(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health)
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley; the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and the University of Cambridge have developed a practical way to make hydrocarbons – molecules made of carbon and hydrogen – powered solely by the sun. The device combines a light absorbing “leaf” made from a high-efficiency solar cell material called perovskite, with a flower-shaped copper nanocatalyst, to convert carbon dioxide into useful molecules. Unlike most metal catalysts, which can only convert carbon dioxide into single-carbon molecules, the copper flowers enable the formation of more complex hydrocarbons with two carbon atoms, such as ethane and ethylene, which are key building blocks for liquid fuels, chemicals, and plastics.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the University at Buffalo; Central South University in Changsha, China; Shandong Normal University in Jinan, China; TU Wien in Vienna, Austria; the University of Salerno in Italy; and Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea, have demonstrated that using thin two-dimensional (2D) materials, like the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), in combination with silicon can create highly efficient electronic devices with excellent control over how an electrical charge is injected and transported. The presence of the 2D material between the metal and silicon – despite the MoS2 being less than one nanometer thick – can change how electrical charges flow. “Our work investigates how emerging 2D materials can be integrated with existing silicon technology to enhance functionality and improve performance, paving the way for energy-efficient nanoelectronics,” says Huamin Li, the study’s lead author.

(Funded by the National Institutes of Health)
Scientists from the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Ohio State University, Northwestern University, the University of Tokyo, and the Sakakibara Heart Institute in Tokyo have developed a nanotechnology-based drug delivery system to save patients from repeated surgeries. The approach would allow surgeons to apply a paste of nanoparticles containing hydrogel on transplanted veins to prevent the formation of harmful blockages inside the veins. Not only did this innovation, dubbed “Pericelle,” work at three months – when the applied drug supply ran out – but it continued to work at six months and was still working at nine months. The scientists can’t fully explain the unexpectedly durable benefits, but they are excited about what it suggests for the potential of their technique.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Researchers at Penn State have developed novel contrast agents that target two proteins implicated in osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease. By marking the proteins with the contrast agents, which comprise newly designed metal nanoprobes, the researchers can use advanced imaging, called photon-counting computed tomography, to simultaneously track separate biological processes in color, which, together, reveal more about the disease’s progression than a traditional scan. “This high-resolution … imaging approach could potentially be used to image multiple biological targets, thus enabling disease progression tracking over time,” said Dipanjan Pan, one of the scientists involved in this study. Read additional details about the research here: https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-technique-allows-technicolor-imaging-degenerative-joint-disease.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health)
A few years ago, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University made an intriguing discovery: adding a branch to the end of lipid nanoparticles’ normally linear lipid tails dramatically improved messenger RNA (mRNA) delivery. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have tested branched lipids in a variety of experiments and found that these lipids reliably outperform even the lipid nanoparticles used by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, the makers of the COVID-19 vaccines. The researchers hope the branched lipids will not only improve lipid nanoparticle delivery but also inspire a new approach to designing lipids, moving away from trial-and-error methods.