(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Supplies of nickel and cobalt, which are commonly used in the cathodes of lithium-ion batteries, are limited. Now, new research led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory opens up a potential low-cost, safe alternative in manganese, the fifth most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust. The researchers showed that manganese can be effectively used in emerging cathode materials called disordered rock salts. They used state-of-the-art electron microscopes to capture atomic-scale pictures of the manganese-based material in action and found that it formed a nanoscale semi-ordered structure that enhanced the battery performance.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation)
Researchers from New York University have begun to explore exosomes, tiny membrane-bound vesicles, as promising tools for wound healing. These nanovesicles carry various biological materials – nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids – allowing them to mediate intercellular communication and influence processes such as tissue repair. By combining them with hydrogels, which are composed of networks of cross-linked polymers, the researchers showed that hydrogel-exosome combinations consistently lead to faster wound closure than either hydrogels or exosomes used alone.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the University of Washington; North Carolina State University; and Xiamen University in China have achieved a uniform two-dimensional (2D) layer of silk protein fragments on graphene, a carbon-based material useful for its excellent electrical conductivity. This combination of materials—silk-on-graphene—could form a sensitive, tunable transistor highly desired by the microelectronics industry for wearable and implantable health sensors. The researchers also see potential for their use as a key component of memory transistors or “memristors,” in computing neural networks. Memristors allow computers to mimic how the human brain functions.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Maine has identified and successfully demonstrated a new method to process a plant-based material, called nanocellulose, that reduced energy needs by a whopping 21%. The approach was discovered using molecular simulations that were run on the lab’s supercomputers, followed by pilot testing and analysis. The method can significantly lower the production cost of nanocellulosic fiber and supports the development of a circular bioeconomy, in which renewable, biodegradable materials replace petroleum-based resources.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Iowa, and the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom have developed a platform to streamline the discovery and cost-effective manufacturing of nanosensors that can detect proteins, peptides, and small molecules by increasing their fluorescence up to 100-fold in less than a second. A key component of the platform is fluorogenic amino acids that can be encoded into target-binding small protein sequences. “Essentially, we retrofitted the protein synthesis process for the construction of binding-activated fluorescent nanosensors,” said Jonathan Rittichier, one of the researchers involved in this study.