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

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as the Indian Institute of Technology in Gandhinagar, India, have created 3–4 nanometer ultrathin nanosheets of a metal hydride that increase hydrogen storage capacity. Hydrogen has the highest energy density of any fuel and is considered a viable solution for ground transportation, aircraft, and marine vessels. The material created in this most recent collaboration came from solvent-free mechanical exfoliation in zirconia, yielding a material that is only 11–12 atomic layers thick and can hydrogenate to about 50 times the capacity of the bulk material.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, as well as Stanford University, Cornell University, the University of California, Berkeley, North Carolina State University, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Toulouse in France have discovered a size threshold beyond which antiferroelectric materials lose those properties, becoming ferroelectric. To explore how an antiferroelectric material's properties may change at small scales, the researchers focused on lead-free sodium niobate membranes. “We found that when [these] membranes were thinner than 40 nm, they become completely ferroelectric,” said Ruijuan Xu, one of the scientists involved in this work. “And from 40 nm to 164 nm, we found that the material had some regions that were ferroelectric, while other regions were antiferroelectric."

Researchers at Yale University have discovered surprising wire-like properties of a protein made by electricity-producing bacteria that show similarity to those of methane-eating microbes. This protein nanowire allows bacteria to produce to highest electric power reported possible so far and explains how these bacteria can survive without oxygen-like membrane-ingestible molecules. But to date, no one had discovered how they are made and why they are so conductive. Using high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy, the researchers were able to see the nanowire's atomic structure.

Scientists from Rice University, Reading Hospital (West Reading, PA), and Fundación de Investigación Sanitaria de las Islas Baleares (Palma, Spain) have shown that molecular machines that are effective against antibiotic-resistant infectious bacteria and cancer cells can also kill infectious fungi. Based on the work of Nobel laureate Bernard Feringa, the scientists’ molecular machines are nanoscale compounds whose paddlelike chain of atoms moves in a single direction when exposed to visible light. This causes a drilling motion that allows the machines to bore into the surface of cells, killing them.

With some careful twisting and stacking, physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have revealed a new and exotic property in magic-angle graphene: superconductivity that can be turned on and off with an electric pulse, much like a light switch. The discovery could lead to ultrafast, energy-efficient superconducting transistors for neuromorphic devices – electronics designed to operate in a way similar to the rapid on/off firing of neurons in the human brain. Magic-angle graphene refers to a very particular stacking of graphene – an atom-thin material made from carbon atoms that are linked in a hexagonal pattern resembling chicken wire. 

Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a new way to significantly increase the potency of almost any vaccine. The scientists used chemistry and nanotechnology to change the structural location of adjuvants and antigens on and within a nanoscale vaccine, greatly increasing vaccine performance. The antigen targets the immune system, and the adjuvant is a stimulator that increases the effectiveness of the antigen. 

Chemists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have designed a bottlebrush-shaped nanoparticle that can be loaded with multiple cancer drugs in ratios that can be easily controlled. In a study with mice, the researchers showed that nanoparticles carrying three drugs in the synergistic ratio they identified shrank tumors much more than when the three drugs were given at the same ratio but untethered to a nanoparticle. This nanoparticle platform could potentially be deployed to deliver drug combinations against a variety of cancers.

Researchers from the University of Rochester and HRL Laboratories LLC (Malibu, CA) have outlined a new method for controlling electron spin in silicon quantum dots – tiny, nanoscale semiconductors with remarkable properties. Electron spin – the magnetic moment associated with an electron – is a promising candidate for transferring, storing, and processing information in quantum computing. The standard method for controlling electron spin is electron spin resonance, which involves applying oscillating radiofrequency magnetic fields to the qubits, but this method has several limitations. The new method for controlling electron spin does not rely on oscillating electromagnetic fields but is based on a phenomenon called spin-valley coupling.

By repurposing one of the human body's natural cargo transports, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have developed a vaccine platform that could curb certain challenges of vaccines. The researchers used extracellular vesicles – nanoparticles naturally present in cells – to which viral antigens were added to their surfaces. Then, the researchers tested the extracellular vesicles on mice. Those facing the flu virus without a vaccine survived less than 30% of the time, while those given three doses of the extracellular vesicle-based vaccine survived in 60–70% of cases.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas; Lintec of America (Plano, TX); Wuhan University in China; and Hanyang University in South Korea have created a new type of a high-tech yarn called  a twistron, which generates electricity when stretched or twisted. Twistrons are constructed from carbon nanotubes that are twist-spun into high-strength, lightweight yarns. In the new study, the researchers intertwined three individual strands of spun carbon nanotube fibers to make a single yarn, similar to the way conventional yarns used in textiles are constructed.