(Funded by the National Institutes of Health)
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated that ferumoxytol, an U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved iron oxide nanoparticle formulation, greatly reduces infection in patients diagnosed with apical periodontitis. The researchers showed that topical applications of ferumoxytol in combination with hydrogen peroxide potently disrupt biofilms – dense, sticky communities of bacteria that attach to surfaces and cause infections. The researchers treated 44 patients with periapical periodontitis and found that patients who received ferumoxytol/hydrogen peroxide achieved a 99.9% reduction in bacterial counts without experiencing any adverse effects.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health)
Using the nanostructures and microstructures found on Morpho butterfly wings, scientists at the University of California San Diego have developed a simple and inexpensive way to analyze cancerous tissues. Fibrosis, the accumulation of fibrous tissue, is a key feature of many diseases, including cancer, and evaluating the extent of fibrosis in a biopsy sample can help determine whether a patient’s cancer is in an early or advanced stage. The researchers discovered that by placing a biopsy sample on top of a Morpho butterfly wing and viewing it under a standard microscope, they can assess whether a tumor’s structure indicates early- or late-stage cancer – without the need for stains or costly imaging machines.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from Penn State; Columbia University; the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO; TUD Dresden University of Technology in Germany; King’s College London; Radboud University in the Netherlands; the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague in the Czech Republic; and the University of Regensburg in Germany have identified a surface exciton – an excited electron and the hole it leaves behind – in chromium sulfide bromide, a layered magnetic semiconductor. Cooling chromium sulfide bromide down to around –223 degrees Fahrenheit brings it to a ground state, or the state of lowest energy. This transforms it into an antiferromagnetic system, in which the magnetic moments – referred to as “spin” – of the system’s particles align in a regular, repeating pattern. This antiferromagnetic ordering ensures that each layer alternates its magnetic alignment. As a result, excitons tend to stay in the layer with the same spin. Like cars on alternating one-way streets, these established boundaries keep excitons confined to the layer with which they share the same spin directions.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from Oregon State University, The Ohio State University, and the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, have helped characterize a novel electrocatalyst developed by collaborators at Yale University and helped explain its improved efficiency for deriving methanol from carbon dioxide. The researchers’ dual-site catalyst is the result of combining two different catalytic sites at adjacent locations, separated by about 2 nanometers, on carbon nanotubes. The new design increases the methanol production rate, and less of the electricity used to catalyze the reaction is wasted. “The hybrid catalyst was found to exhibit unprecedented high catalytic efficiencies, nearly 1.5 times higher than observed before,” said Zhenxing Feng, one of the scientists involved in this study.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Villanova University; Northwest Missouri State University; Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg, Germany; the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany; the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg, Germany; the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies in Milano, Italy; and Politecnico di Milano in Italy have observed how electrons, excited by ultrafast light pulses, danced in unison around fullerene (C60) molecules. Researchers measured this dance with unprecedented precision, achieving the first measurement of its kind at the sub-nanometer scale. The synchronized dance of electrons, known as plasmonic resonance, can confine light for brief periods of time. While they’ve been studied extensively in systems from several centimeters across to those just 10 nanometers wide, this is the first time researchers were able to break the field’s “nanometer barrier.”