the digestive tract known as Lactobacillus plantarum which is known to induce immunological tolerance to foreign antigens.
In contrast to what happens with all anti-viral vaccines, this oral
tolerogenic vaccine elicited neither anti-SIV antibodies nor cytotoxic
T-lymphocytes but induced instead a previously unrecognized class of
SIV- specific, non-cytolytic CD8+ T-regulatory cells which prevented SIV+ CD4+ T-cell activation and suppressed SIV replication.
By blocking SIV reverse transcription in CD4+ T-cells, the initial burst of virus replication was prevented and the vaccinated macaques were protected from infection. Of the 16 vaccinated macaques that were challenged intra-rectally 3 to 14 months later with the homologous SIV strain as well as with the heterologous strainSIV-B670, 15 were solidly protected from SIV challenge.

Since CD4+ T-cell activation
drives both the initial SIV and HIV-1 replication in macaques and
humans respectively, it is plausible that such a tolerogenic vaccine may
also be effective against HIV-1 in humans and this will be certainly be
investigated in the near future, either as a preventive or therapeutic
vaccine..

Test on humans will start by the end of this year.
Source: http://www.parisdescartes.fr/
In english: Ask for PDF document at:
Alice Tschudy
Press Officer
Université Paris Descartes
+33 1 76 53 18 63 / 17 98
presse@parisdescartes.fr

Researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) looked to nature for inspiration, and they are now developing a new technology that makes it possible to use plants to generate electricity. The sun provides the most abundant source of energy on the planet. However, only a tiny fraction of the solar radiation on Earth is converted into useful energy. Plants are the undisputed champions of solar power. After billions of years of evolution, most of them operate at nearly 100 percent quantum efficiency, meaning that for every photon of sunlight a plant captures, it produces an equal number of electrons. Converting even a fraction of this into electricity would improve upon the efficiency seen with solar panels, which generally operate at efficiency levels between 12 and 17 percent. During photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to split water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen, which produces electrons. These newly freed electrons go on to help create sugars that plants use much like food to support growth and reproduction.

“We have developed a way to interrupt photosynthesis so that we can capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make these sugars,” said Ramajara Ramasamy, an assitant Professor in the UGA College of Engineering and member of UGA’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.
“Clean energy is the need of the century,” added Ramaraja Ramasamy, corresponding author of a paper describing the process in the Journal of Energy and Environmental Science. “This approach may one day transform our ability to generate cleaner power from sunlight using plant-based systems.”
Source: http://sustainability.uga.edu

Chemical engineering researchers have identified a new mechanism to convert natural gas into energy up to 70 times faster, while effectively capturing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2).

“This could make power generation from natural gas both cleaner and more efficient,” says Fanxing Li, co-author of a paper on the research and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. “Improving this process hopefully moves us closer to commercial applications that use chemical looping, which would help us limit greenhouse gas emissions,” Li says.
At issue is a process called chemical looping, in which a solid, oxygen-laden material – called an “oxygen carrier” – is put in contact with natural gas. The oxygen atoms in the oxygen carrier interact with the natural gas, causing combustion that produces energy.
Source: http://web.ncsu.edu/

Take a swab of saliva from your mouth and within minutes your DNA could be ready for analysis and genome sequencing with the help of a new device. Now University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods. The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.

Hand-held device for extracting DNA
“It’s very complex to extract DNA,” said Jae-Hyun Chung, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering who led the research. “When you think of the current procedure, the equivalent is like collecting human hairs using a construction crane.”
The small, box-shaped kit now is ready for manufacturing, then eventual distribution to hospitals and clinics.

Source:http://www.washington.edu/

In a promising development for diabetes treatment, researchers have developed a network of nanoscale particles that can be injected into the body and release insulin when blood-sugar levels rise, maintaining normal blood sugar levels for more than a week in animal-based laboratory tests. The work was done by researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children’s Hospital Boston.

The nano-network releases insulin in response to changes in blood sugar

“We’ve created a ‘smart’ system that is injected into the body and responds to changes in blood sugar by releasing insulin, effectively controlling blood-sugar levels,” says Dr. Zhen Gu, lead author of a paper describing the work and an assistant professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at NC State and UNC Chapel Hill. “We’ve tested the technology in mice, and one injection was able to maintain blood sugar levels in the normal range for up to 10 days.”
Source: http://news.ncsu.edu/

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have fabricated arrays of piezotronic transistors capable of converting mechanical motion directly into electronic controlling signals. The arrays could help give robots a more adaptive sense of touch. Mimicking the sense of touch electronically has been challenging, and is now done by measuring changes in resistance prompted by mechanical touch. The devices developed By Georgia Tech scientists rely on a different physical phenomenon – tiny polarization charges formed when piezoelectric materials such as zinc oxide are moved or placed under strain. In the piezotronic transistors, the piezoelectric charges control the flow of current through the wires just as gate voltages do in conventional three-terminal transistors.

“Any mechanical motion, such as the movement of arms or the fingers of a robot, could be translated to control signals,” explained Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents’ professor and Hightower Chair in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This could make artificial skin smarter and more like the human skin. It would allow the skin to feel activity on the surface.”
Source: http://www.gatech.edu/

Scientists at Princeton University used off-the-shelf printing tools to create a functional ear that can “hear” radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability. The researchers’ primary purpose was to explore an efficient and versatile means to merge electronics with tissue. The scientists used 3D printing of cells and nanoparticles followed by cell culture to combine a small coil antenna with cartilage, creating what they term a bionic ear.

“In general, there are mechanical and thermal challenges with interfacing electronic materials with biological materials,” said Michael McAlpine, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton and the lead researcher. “Previously, researchers have suggested some strategies to tailor the electronics so that this merger is less awkward. That typically happens between a 2D sheet of electronics and a surface of the tissue. However, our work suggests a new approach — to build and grow the biology up with the electronics synergistically and in a 3D interwoven format.”

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory describe details of a low-cost, stable, effective catalyst that could replace costly platinum in the production of hydrogen. The catalyst, made from renewable soybeans and abundant molybdenum metal, produces hydrogen in an environmentally friendly, cost-effective manner, potentially increasing the use of this clean energy source.
Their ultimate goal is to find ways to use solar energy — either directly or via electricity generated by solar cells — to convert the end products of hydrocarbon combustion, water and carbon dioxide, back into a carbon-based fuel. Dubbed “artificial photosynthesis,” this process mimics how plants convert those same ingredients to energy in the form of sugars. One key step is splitting water, or water electrolysis.

“By splitting liquid water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen can be regenerated as a gas (H2) and used directly as fuel,” explains Etsuko Sasaki, member of the Broohaven team.
“A very promising route to making a carbon-containing fuel is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide (or carbon monoxide) using solar-produced hydrogen,” adds Fujita, who leads the artificial photosynthesis group in the Brookhaven Chemistry Department.

Source: http://www.bnl.gov/

An Indiana University School of Medicine breast cancer surgeon is pursuing research that will utilize glass, gold, nanotechnology and Greek mythology hoping to vanquish breast cancer that has metastasized to the brain. Susan E. Clare, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of surgery at the IU School of Medicine, is the initiating principal investigator for a $573,000 Department of Defense grant that will allow her to explore a new approach to delivering therapy to brain metastases from primary breast cancer. As did the Greeks of old, Dr. Clare hopes to covertly deliver “warriors” to the enemy stronghold, in this case a metastatic brain tumor. Her research will explore using a cell from the body’s immune system to deliver chemotherapy directly to the brain metastases. The drug or other therapeutic is attached to the nanospheres, which are carried within the immune cell, much as soldiers were carried within the Trojan Horse. The immune cells travel in the bloodstream and release the drug when it has reached the tumor site.

“The problem for almost all drugs, and HER2-targeted drugs are no exception, is that the blood-brain barrier is a significant impediment to delivering therapies in concentrations that can be effective,” Dr. Clare said.

That biological issue caused Dr. Clare to explore other methods of delivering drugs to metastatic brain tumors. Using nanoparticles called “nanoshells,” developed by Naomi J. Halas, Ph.D., D.Sc., director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University, Dr. Clare hopes to target the brain tumors with lapatinib at a dose sufficient to shut down the signaling pathway needed for the cancer cells to proliferate.

Source: http://news.medicine.iu.edu