New biosensor reveals activity of elusive metal that’s essential for life

Nuclear magnetic resonance shows the structure of a natural protein called lanmodulin, which binds rare earth elements with high selectivity and was discovered 5 years ago by Penn State researchers. Researchers recently genetically reprogramed the protein to favor manganese over other common transition metals like iron and copper.
Illustration Credit: Courtesy Cotruvo Lab | Pennsylvania State University
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

A new biosensor engineered by Penn State researchers offers scientists the first dynamic glimpses of manganese, an elusive metal ion that is essential for life.

The researchers engineered the sensor from a natural protein called lanmodulin, which binds rare earth elements with high selectivity and was discovered 5 years ago by some of the Penn State researchers involved in the present study.

They were able to genetically reprogram the protein to favor manganese over other common transition metals like iron and copper, which defies the trends observed with most transition metal-binding molecules.

The sensor could have broad applications in biotechnology to advance understanding of photosynthesis, host-pathogen interactions and neurobiology. It could also be potentially applied more generally for processes such as separation of the transition metal components (manganese, cobalt, and nickel) in lithium-ion battery recycling.

New Tool for Understanding Disease

Lina Pradham (left), a post-doctoral researcher in the Kloxin Group points out dormant breast cancer cells in 3D cultures imaged using confocal microscopy to UD engineer April Kloxin, Thomas and Kipp Gutshall Development Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. In the image, the dormant cells (shown in green) are viable, not proliferating, and remain capable of proliferating upon stimulation.
Photo Credit: Evan Krape / University of Delaware

UD model illuminates environmental cues that may contribute to breast cancer recurrence

Nearly 270,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. 

According to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, about 70-80% of these individuals experience estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer, where cancer cells need estrogen to grow. In terms of treatment, this presence of hormone receptors provides a nice handle for targeting tumors, say with therapies that knock out the tumor cell’s ability to bind to estrogen and prevent remaining breast cancer cells from growing.

However, even if treated successfully, on average, one in five individuals with ER+ breast cancer experiences a late recurrence when dormant tumor cells in distant parts of the body, such as the bone marrow, reactivate anywhere from 5 to over 20 years after initial treatment.

Boeing Successfully Demonstrates Anti-Jam Capability for U.S. Department of Defense Satellites

U.S. Air Force Capt. Yousuke Matsui from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command and several members of Boeing’s PTES team work with the key management system initialization interface during the operational capability demonstration at the Joint SATCOM Engineering Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Photo Credit: James K. Lee

Boeing engineers successfully demonstrated the company’s Protected Enterprise Tactical Service (PTES) over an on-orbit operational satellite, validating the design for the U.S. Space Force’s ground-based anti-jamming satellite communications (SATCOM) capability. The demonstration was the first time the PTES program integrated all of the end-to-end capabilities and tested them over the air using a commercial satellite.

The event, which took place at the Joint Satellite Engineering Center, closely represented scenarios of users accessing field-deployed equipment via a Protected Tactical Waveform (PTW) user terminal interface. The demonstration validated integration of software and hardware with the current U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) SATCOM architecture and exercised PTW anti-jam capability. Actual initial deployment of this capability for operational use will be over the government’s Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) fleet, taking advantage of its military features for high levels of jamming resistance and connectivity assurance.

Fermilab completes the first-of-its-kind prototype of a superconducting accelerator module

The cavity string for the HB650 cryomodule after being assembled in April 2022. These cavities comprise the heart of the new cryomodule.
Photo Credit: Lynn Johnson, Fermilab

Technical staff at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have completed a prototype of a special superconducting cryomodule, the first of its kind in the world. The national lab is home of the Proton Improvement Plan II, or PIP-II, a project to upgrade Fermilab’s particle accelerator complex.

The new high-beta 650-megahertz, or HB650, cryomodule is the longest and largest cryomodule in PIP-II. It will be responsible for accelerating protons to more than 80% of the speed of light. Ultimately, four of them will comprise the last section of the new linear accelerator, or linac, that will drive Fermilab’s accelerator complex.

In this final section of the linac, these superconducting cryomodules will power beams of protons to the final energy of 800 million electronvolts, or MeV, before the protons exit the linac. From there, the proton beam will transfer to the upgraded Booster and Main Injector accelerators, where it will gain more energy before being turned into a beam of neutrinos. These neutrinos will then be sent on a 1,300-kilometer journey through Earth to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility in Lead, South Dakota.

3D bioprinting inside the human body could be possible thanks to new soft robot

The tiny flexible 3D bioprinter developed at UNSW Sydney was able to 3D print a variety of materials with different shapes on the surface of a pig’s kidney.
Photo Credit: Dr Thanh Do

UNSW researchers unveil prototype device that can directly 3D print living cells onto internal organs and potentially be used as an all-in-one endoscopic surgical tool.

Engineers from UNSW Sydney have developed a miniature and flexible soft robotic arm which could be used to 3D print biomaterial directly onto organs inside a person’s body.

3D bioprinting is a process whereby biomedical parts are fabricated from so-called bioink to construct natural tissue-like structures.

Bioprinting is predominantly used for research purposes such as tissue engineering and in the development of new drugs – and normally requires the use of large 3D printing machines to produce cellular structures outside the living body.

The new research from UNSW Medical Robotics Lab, led by Dr Thanh Nho Do and his PhD student, Mai Thanh Thai, in collaboration with other researchers from UNSW including Scientia Professor Nigel Lovell, Dr Hoang-Phuong Phan, and Associate Professor Jelena Rnjak-Kovacina is detailed in a paper published in Advanced Science.

Producing extreme ultraviolet laser pulses efficiently through wakesurfing behind electron beams

A 3D simulation of the wake behind the electron beam (purple) and how a light pulse (blue and red stripe) might surf behind it. The plasma wake is shown in alternating yellow for the absence of electrons and green for peaks in the electron density. When a light pulse sits on that boundary, it can continuously gain energy—the trick is keeping it there.
Image Credit: Ryan Sandberg, High Field Science Group

Simulations suggest this mechanism could provide a tenfold increase in frequency—likely hitting a peak power of 100 trillion watts in XUV

A laser pulse surfing in the wake of an electron beam pulse could get upshifted from visible to extreme ultraviolet light, simulations done at the University of Michigan have shown.

The approach could enable more efficient generation of high-energy laser light, perhaps even to X-rays. The 3D simulation showed up to a tenfold increase in the frequency of the light, while the 1D simulation went up to a 50-fold increase. In principle, the researchers say it is possible to continue amping up the energy of the laser pulse by extending the period of time that it can ride in the wake of the electron beam.

“Future lasers, potentially including those used to pattern semiconductor chips for computers, could take advantage of this effect to produce higher energy pulses more efficiently,” said Alec Thomas, U-M professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences and corresponding author of the study in Physical Review Letters.

Custom, 3D-printed heart replicas look and pump just like the real thing

No two hearts beat alike. The size and shape of the heart can vary from one person to the next. These differences can be particularly pronounced for people living with heart disease, as their hearts and major vessels work harder to overcome any compromised function.

MIT engineers are hoping to help doctors tailor treatments to patients’ specific heart form and function, with a custom robotic heart. The team has developed a procedure to 3D print a soft and flexible replica of a patient’s heart. They can then control the replica’s action to mimic that patient’s blood-pumping ability.

The procedure involves first converting medical images of a patient’s heart into a three-dimensional computer model, which the researchers can then 3D print using a polymer-based ink. The result is a soft, flexible shell in the exact shape of the patient’s own heart. The team can also use this approach to print a patient’s aorta — the major artery that carries blood out of the heart to the rest of the body.

To mimic the heart’s pumping action, the team has fabricated sleeves similar to blood pressure cuffs that wrap around a printed heart and aorta. The underside of each sleeve resembles precisely patterned bubble wrap. When the sleeve is connected to a pneumatic system, researchers can tune the outflowing air to rhythmically inflate the sleeve’s bubbles and contract the heart, mimicking its pumping action. 

New Hope for People Living with Paralysis after Stroke

Video Credit: Carnegie Mellon University

Globally, every fourth adult over the age of 25 will suffer a stroke in their lifetime, and 75% of those people will have lasting deficits in fine motor control. Until now, treating paralysis in the so-called chronic stage, which begins six months after the stroke, has remained ineffective.

Technology developed by Douglas Weber, the Akhtar and Bhutta Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh is offering new hope for people living with impairments that would otherwise be considered permanent. The team discovered that muscles respond directly to electrical stimulation of specific spinal cord regions enabling patients to regain mobility of their arm and hand.  

Spinal cord stimulation technology uses a set of electrodes placed on the surface of the spinal cord to deliver pulses of electricity that activate the nerve cells inside. Research groups around the world have shown that this stimulation can be used to restore movement to the legs, but the complexity of the neural signals controlling the unique dexterity of the human hand and arm adds a significantly higher set of challenges.

Engineers discover a new way to control atomic nuclei as “qubits”

Diagram illustrates the way two laser beams of slightly different wavelengths can affect the electric fields surrounding an atomic nucleus, pushing against this field in a way that nudges the spin of the nucleus in a particular direction, as indicated by the arrow.
Illustration Credit: Courtesy of the researchers | MIT
Creative Commons

In principle, quantum-based devices such as computers and sensors could vastly outperform conventional digital technologies for carrying out many complex tasks. But developing such devices in practice has been a challenging problem despite great investments by tech companies as well as academic and government labs.

Today’s biggest quantum computers still only have a few hundred “qubits,” the quantum equivalents of digital bits.

Now, researchers at MIT have proposed a new approach to making qubits and controlling them to read and write data. The method, which is theoretical at this stage, is based on measuring and controlling the spins of atomic nuclei, using beams of light from two lasers of slightly different colors. The findings are described in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Physical Review X, written by MIT doctoral student Haowei Xu, professors Ju Li and Paola Cappellaro, and four others.

Nuclear spins have long been recognized as potential building blocks for quantum-based information processing and communications systems, and so have photons, the elementary particles that are discreet packets, or “quanta,” of electromagnetic radiation. But coaxing these two quantum objects to work together was difficult because atomic nuclei and photons barely interact, and their natural frequencies differ by six to nine orders of magnitude.

Two-dimensional oxides open door for high-speed electronics

Furkan Turker, graduate student in the Department of Materials Sciences, works on a silicon carbide chip in the laboratory 
Photo Credit: Pennsylvania State University
 Creative Commons

Advances in computing power over the decades have come thanks in part to our ability to make smaller and smaller transistors, a building block of electronic devices, but we are nearing the limit of the silicon materials typically used. A new technique for creating 2D oxide materials may pave the way for future high-speed electronics, according to an international team of scientists.

“One way we can make our transistors, our electronic devices, work faster is to shrink the distance electrons have to travel between point A and B,” said Joshua Robinson, professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State. “You can only go so far with 3D materials like silicon — once you shrink it down to a nanometer, its properties change. So, there’s been a massive push looking at new materials, one of which are 2D materials.”

The team, led by Furkan Turker, graduate student in the Department of Materials Sciences, used a technique called confinement hetroepitaxy, or CHet, to create 2D oxides, materials with special properties that can serve as an atomically thin insulating layer between layers of electrically conducting materials.

“Now we can create essentially the world’s thinnest oxides — just a few atoms thick,” Turker said. “That allows you to bring conducting layers closer together than ever without letting them touch. This enables the formation of an ultrathin barrier between conducting layers, which is essential for the fabrication of next-generation electronic devices, such as diodes or transistors.”

Engineering skin grafts for complex body parts

A bioengineered glove of human skin created for grafting.
Photo Credit: Alberto Pappalardo and Hasan Erbil Abaci / Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Skin grafts are a vital treatment for burns and other extensive skin injuries. Since the 1980s, advances in bioengineering have allowed researchers to grow new patches of skin in the lab. Such engineered grafts are less traumatic for patients than transplanting skin from elsewhere on the body.

To date, available techniques have only allowed such skin patches to be produced in shapes similar to bandages, such as flat rectangles or circles. These shapes work well to cover wounds on flat surfaces like the back. But using them on complex structures like the hands or face requires extensive cutting and suturing, which can cause damage and scarring.

A research team led by Dr. Hasan Erbil Abaci of Columbia University has been working on methods to make 3D engineered skin in the shape of complex body parts. Such custom grafts could then be transplanted intact, with minimal suturing required. In a new study, the team tested their skin-culture system using models of human hands and the hindlimbs of mice. Results were published on January 27, 2023, in Science Advances.

Kangaroo fecal microbes could reduce methane from cows

Photo Credit: sandid

Baby kangaroo feces might help provide an unlikely solution to the environmental problem of cow-produced methane. A microbial culture developed from the kangaroo feces inhibited methane production in a cow stomach simulator in a Washington State University study.

After researchers added the baby kangaroo culture and a known methane inhibitor to the simulated stomach, it produced acetic acid instead of methane. Unlike methane, which cattle discard as flatulence, acetic acid has benefits for cows as it aids muscle growth. The researchers published their work in the journal Biocatalysis and Agricultural Biotechnology.

“Methane emissions from cows are a major contributor to greenhouse gases, and at the same time, people like to eat red meat,” said Birgitte Ahring, corresponding author on the paper and a professor in with the Bioproducts, Sciences and Engineering Laboratory at the WSU Tri-Cities campus. “We have to find a way to mitigate this problem.”

Reducing the burps and farts of methane emissions from cattle is no laughing matter. Methane is the second largest greenhouse gas contributor and is about 30 times more potent at heating up the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. More than half of the methane released to the atmosphere is thought to come from the agricultural sector, and ruminant animals, such as cattle and goats, are the most significant contributors. Furthermore, the process of producing methane requires as much as 10% of the animal’s energy.

‘Magic’ solvent creates stronger thin films

This micrograph image shows an initiated chemical vapor deposition coating made by doctoral student Pengyu Chen in the lab of Rong Yang, assistant professor in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Cornell Engineering.
Image Credit: Courtesy of the researchers 

A new all-dry polymerization technique uses reactive vapors to create thin films with enhanced properties, such as mechanical strength, kinetics and morphology. The synthesis process is gentler on the environment than traditional high-temperature or solution-based manufacturing and could lead to improved polymer coatings for microelectronics, advanced batteries and therapeutics.

“This scalable technique of initiated chemical vapor deposition polymerization allows us to make new materials, without redesigning or revamping the whole chemistry. We just simply add an ‘active’ solvent,” said Rong Yang, assistant professor in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Cornell Engineering. “It’s a little bit like a Lego. You team up with a new connecting piece. There’s a ton you can build now that you couldn’t do before.”

Yang collaborated on the project with Jingjie Yeo, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Shefford Baker, associate professor of materials science and engineering.

Ingestible sensor could help doctors pinpoint GI difficulties

MIT engineers have shown that they can use magnetic fields to track the location of this ingestible sensor within the GI tract.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the researchers / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Engineers at MIT and Caltech have demonstrated an ingestible sensor whose location can be monitored as it moves through the digestive tract, an advance that could help doctors more easily diagnose gastrointestinal motility disorders such as constipation, gastroesophageal reflux disease, and gastroparesis.

The tiny sensor works by detecting a magnetic field produced by an electromagnetic coil located outside the body. The strength of the field varies with distance from the coil, so the sensor’s position can be calculated based on its measurement of the magnetic field.

In the new study, the researchers showed that they could use this technology to track the sensor as it moved through the digestive tract of large animals. Such a device could offer an alternative to more invasive procedures, such as endoscopy, that are currently used to diagnose motility disorders.

“Many people around the world suffer from GI dysmotility or poor motility, and having the ability to monitor GI motility without having to go into a hospital is important to really understand what is happening to a patient,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Creating 3D objects with sound

The use of sound waves to create a pressure field to print particles. 
Image Credit: © MPI for Medical Research, Heidelberg University/ Kai Melde

Creating 3D objects with sound

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and the Heidelberg University have created a new technology to assemble matter in 3D. Their concept uses multiple acoustic holograms to generate pressure fields with which solid particles, gel beads and even biological cells can be printed. These results pave the way for novel 3D cell culture techniques with applications in biomedical engineering.

Additive manufacturing or 3D printing enables the fabrication of complex parts from functional or biological materials. Conventional 3D printing can be a slow process, where objects are constructed one line or one layer at a time. Researchers in Heidelberg and Tübingen now demonstrate how to form a 3D object from smaller building blocks in just a single step. “We were able to assemble microparticles into a three-dimensional object within a single shot using shaped ultrasound”, says Kai Melde, postdoc in the group and first author of the study. “This can be very useful for bioprinting. The cells used there are particularly sensitive to the environment during the process”, adds Peer Fischer, Professor at Heidelberg University.

Inhalable ‘SHIELD’ Protects Lungs Against COVID-19, Flu Viruses

Photo Credit: Robina Weermeijer

Researchers have developed an inhalable powder that could protect lungs and airways from viral invasion by reinforcing the body’s own mucosal layer. The powder, called Spherical Hydrogel Inhalation for Enhanced Lung Defense, or SHIELD, reduced infection in both mouse and non-human primate models over a 24-hour period, and can be taken repeatedly without affecting normal lung function.

“The idea behind this work is simple – viruses have to penetrate the mucus in order to reach and infect the cells, so we’ve created an inhalable bioadhesive that combines with your own mucus to prevent viruses from getting to your lung cells,” says Ke Cheng, corresponding author of the paper describing the work. “Mucus is the body’s natural hydrogel barrier; we are just enhancing that barrier.”

Cheng is the Randall B. Terry, Jr. Distinguished Professor in Regenerative Medicine at North Carolina State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and a professor in the NC State/UNC-Chapel Hill Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering.

The inhalable powder microparticles are composed of gelatin and poly(acrylic acid) grafted with a non-toxic ester. When introduced to a moist environment – such as the respiratory tract and lungs – the microparticles swell and adhere to the mucosal layer, increasing the “stickiness” of the mucus.

Researchers develop elastic material that is impervious to gases and liquids

This image shows a container made of the new material that is elastic, flexible, and impervious to both gases and liquids. The material can be used to make ‘soft’ batteries for use with wearable electronics and other devices.
Photo Credit: Michael Dickey.

An international team of researchers has developed a technique that uses liquid metal to create an elastic material that is impervious to both gases and liquids. Applications for the material include use as packaging for high-value technologies that require protection from gases, such as flexible batteries.

“This is an important step because there has long been a trade-off between elasticity and being impervious to gases,” says Michael Dickey, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University.

“Basically, things that were good at keeping gases out tended to be hard and stiff. And things that offered elasticity allowed gases to seep through. We’ve come up with something that offers the desired elasticity while keeping gases out.”

Researchers Develop New Method to Improve Burn Assessment

The handheld THz Scanner is shown in operation.
Photo Credit: Terahertz Biophotonics Laboratory, Stony Brook University

Stony Brook Engineers Employ New Device and Neural Networks with Terahertz Spectroscopy

An important component to a more successful treatment course for burns is correctly assessing them, and current methods are not accurate enough. A team of Stony Brook University researchers believe they created a new method to significantly improve burn assessment. They are employing a physics-based neural network model that uses terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) data for non-invasive burn assessment. The team combines the approach with a handheld imaging device that they developed specifically for fast THz-TDS imaging of burn injuries. Details of their method are published in a paper in Biomedical Optics Express.

Studies have shown that the accuracy of burn diagnosis is only about 60 to 75 percent when trying to decide which one of the burns needs surgical intervention (skin grafting) or which burns can heal spontaneously. The Stony Brook team has found with their method using THz-TDS — broadly defined as detecting and measuring properties of matter with picosecond short pulses of electromagnetic fields — that THz spectroscopic imaging can increase the accuracy rate of burn diagnosis and classification to approximately 93 percent.

Smart Contact Lens that Diagnoses and Treats Glaucoma

Schematic illustration of a theranostic smart contact lens for glaucoma treatment.
Illustration Credit: Pohang University of Science and Technology

POSTECH research team led by Professor Sei Kwang Hahn proposes a new paradigm for monitoring and control of intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients.

Glaucoma is a common ocular disease in which the optic nerve malfunctions due to the increased intraocular pressure (IOP) caused by drainage canal blocking in the eye. This condition narrows the peripheral vision and can lead to vision loss in severe cases. Glaucoma patients have to manage IOP levels for their lifetime. Automatic monitoring and control of the IOP in these patients would significantly improve their quality of life.

Recently, a research team at POSTECH has developed a smart contact lens by combining an IOP sensor and a flexible drug delivery system to manage IOP measurement and medication administration.

The moon is too hot and too cold; now it could be just right for humans, thanks to newly available science

Issam Mudawar’s research on heat transfer could enable space habitats to be built in extreme environments like the moon.
Photo Credit: Purdue University / John Underwood

With temperatures on the moon ranging from minus 410 to a scorching 250 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s an understatement to say that humans will need habitats with heat and air conditioning to survive there long term.

But heating and cooling systems won’t be effective enough to support habitats for lunar exploration or even longer trips to Mars without an understanding of what reduced gravity does to boiling and condensation. Engineers haven’t been able to crack this science – until now.

“Every refrigerator, every air conditioning system we have on Earth involves boiling and condensation. Those same mechanisms are also prevalent in numerous other applications, including steam power plants, nuclear reactors and both chemical and pharmaceutical industries,” said Issam Mudawar, Purdue University’s Betty Ruth and Milton B. Hollander Family Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “We have developed over a hundred years’ worth of understanding of how these systems work in Earth’s gravity, but we haven’t known how they work in weightlessness.”

A team of engineers at Purdue led by Mudawar, who is collaborating with NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, has spent 11 years developing a facility to investigate these phenomena.