News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

Researchers at Caltech have created a material that can collect drinkable water from the air both day and night, combining two water-harvesting technologies into one. The material is part of a class of so-called “micro- and nano-architected materials,” whose shapes (controlled at each length scale, nanoscopic and microscopic) give them unusual and potentially useful properties. In this case, the material is a membrane of arrayed tiny spines that look like Christmas trees and are inspired by the shape of cactus spines.

An international, interdisciplinary team of researchers has found a way to replicate a natural process that moves water between cells, with a goal of improving how we filter out salt and other elements and molecules to create clean water while consuming less energy. This is the first instance of an artificial nanometer-sized channel that can truly emulate the key water transport features of these biological water channels. This water-transport channel could improve the ability of membranes to efficiently filter out unwanted molecules and elements, while speeding up water transport, making it cheaper to create a clean supply.

A promising class of therapeutics uses synthetic nucleic acids, called small interfering RNA (siRNA), to target and shut down specific, harmful genes and prevent viruses from spreading. Now, chemical engineering researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have created and analyzed different types of nanoparticles that deliver siRNA to their targets while protecting the siRNAs from the body's immune system.

Researchers from Penn State, the Southwest University of Science and Technology in China, and neaspec GmbH in Germany have, for the first time, revealed the subsurface structural changes of silica glass due to nanoscale wear and damage, which may lead to improvements in glass products such as electronic displays and vehicle windshields. The researchers used a new instrumentation technique, known as hyperspectral near-field optical mapping, which enables scientists to see effects to the glass from scratching and to find structural changes that occur around nano-level indentations into the glass surface.

Researchers at the University of Connecticut have developed a way to protect large-biomolecule drugs by encasing them in a nanomaterial mimicking DNA. The nanomaterial is shaped like a bundle of sticks, where the sticks are tubes of DNA-like nanotubes. The researchers showed that this DNA-nanotube drug delivery can inhibit viral genes in infected human lung cells.

Inspired by nature, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, along with collaborators from Washington State University, have created a novel material that provides a highly efficient artificial light-harvesting system, with potential applications in photovoltaics and bioimaging. The material combines the programmability of a protein-like synthetic molecule with the complexity of a silicate-based nanocluster, to create a new class of highly robust nanocrystals.

Researchers at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and elsewhere have found a new way of making electrical connections between electronic components and 2D materials, which could help unleash the potential of 2D materials and further the miniaturization of electronic components. The 2D material used in this study consists of a thin sheet just one or a few atoms thick of molybdenum disulfide.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have created 3D-printable gels with improved and highly controlled properties by merging micro- and nano-sized networks of the same materials harnessed from seaweed. The gels are composed of both a primary gel matrix and a reinforcement network that consists of micron-scale fibers, which branch multiple times into ever thinner fibers, the thinnest of which are 10 nanometers in diameter. These gels could be used to create biological scaffolds for growing cells and to develop soft robotics.  

Scientists from The University of New Mexico, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Institute of Optics in Spain have published a study that gives new insight into the way collections of nanoparticles radiatively exchange heat with one another and their environment. The team found that when an arrangement of nanoparticles has some amount of heat initially stored in it, the system will approach the temperature of its environment in the same way, regardless of which particles are hot. The scientists also found that as a nanoparticle thermalizes to its environment, the nanoparticle cools down and heats back up several times, even though the environment remains at the same temperature.

Engineers at the University of California, Riverside. have developed a method to deliver nanomaterials with reliable mechanical and electric properties, which requires consistent, predictable shapes and surfaces, as well as scalable production techniques. The method involves vaporizing metals within a magnetic field to direct the reassembly of metal atoms into predictable shapes.