(Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Department of Defense)
Researchers from the University of Mississippi have shown that using glycopolymers – polymers made with natural sugars like glucose – to coat nanoparticles that deliver cancer-fighting medication directly to tumors reduces the body’s immune response to cancer treatment. The researchers tested glycopolymer-coated nanoparticle treatments in mice with breast cancer and found that more nanoparticles reached the tumors in the glycopolymer treatment compared to more conventional treatment that uses polyethylene glycol-based nanoparticles. “Our findings highlight that the nanoparticles we’re using significantly reduce unwanted immune responses while dramatically enhancing drug delivery, both in cell and animal models,” said Kenneth Hulugalla, one of the scientists involved in this study.

(Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy)
Scientists from Washington State University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered a way to make ions move more than ten times faster in mixed organic ion-electronic conductors. These conductors combine the advantages of the ion signaling used by many biological systems with the electron signaling used by computers. The new development speeds up ion movement in these conductors by using molecules that attract and concentrate ions into a separate nanochannel creating a type of tiny “ion superhighway.” These types of conductors hold a lot of potential because they allow movement of both ions and electrons at once, which is critical for battery charging and energy storage.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have captured direct images of a new quantum phase of an electron solid – the Wigner molecular crystal. Whereas Wigner crystals are characterized by a honeycomb arrangement of electrons, Wigner molecular crystals have a highly ordered pattern of artificial “molecules” made of two or more electrons. The scientists formed a nanomaterial, called a “twisted tungsten disulfide moiré superlattice,” and doped it with electrons, which filled each 10-nanometer-wide unit cell of the material with just two or three electrons. In a surprising result, these filled unit cells formed an array of moiré electron molecules throughout the superlattice – resulting in a Wigner molecular crystal.

(Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from Florida State University, the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, and Wuhan University have revealed how various physical manipulations of graphene, such as layering and twisting, impact its optical properties and conductivity. The researchers found that the optical conductivity of twisted bilayer graphene is not heavily impacted by such manipulations and instead depends more on how the material’s geometry structure changes by interlayer twisting. To conduct the study, the team captured images of plasmons – tiny waves of energy that happen when electrons in a material move together – that appeared in various regions of the twisted bilayer graphene.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from New York University; the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory; and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have used a special robotic system to assemble very large pieces of atomically clean two-dimensional materials into stacks. These materials, called graphene heterostructures, consist of sheets just a few atoms thick, have record-setting dimensions – as large as 7.5 square millimeters, which is very large in the world of microelectronics. The robotic assembly tool helped the scientists discover a new interface cleaning mechanism that combines mechanical and thermal forces. Overall, this study opens a new opportunity to develop a more effective process to make large and clean layered heterostructure devices.