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

Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have successfully created graphyne, a material that could rival the conductivity of graphene. Graphene is composed of carbons in the form of a regular array of hexagons (benzene rings); graphyne is also composed of benzene rings, but they are connected with one another through acetylene bonds (instead of carbon bonds, as in graphene). The scientists were able to create graphyne by using an organic chemical reaction called alkyne metathesis, as well as thermodynamics and kinetic control. 

Scientists at the University of Southern California have found that a protein called emerin responds to harmful mechanical forces on a cell by bunching together to form so-called "nanoclusters." The emerin nanoclusters help to stabilize and protect the membrane surrounding a cell’s nucleus from damage and rupture. The researchers also found that mutant forms of emerin known to cause muscular dystrophy were unable to correctly self-assemble, providing further evidence and understanding of emerin's role in muscular dystrophy. 

Forming metal into the shapes needed for various purposes can be done through processes that affect the sizes and shapes of the tiny crystalline grains that make up the bulk metal. Now, researchers at MIT have studied exactly what happens when these crystal grains form during an extreme deformation process, down to a few nanometers across. They discovered a "novel pathway" by which grains are forming down to the nanometer scale. The new pathway is a variation of a known phenomenon in metals called twinning.

A research team from Carnegie Mellon University and Columbia University has combined two emerging imaging technologies to better view a wide range of biomolecules, including proteins, lipids and DNA, at the nanoscale. Their technique brings together expansion microscopy and stimulated Raman scattering microscopy. Expansion microscopy is a technique that addresses the problem of diffraction limits in a wide range of biological imaging, and stimulated Raman scattering microscopy visualizes the chemical bonds of biomolecules by capturing their vibrational fingerprints.

A team of researchers from Yale University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, has built an intelligent sensor that can simultaneously detect the intensity, polarization, and wavelength of light. To build their sensing device, the research team used twisted double bilayer graphene – two atomic layers of natural stacked carbon atoms that are given a slight rotational twist. 

A team of researchers from Harvard University and MIT have described a new method for designing large-scale metasurfaces that uses techniques of machine intelligence to generate designs automatically. Metasurfaces use specifically designed and patterned nanostructures on a flat surface to focus, shape, and control light.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Rice University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Shenzhen University, and Tsinghua University have demonstrated an ultrathin silicon nanowire that conducts heat 150% more efficiently than conventional materials used in advanced chip technologies. The device could enable smaller, faster, energy-efficient electronics.

Polymer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst announced that they have solved a longstanding mystery surrounding a nanoscale structure, formed by collections of molecules, called a double-gyroid. This shape is one of the most desirable for materials scientists, but until now, a predictable understanding of how these shapes form has eluded researchers.

One of the most impactful breakthroughs of lens technology in recent history has been the development of photonic metasurfaces – artificially engineered nanoscale materials with remarkable optical properties. Now, scientists at Georgia Tech, Florida International University, Stanford University, the City University of New York, and RWTH Aachen in Germany have demonstrated the first-ever electrically tunable photonic metasurface platform with a record eleven-fold change in the reflective properties, a large range of spectral tuning for operation, and much faster tuning speed. 

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a machine learning model that predicts interactions between nanoparticles and proteins. This model could enable the design of engineered nanoparticles that would shut down bacterial or viral infections.