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

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Minnesota, and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in South Korea have developed a new kind of camera that can detect terahertz pulses rapidly, with high sensitivity, and at room temperature and pressure. The new system uses nanoparticles, called quantum dots, which can emit visible light when stimulated by terahertz waves. The visible light can then be recorded by a device that is similar to a standard electronic camera's detector and can even be seen with the naked eye. 

Researchers at Rice University have described a strategy by which constraining carbon feedstock in a furnace helps to control the growth of nanotubes. In this method, a nanotube begins to form at the metal catalyst on a substrate, but lifts the catalyst as it grows, looking like a kite on a string.

A team of researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has developed a nanotechnology platform that can change the way the immune system sees solid tumor cells, making them more receptive to immunotherapy. The preclinical findings suggest that this adaptable immune conversion approach has the potential for broad application across many cancer types. 

Researchers from Vanderbilt University, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Western University in Canada, and Deep Science Fund – Intellectual Ventures in Seattle are working on a new approach to filter nanoparticles and ways to help decarbonize transportation. The researchers are developing one atom-thick filters that remove nanoparticles down to 5 nanometers from air streams. Such filters can enable applications for protecting soldiers and first responders from biological threats. The researchers are also exploring ways to create one atom-thick membranes for efficient and more sustainable transportation.

Researchers at Indiana University have developed a technology that can change skin tissue into blood vessels and nerve cells and might be used as a treatment for traumatic muscle loss. The technology uses a minimally invasive nanochip device that can reprogram tissue function by applying a harmless electric spark to deliver specific genes in a fraction of a second. The researchers found that muscle function improved when the device was used as a therapy for seven days following volumetric muscle loss in rats. Volumetric muscle loss is the traumatic or surgical loss of skeletal muscle that results in compromised muscle strength and mobility.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered that the binding of copolymers on the surface of nanoparticles that are already used in industrial manufacturing provides an economic and scalable route toward self-healing polymers with increased strength and toughness. The properties of the resulting materials can be varied by controlling the interactions between nanoparticle building blocks. This concept opens up new possibilities to vary properties of engineering materials without having to change their chemical composition—a feature that is highly beneficial in the context of recyclability.

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo have produced centimeter-scale structures, large enough for the eye to see, that are packed with hundreds of billions of hollow aligned fibers, or nanotubes, made from hexagonal boron nitride. The team's results provide a route toward fabricating aligned boron nitride nanotubes in bulk. The researchers plan to harness the technique to fabricate bulk-scale arrays of these nanotubes, which can then be combined with other materials to make stronger, more heat-resistant composites, for instance to shield space structures and hypersonic aircraft.

A research team at Washington State University has developed two low-cost tests that use nanoparticles to measure the levels of two herbicides, namely atrazine and acetochlor, in samples of apples, strawberries, cabbage, corn and fruit juices. One of the tests uses palladium-platinum nanoparticles to catalyze a reaction that causes a color change in a sample when the herbicide is present. The other test uses nanoparticles in a low-cost paper strip that looks like a COVID-19 or pregnancy test and can be read with a smartphone reader.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a set of enzyme-targeting nanoscale tools to monitor cancer progression and treatment response in real time, map enzyme activity to precise locations within a tumor, and isolate relevant cell populations for analysis. The tests rely on nanoparticles that interact with tumor proteins. The nanoparticles are coated with peptides (short protein fragments) that target these proteins. When the nanoparticles arrive at a tumor site, the peptides are cut and release biomarkers that can be detected in the urine.

Engineers and scientists from Rice University and Princeton University have discovered a low-energy, one-step photocatalytic method that uses gold nanoparticles to convert the problematic industrial pollutant hydrogen sulfide into valuable hydrogen gas and sulfur. According to the researchers, the remediation process could wind up having low enough implementation costs and high enough efficiency to become economical for cleaning up nonindustrial hydrogen sulfide from sources like sewer gas and animal wastes.