(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation)
Researchers from Vanderbilt University have developed advanced dialysis membranes using an atomically thin material called graphene. These innovative membranes leverage a protein-enabled sealing mechanism that works as follows: When proteins escape through larger pores, they react with molecules on the other side of the graphene membrane. This reaction triggers a sealing process, selectively closing larger pores while preserving smaller ones. This self-sealing capability ensures precise size-selective filtration and improves the membrane’s overall effectiveness. The defect-sealed membranes remained stable for up to 35 days and consistently outperformed state-of-the-art commercial dialysis membranes.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health)
Scientists from the City University of New York, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Weill Cornell Medicine have developed a groundbreaking approach using nanoparticles that are primarily composed of a drug and a thin peptide coating which improves solubility, enhances stability in the body, and optimizes delivery to targeted areas. In leukemia models, the nanoparticles were more effective at shrinking tumors compared to the drug alone. “Using specially designed peptides, we can build nanomedicines that make existing drugs more effective and less toxic and even enable the development of drugs that might not be able to work without these nanoparticles,” said Daniel Heller, one of the scientists involved in this study.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Scientists from Montana State University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, North Carolina State University, the Honda Research Institute in San Jose, CA, and the National University of Singapore have enabled the emission of single photons of light in ultra small, two-dimensional, ribbon-shaped materials measuring one atom thick and tens of atoms wide – about a thousand times narrower than the width of a human hair. Although the ability to emit single photons was known to occur in large sheets of two-dimensional materials, the observation made in this study is the first demonstration that the ability to emit single photons also occurs in much smaller ribbon structures.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) (a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology), KMLabs Inc. in Boulder, CO, and 3M Center in St. Paul, MN, have developed a novel microscope that makes examining ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors – which have a relatively large energy gap between the valence and conduction bands – possible on an unprecedented scale. The microscope uses high-energy deep ultraviolet laser light to create a nanoscale interference pattern on the material’s surface, heating it in a controlled, periodic pattern. Observing how this pattern fades over time provides insights into the electronic, thermal, and mechanical properties at spatial resolutions as fine as 287 nanometers, well below the wavelength of visible light.

(Funded by the National Institutes of Health)
A new experimental vaccine developed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Caltech, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom could offer protection against emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2, as well as related coronaviruses, known as sarbecoviruses, that could spill over from animals to humans. Sarbecoviruses include SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and the virus that led to the outbreak of the original SARS in the early 2000s. By attaching up to eight different versions of sarbecovirus receptor-binding proteins to nanoparticles, the researchers created a vaccine that generates antibodies that recognize regions of receptor-binding proteins that tend to remain unchanged across all strains of the viruses.