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

The human body is made up of thousands of tiny lymphatic vessels that ferry white blood cells and proteins around the body, like a superhighway of the immune system. If damaged from injury or cancer treatment, the whole system starts to fail, and when lymphatic vessels fail, their ability to pump out fluid is compromised. The resulting fluid retention and swelling, called lymphedema, is both uncomfortable and irreversible. Now, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new treatment using nanoparticles that can repair lymphatic vessel pumping.

Researchers from the University of Michigan, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Pennsylvania, and Pro-Vitam Ltd in Romania have created tiny "bow ties" that are self-assembled from #nanoparticles. The development opens the way for easily producing materials that interact with twisted light, providing new tools for #MachineVision and producing medicines.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that a famous fluid dynamics equation, discovered by Walter Nernst and Albert Einstein in the beginning of the 20th century, breaks down completely under strong spatial confinement inside carbon nanotube pores. The Nernst-Einstein equation, as it is known, is an essential building block of several important theories of ion transport.

Due to their considerable efficiency, catalysts made of just a few atoms show great promise in the field of water treatment. In a new study, researchers from Yale University, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Guangdong University of Technology in China have looked into how to optimize the performance of these nanocatalysts and make them viable for practical use. "We didn't have this capability before, but now we are basically loading single-atom metals, atom by atom, onto the substrate," said Jaehong Kim, one of the scientists involved in this study.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida have created the first environmentally friendly, large-scale, and multicolor alternative to pigment-based colorants. "The range of colors and hues in the natural world are astonishing – from colorful flowers, birds and butterflies to underwater creatures like fish and cephalopods," said Debashis Chanda, one of the scientists involved in this study. Based on such bio-inspirations, Chanda's research group innovated a plasmonic paint, which uses nanoscale structural arrangement of colorless materials – instead of pigments – to create colors.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, Boston University, and Northwestern University have discovered a method for introducing spinning electrons as qubits – the building blocks of quantum computers – in a host nanomaterial. Their test results revealed record long coherence times – the key property for any practical qubit, because it defines the number of quantum operations that can be performed in the lifetime of the qubit.

Scientists from Rice University and Taif University (Taif, Saudi Arabia) have uncovered a property of ferroelectric two-dimensional materials that could be exploited as a feature in future devices. They have shown that because they bend in response to an electrical stimulus, single-layer ferroelectric materials can be controlled to act as a nanoscale switch or even a motor. "The novelty we found in this study is that there is a connection or coupling between the ferroelectric state and the bending or flexing of the material,” said Boris Yakobson, one of the authors of the study.

Researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz; the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom; and the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics and National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have shown that trapped electrons traveling in circular loops at extreme speeds inside graphene quantum dots are highly sensitive to external magnetic fields and could be used as novel magnetic field sensors. Electrons in graphene (an atomically thin form of carbon) behave as if they were massless, and when these electrons are confined in a quantum dot, they travel at high velocity in circular loops around the edge of the dot. 

Researchers from Oregon State University and HP Inc. (Corvallis, Oregon) have developed a dual-purpose photocatalyst that purifies herbicide-tainted water while also producing hydrogen. Photocatalysts are materials that absorb light to reach a higher energy level and can use that energy to break down organic contaminants through oxidation. In this study, the researchers used titanium dioxide photocatalysts, which are derived from metal-organic frameworks – crystalline, porous materials with tunable structural properties and nanosized pores. 

Researchers from Stanford University and Pumpkinseed Technologies, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA) have developed an innovative method that could lead to faster, inexpensive, and more accurate microbial assays of virtually any fluid. The researchers modified an inkjet printer to print dots of blood that are two trillionths of a liter in volume – more than a billion times smaller than a raindrop. At that scale, the droplets are so small they may hold just a few dozen cells. The researchers infused the samples with gold nanorods that attach themselves to bacteria, if present. When laser light is shone on the tiny dots of blood, the gold nanorods act like antennas, drawing the laser light toward the bacteria and amplifying their signal some 1,500 times.