(Funded by the National Institutes of Health)
Scientists from The Wistar Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Saint Joseph’s University (Philadelphia, PA), and Inovio Pharmaceuticals (Plymouth Meeting, PA) have described a next-generation vaccination technology that combines plasmid DNA with a lipid nanoparticle delivery system. The team showed that these DNA lipid nanoparticles demonstrate a unique way of priming the immune system compared to mRNA and protein-in-adjuvant formulations and that these DNA lipid nanoparticles induced robust antibody and T-cell responses after a single dose. Importantly, these responses were durable, with memory responses in small animals persisting beyond a year after immunization.

(Funded by the National Institutes of Health)
Researchers from Oregon State University, Oregon Health & Science University, and international collaborators have developed magnetic nanoparticles in the shape of a cube sandwiched between two pyramids for the treatment of ovarian cancer. Made of iron oxide and doped with cobalt, the nanoparticles show exceptional heating efficiency when exposed to an alternating magnetic field. When the particles accumulate in cancerous tissue after intravenous injection, they are able to quickly rise to temperatures that weaken or destroy cancer cells. A cancer-targeting peptide helps the nanoparticles accumulate in the tumor, and because the nanoparticles’ heating efficiency is strong, the necessary concentration of nanoparticles can be achieved without a high dosage, limiting toxicity and side effects.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the City University of New York, Yale University, Caltech, Kansas State University, and international collaborators have discovered a new way of generating phonon-polaritons, a unique type of electromagnetic wave that occurs when light interacts with vibrations in a material’s crystal lattice structure. This advance could pave the way for cheaper, smaller long-wave infrared light sources and more efficient device cooling. The researchers made that discovery by using a thin layer of graphene sandwiched between two hexagonal boron nitride slabs. Until now, exciting and detecting phonon-polariton waves has been expensive – typically involving costly mid-infrared or terahertz lasers and near-field scanning probes – but in this study, the researchers used a cheaper alternative: an electrical current generated by applying an electric field to the graphene.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers at Caltech have developed an on-chip transducer that converts microwave photons to optical photons. The device involves a tiny silicon beam that vibrates at 5 gigahertz and couples to a microwave resonator – essentially a nanoscale box in which photons bounce around, also at 5 GHz. Using a technique called electrostatic actuation, a microwave photon is converted within that box to a mechanical vibration of the beam, and that mechanical oscillation, with the help of laser light, gets converted by the resonator into an optical photon. Such a conversion could enable the construction of large-scale distributed superconducting quantum computers.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health)
Researchers at Cornell University have, for the first time, identified what happens when bacteria receive electrons from quantum dots. Using fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy with two-photon excitation on a quantum dot and bacteria, the researchers identified a distinct halo surrounding the bacteria, which suggested the charge transfer was receiving some peripheral assistance. It turned out that an electron could either move directly from the quantum dot to the bacterium or be transferred from the bacterium via shuttle molecules. Photosynthetic biohybrids of this sort could potentially convert carbon dioxide into value-added chemical products, such as bioplastics and biofuels, and control other microbial processes.